The Last Hurrah

It was inevitable, and now it's nearly over. Everything predicted will come to pass with the brush of a pen tomorrow, or more like 50 pens; these bill-signings always call for lots of pens for some reason. In the end, politics trumped principles, as it always does with democrat lawmakers (when the principle isn't the politic). Bart Stupak himself needed little more than Bama's craftily conceived obfuscation to cast his troubles to the curb and vote yes. So what of these vaunted "pro-life Democrats?" Obviously there is no such thing, only liberal opportunists whose "principles" flutter in the wind.

One needed little more than to watch the grandstanding following the vote last night to understand what this was all about. Look at that podium. Every single person who spoke was born during the FDR presidency. Coincidence? Of course not. They were raised suckling the teet of Depression-era New Deal liberalism. They cut their teeth moving paper for LBJ, and now they've created a bureaucratic monument of their own, both a testament and tribute to a life of liberal idealism. They call it progress, but true progress would eliminate the perceived necessity of such action. As I've described before this is entropy. Entropy is cold and inevitable, just like "progressive" liberalism. Maybe the only question is how did we hold out so long?

If democrats could just get out of the way and let somebody make a profit then truly free markets would offer a solution for anyone who needed it, and there would be no imposed fines and weighty new federal institutions to manage what will surely be unmanageable. Unfortunately, profit is some unimaginable horror to democrat politicians, even though many of them are wealthy exactly because of the capitalist society they demonize. Or maybe that's not right - there's a lot of lawyers in that group, too.

What will last for most of us who have been thinking about the issue for the last two years is how brazenly Democrats have and will continue to lie to the American people for this thing. Today Secretary Kathleen Sebelius commented on this occasion by reiterating the lie that "You can't fix the economy without first fixing health care." Oh, then what was the point of that trillion dollar spending spree last year? Wasn't that to fix the economy? It's a lie because the only sector in the American economy that grew last year was Health Care, which saw record profits. When she says "economy" she means government, because government spending for Medicare sets new records every year. Hundreds of billions of dollars of your money and mine goes to approved providers to pay for the care of mostly the elderly. Are we so lost as a society, so afraid to die, that we must squeeze every last painful second from life? More evidence of the erosion of values. More entropy in action, bought by Uncle Sam and paid for by every generation of Americans to follow.

Another lie is that only through reform can we cut costs. If it was possible to cut $500 Billion from Medicare, shouldn't they have done it by now? It's unlikely one dime will be cut from Medicare; it's very likely that Democrats will cave to pressure from frightened seniors, who are equally responsible for the mess the economy is in today because of 80 years of selfish entitlement spending, and who continue to dictate terms even as they get to the end of theirs.

It's a lie that the insurance industry is exploiting consumers for pure profit. Insurance industry profits were 7% last year - hardly egregious. Why do you think that Blue Cross company in California raised rates by 40%? Not because they wanted to make 40% more profit, I assure you of that. I'm not convinced Rahm and Bama weren't involved, and I'd bet a month's pay that if the media was at all interested in the truth instead of just pushing the democrat agenda that they'd find members of the board of directors of that company were Obama campaign contributors, and the relationship goes both ways. Classic Chicago politics.

And then there's the lie that premiums will go down. During that useless meeting with leaders of Congress last month Bama was emphatic that the CBO report showed premiums would go down. Well remember how liberals aggressively pushed for "equality" in mortgage lending, openly threatening and bullying lenders to give loans to unqualified borrowers? Bama was on the front lines, along with corrupt feeder groups like Acorn, directly caused the collapse of the housing market and contributed greatly to the economic collapse of 2008. Now they're doing the same thing to the insurance industry. Forcing companies to take on consumers with pre-existing conditions alters the cost equation. Either premiums will go up to cover or insurance companies will go out of business. There are no alternatives. Bama's argument is all lies.

But that's what he wants. With the insurance industry bleeding a slow death the federal government can step in more and more, and we will be dependent on it for more of our needs all the time. We'll likely have single-payer at some point this decade, and who's going to pay for that? Remember, the government spends our money - it doesn't have its own. Single-payer is a myth - just another lie. We'll all pay, and in addition to the current costs we'll now have to support a massive new layer of bureaucracy. It's self-perpetuating. It's socialism, but that's not even the ultimate goal. Progressives want Soviet-style communism, where the elite few control every aspect of the lives of the many; only then can there be true equality, so long as you don't consider the elite. They'll call it "US-brand social capitalist democracy" or some such nonsense, but it will be death to the freedoms and liberties we've enjoyed for better than two centuries.

No, societal prejudices do not favor everyone, but that's the thing: life isn't fair. Not everyone is born to privilege, or is good-looking or healthy or highly intelligent or even capable, and for the less fortunate we can help out. Americans are a very giving people - we just don't like to be forced to do things at the end of a baton, or a gavel. But then liberals don't trust the American people. They don't trust us because they don't control us. Not yet anyway, and hopefully in November we can get rid of these Stalinists and take a step away from progressive entropy.