The President Thinks You’re An Idiot

Imagine:  It’s 5 AM.  You’re tied up and stuck on some railroad tracks, certain to die, if no one comes along to free you before the 4 PM train comes through.  From somewhere over on your left, a man claiming to be your hero appears, telling you he can burn the ropes off of you and pull you from the tracks, but he thinks your shoes are stuck, so he says he’ll have to cut off your feet.  Oh, and he’s going to blow up the tracks, too — just to be safe.  You’re not too excited about his solution.  Then, from somewhere to your right another person appears.  He tells you there’s no need for fire or hacksaws, he can just untie the rope (and your shoes, if they’re really stuck) and you can walk away.  Hero-man on your left shouts at you that his way is better, and that he must do it NOW!  The other guy repeats that such drastic measures are not necessary, but hero-man presses on.  “Some people say we should do nothing!  But doing nothing will be much worse than my plan,” he assures you.

This is what our president is doing.  He’s proposing fire and hacksaws and demolition crews to avert the imminent disaster that our health care system will lead us to, and equating anyone advocating a less drastic alternative with someone wanting to do nothing.  He did the same exact thing with the stimulus bill, claiming a $750B mess of Democrat pet projects — a bill he did not write and probably did not read — was absolutely necessary to rescue the economy, and had to be passed immediately.  Anyone who disagreed was said to prefer to “do nothing,” the implication being that they did not care about suffering Americans.  Now, he wants to completely overhaul the US health care system, using new powers and hundreds of pages of new rules and regulations, involving the government deeply in an area in which it is at least questionable (to any reasonable person) for it to be involved.  And he wants his plan approved before people have time to really understand it.  Those who believe that he is going too far?  According to him, they just want to do nothing.  This has been his m.o. all along: promote his plans by attacking straw men.

Can this strategy work?  Only on idiots.  Yet the president uses it, repeatedly.  You decide what that means.

A Horrible Tragedy Turns Disgusting

Today we learned that the woman who drove her minivan the wrong way on a local New York highway, killing 5 children, 3 men, and herself, when she collided head-on with an SUV, was drunk and high.  According to the toxicology report, her BAL was .19, and had enough THC in her system to indicate that she had smoked pot as recently as 15 minutes before the accident.  Since she was near the end of a 4-hour trip, that means she had been drinking and smoking while the kids were in the car.

When I first heard about the accident, in which the driver, her 2-year-old daughter and 3 nieces were killed, along with the 3 men in the SUV, I was sickened by the tragedy of it all.  Four young lives ended.  (Miraculously, the woman’s 5-year-old son survived the crash.)  The driver’s brother, father of the 3 girls, had spoken to her (and to one of his daughters) while they were on the road, and told her to wait, and that he would come and pick them up.  Now his girls are gone.  His babies.  Gone.  Her husband lost his baby girl.  And the families of the 3 men lost loved ones.  For nothing.

It was vary sad.  At first, reports said she had called her bother to tell him she wasn’t feeling well, which is why he offered to pick everyone up.  So, even from the start, it did seem that poor judgment had caused the tragedy.  But still, it was just a very sad story.  Now, with the news of the woman being drunk and stoned, the story has turned disgusting.  As a father, I cannot help but be furious at this woman, who’s husband and brother trusted her with their children, and who then made the selfish decision to drive on, even though she knew (enough to call her brother) that she should not be behind the wheel.  It makes me feel physically sick to think about it.

Perhaps there’s more to this story.  The details are still sketchy.  How did she start out on a 4-hour trip, at 9:30 in the morning, “fine,” as witnesses have reported, and wind up drunk and stoned 4 hours later?  She would have had to guzzle vodka (a bottle of Absolut was found in the car) and smoke up in the middle of the trip.  Why would she do that?  Regardless of the reasons, it’s hard not to judge the woman as selfish and irresponsible beyond belief.  I’m sad for the children.  I’m sad for the parents who’ve lost them.  I’m sad for the families of the other men.  And I’m angry at this woman.

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Note:  I had originally linked to a NY Post article for this story, but decided to use a different source because of the Post’s inappropriate use of wordplay in their title: “CRASH MOM WAS FULLY ‘LOADED’”  Great time to make puns.  How embarassing.