As the disastrous health-care bill winds its way through a morally and ethically bankrupt Congress, the process has come more and more to resemble Mr. Obama’s campaign itself. Who would have thought that a rookie Senator with the left-most voting record in Congress and the middle name “Hussein” would eventually triumph over Hillary’s well-oiled, seemingly invincible political machine? Well, he did, and in the end, most voters seemed not to have cared that Barack Obama’s Rolodex was filled with the names of campus radicals (including that of Bill Ayers, the unapologetic bomber) ; that his spiritual mentor for 20 years was the fire-breathing, America-hating pastor Jeremiah Wright; and that his only political experience prior to the campaign had been carrying water for Chicago’s most corrupt power brokers.
In similar fashion, a trillion-dollar health care bill that no one in Congress has read and which perhaps half the voters revile is, against all odds, about to become law. It was barely a week ago that Sen. Joe Lieberman reportedly stood ready to oppose the health bill’s crucial “public option” with every supposedly principled fiber in his body. Now we read that compromises are being made, that objections are being dealt with, and that even the sticky issue of abortion coverage will somehow be smoothed over so that the camel of socialized medicine can get its nose into the tent.
Medicare ‘Kicker’
This is “The Worst Bill Ever,” according to a lengthy and passionate editorial in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago. “Epic new spending and taxes, pricier insurance, rationed care, dishonest accounting: The Pelosi health bill has it all,” the Journal’s editors declaimed. It may “well be the worst piece of post-New Deal legislation ever introduced.” And that was before the compromisers began to work their magic – most recently, with a proposal that would lower the eligibility age for Medicare to 55. Now there’s a money-saving idea that will help balance the books, pronto!
And yet, the bill plods on, impelled by the wanton recklessness of a president who accepts no limit on the power of government, and whose chief aspiration is to remake America, as quickly as possibly, in the image of Sweden. The health care bill threatens, all by itself, to get us halfway to that dubious goal. How ironic it would be if the U.S. and Europe, steaming toward the finish line of progressivism from two entirely different directions, were to go bankrupt at the same time.
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The beginning of the end. I wish I were younger. I’d leave everything right now and immigrate to New Zealand and NEVER come back here. Frankly, if I had the cash, I stick my neck out and leave NOW. The storm clouds are gathering. The American people have LOST the will (and are spoiled sheep, intellectually lazy, and are completely indifferent) and the USA is in BIG trouble. Every single night Fox’s Hannity, O’Reilly, Greta, and so on, and is all “sound and fury signifying nothing.” I am completely disgusted and am just waiting for the inevitable. How a bunch of immoral, unethical, self-serving, and greedy politicians and the mephistophelian President can actually shove this “crap” down 160 million people’s throats is a bigger accomplishment than Hitler’s “putsch” and Hitler’s forced institution of National Socialism (NAZI.) All I can say is: “Seig Heil.” Yes, . . . it’s coming.