A brief look around the Beltway, as the health care battle heats up...
John Leo at RealClearPolitics calls out Madame Speaker for her alleged shock at the presence of swastikas at health-care rallies, effectively calling Obama’s plan the work of fascism. Leo goes through the litany of instances of the Left comparing Bush to Hitler. Indeed, as Leo notes, such comparisons became so commonplace they ceased to attract attention. Pelosi was curiously silent during all this.
There’s a couple lessons to be drawn from this. The first is that just like the introduction of poison gas back in World War I, you can never assume that its use will only be restricted to your side. Eventually the opposition will get a hold of the same weaponry. Conservatives, tired of liberal media bias, went and got their own network in Fox News and through talk radio. Liberals, after seeing Bill Clinton impeached by a GOP House, were hungry to impeach Bush when their own party re-took Congress in 2006. The rationales cited generally came back to “You guys did it to Clinton.” To her credit, Pelosi dismissed these calls for revenge as quickly as they arose.
The other lesson is one that should have been paid more heed in the campaign—you cannot credibly accuse the opposition of something without cleaning house on your own side first. John McCain tried in vain to point out to voters that for all his unity talk, Barack Obama had never challenged his own party orthodoxy on anything. Essentially, Barack’s idea of unity is everyone agreeing with him. McCain, on the other hand, had challenged Republican dogma on a host of issues, ranging from taxes to campaign finance reform to the use of torture on military prisoners. When he spoke of bipartisanship he had walked the walk. This shouldn’t be taken as my endorsement of all of McCain’s stances, but he made real efforts at bipartisanship that were aimed at making tough choices himself first. If we put that in biblical terms we might call it removing the plank from one’s own eye before removing it from someone else’s. When it comes to protesting rash comparisons to Hitler, the Left should best focus on its own plank-filled eye.
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As long as we’re on the subject of rash comparisons, left-wing Newsweek columnist Eleanor Clift implores the Democrats to fight right-wing “mob attacks.” What exactly is a “mob attack?" When I hear the phrase, I think of things like Kristallnacht, a 1938 night in Germany, when mobs were cut loose to smash the windows and destroy Jewish businesses, setting the stage for Hitler’s Final Solution. Another example might be Robespierre’s France during the awful period of the French Revolution, when mobs raided convents and monasteries, killing priest and nuns, and thousands were hauled off to a bloody death at the guillotine. The killing became so massive, that the water of Paris was literally contaminated with blood. Other examples might include that mobs of the Roman Empire present at the conviction of Sejanus on charges of treason. After being strangled, he was thrown down the stairs where the crowds tore his body to pieces, then hunted down his family and anyone remotely connected to him, and killed them.
What is Clift’s idea of a mob? It’s people coming to a townhall meeting on health care reform and getting angry enough to lose their temper. Note that there’s no violence, no one is in any physical jeopardy. Clift refers to these as “Democratic meetings”, even though they are open to the public. Yet another case of a columnist who’s lived in a secluded world inside the Beltway for far too long.
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Charles Lane of The Washington Post addresses the end-of-life controversy that surrounds a provision of the current health care legislation. The provision would essentially bribe doctors to “consult” with senior citizens every few years regarding their options, especially if they are terminally ill. Lane charges the Right with overblowing this into a requirement that seniors sign their death warrant. However, he also acknowledges that it’s not as benign as liberal politicians claim. Indeed, during the tragedy of Teri Schiavo, the right-to-life community was widely derided for getting the government involved in people’s personal affairs. Yet, just as with abortion, it does appear that the Left is not all about choice either. Plans for national health care require some sort of cost-control. In my previous column, I went into this in more detail and won’t reiterate it all here. But if you don’t let the marketplace do it, you eventually have to do it by rationing. And why wouldn’t rationing start with the terminally ill?
This is a problem that won’t go away until clear definitions of when life begins and when it ends are written into law. That necessarily involves discussion of religion and of God. And it shows you can only go so far in writing public policy in such a way that treats all belief systems equally. That should be the ideal, but there are situations like these where clear choices have to be made and one side or the other is going to be trampled. And there’s no reason the faith and belief of the Catholic Church, and those closely aligned with it, forever have to be the ones taking the worst of it.
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