Liberal intellectuals Patrick Kennedy and Bette Midler made headlines this week by claiming that right-wing opposition to Democrats’ plans to create a government-run health care plan is, in the words of young Mr. Kennedy, “dangerous to the fabric of our country”.
Congressman Kennedy, son of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, went on to say:
It’s very, very dangerous,” Kennedy said in the interview. “We put a lot of people in jail around the world for threatening our country’s security. But this atmosphere of attack that doesn’t attack the issue, but attacks the people, is very disruptive to the institution of democracy, which relies on a respect for the opposition. … George Wallace didn’t need a gun to pull a trigger.”
Midler, whose political qualifications are unknown to this writer, went further, comparing the controversial Glen Beck to perpetrators of Rwandan genocide:
“If you look around at the rest of the world and what this kind of behavior has done, like in Rwanda, where the demagogues got on the radio and fomented all that hate between the Tutsis and the Hutus and the devastation that happened from that, I mean, it’s terrifying. … And that could happen, you know… I’m not for censorship. But I also feel like, be a human being.”
What these and other liberal thinkers fail to consider is the true nature of cause and effect in this situation, one that I think they are greatly exaggerating the danger of in order to make political hay.
Consider a chemical solution that is in a stable state. Pick it up, swirl it around, and nothing happens. It is inert until a catalyst of some sort is introduced into the solution. Then all hell can break loose. If that happens, what is to blame, the stable solution or the catalyst?
In fact, American society was in a state of relative stasis prior to Democrats embarking on a reckless, unjustified spending spree, threatening to spend hundreds to billions more on a massive health care boondoggle, and blustering about crippling the nation’s economy via Cap-and-Trade legislation. That stasis was upset by Democrats’ non-stop liberalization of Congressional policies. Who then is responsible for the acrimony that now dominates the political debate?
Now consider the abhorrent nature of the liberals’ own rhetoric. Rookie Congressman Alan Grayson’s despicable speech on the floor of the House of Representatives is just one example of Democrat’s desperate, violent rhetoric:
If you get sick, America, the Republican health care plan is this: Die quickly. That’s right. The Republicans want you to die quickly if you get sick. Remember, the Republican plan: Don’t get sick. And if you do get sick, die quickly.
…
I call upon all of us to do our jobs for the sake of America, for the sake of those dying people and their families. I apologize to the dead and their families that we haven’t voted sooner to end this Holocaust in America.
Grayson also repeated the oft-repeated Democratic falsehood that there are 40 million Americans without access to health care benefits, a number that liberals have ginned up by tripling most reasonable estimates that acknowledge the millions who already benefit from government programs or simply don’t care about insurance (the people President Obama accused of shirking their responsibilities by not buying insurance they do not need or want).
Moreover, a Grayson aide wrote this charming missive to a constituent with the official blessing of the congressman:
As you know, we do support the health care plan and feel failure to act is similar to murdering the uninsured. On the other hand, we respect differences of opinion and I will let him know how you feel.
Refusing to submit to a government-run health plan is murder? Somehow I fail to see the respect in the Grayson camp’s response.
Let me be perfectly clear: Liberal Democrats like Alan Grayson are the catalyst in the current scenario. As such, they are primarily to blame for any negative repercussions created as a result of their actions.
Yes, rash, violent acts by those opposed to the Democratic spending agenda would be both unfortunate and inexcusable. For example, the jerk who created the Obama Assassination poll on Facebook deserves no respect from or defense by civilized people.
Nevertheless, it must be understood that such negative reactions do not occur in a political vacuum. In fact they are being provoked by liberal politicians and activists who are pursuing a radical agenda of government expansion that runs counter to the will of many, many mainstream Americans. In their absence, there would be no confrontation.
Given the opportunity, health care reform would inevitably work itself out through the natural processes of the American system. All that is needed to lower health care costs is for the government to absent itself from the improper role of cost controller it has taken on and focus instead on dismantling the legislative obstacles it has imposed on competition in the medical marketplace.
Rather than leap headlong into another welfare program disaster, Democrats should ask the obvious questions. Why can’t insurance companies freely offer services in every state in the country? Why do employees have so few choices, if any, if they want to receive employer money? Why are health insurance benefits linked to employers? Why can’t people invest in health care savings plans without restriction?
For many on the left, the answer to these questions is that they simply don’t care. Rather, they mistakenly believe that they have the right to tax others to obtain health care benefits they didn’t earn and that the taxed have no right to object. They want what they want and, like a spoiled toddler after a sweet treat, it doesn’t matter what they have to do to get it – even if that means slandering recalcitrant taxees as murderers to shame them into obedience.
As with the liberal movement of the 1960s, the modern far left is attempting to short-circuit the evolutionary processes of American government by fomenting social revolution in the guise of an imagined public right to health care services, a right that – unlike black Americans’ righteous desire for civil equality 50 years ago – does not exist.
In fact, virtually everything liberals say and do is predicated on the unspoken assumption that the federal government, when controlled by the left, is entitled to tax the people and do what it wants to with the money, whether the citizenry approves or not.
This is not true. It has never been true and it never will be. Small wonder that a highly motivated opposition has materialized and galvanized itself for a long, bitter fight.
Far from being violent radicals, the opposition to Democrats’ massive spending plans are as American as apple pie and want nothing more from their politicians than to be left alone, a solution in stasis. No change agents need apply.