Health Care - A Means To An End

Our country, its institutions, its heritage and spirit - all are in peril. To understand why we need only reflect on the process of securing health "reform." Such an exercise proves to be instructive, the perfect classroom:

National polls show strong opposition to the health bills that have passed the House and Senate. Perhaps 45% support the bills, maybe less. A Rasmussen poll conducted recently shows that Americans are opposed to the Democratic reforms by 55 percent to 40 percent, and think by a 54 percent to 24 percent margin that its enactment would make the quality of medical care worse. What? Something about to become law and most Americans oppose it? Do we not own, as Americans, a representative form of government?

We used to. But as Vic Hansen observed recently, to wonder how the administration "could be so self-destructive to push through an array of proposals that have no more than 45% of the public’s support is like asking whether the English Prof who teaches incomprehensible Foucauldian theory worries whether he has only 2 students."

Better yet, dust off Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle as we just did. In that book Mac didn’t care one iota for the migrants/fruit pickers he supposedly fought for; he was steeled for a greater cause; they were merely tools. Similarly, Obama and his kind, true believers, don’t really care for health reform any more than for the Blue Dogs who will be sacrificed on the alter, just as poor, stupid Jim was shotgunned to death on Mac’s alter. Obama & Co are rigidly programmed, as was Mac, to institutionalize an agenda that will affect America for generations, move it sharply to the left. They hope to become heroes or martyrs in the process.

And what is Obama’s agenda? Progressive statism (Webster: statism - a concentration of ...planning in the hands of a highly centralized gov’t). BO & Co’s core belief is that the state exists to level the playing field; obtaining that goal justifies any means.

The process we have witnessed certainly has sent Andrew Jackson spinning in his grave; it must also have moved most of those who voted for Obama to regret, wondering how they were taken in by a man who ran as a bipartisan but who is the most partisan we’ve seen, a "healer" whose even flippant comments are designed to offend, a statist who assumes that the masses are ignorant, a "reformer" who knows his rhetoric will disguise Daley-style corruption.

The original hope behind the 17th Amendment - the direct election of senators - was to get the upper chamber out of the pocket of those that could buy and sell senators. But we all know now that health passage has been one of the biggest giveaways to corporate interests in the nation's history. As one observer noted, "The Axelrod/Jarrett clique ensures that the government channels stimuli to blue-states, that key Congress people are bought off with tens of millions of government largess." No wonder these politicians "know better" what is good for us than we do.

Finally, all but the willfully blind understand now that every Obama campaign promise — from no lobbyists and airing on C-Span healthcare debates to posting impending legislation on the Internet for set durations and "reaching across the aisle" — was garbage.

Mac and his kind and their method were finally understood - that even murder was an acceptable tool just as field workers were the acceptable vehicle. The rule of law was threatened then, but not extinguished. So too, at least we hope, will the masses in this country finally throw up Obama and his kind and come to their senses, just as most of California’s labor did in Mac’s time, and return to a more thoughtful and balanced process linked to the anchor of limited government, and the preservation of liberty and freedom.

Perhaps we needed this after all; perhaps this is the cake that had to be baked. Thus it is imperative that all of us see in this the warning which we feel it was meant to convey, the positive flip side of such excess.

Let us recall that which Jefferson knew all along, our Lesson #1 for 2010, "The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground."

Happy New Year

Robert Craven