Picked Nits

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.

August 12, 2009 - Posted by stanzy | Government, Politics | , , , | 2 Comments

2 Comments »

  1. He’s right :)

    Comment by futiledemocracy | August 12, 2009

  2. @futiledemocracy – I checked out your site, and I guess you’re saying we Americans are, in fact, idiots, because we haven’t yet adopted a national health system. I also noticed that, in your post praising the UK’s NHS, you felt it necessary to repeatedly refer to Republicans and “the right wing” as stupid, crazy, and greedy. Apparently the NHS has not been able to help you with your small mind. I suppose labeling all Republicans as idiots makes it easier for you to argue your point of view — because you don’t have to argue, at all.

    While MLK was no fool, the quote you included in your post was foolish. Just because the US federal government spends more on the military (it’s explicit responsibility) than on “social uplift” (nowhere in the US Constitution), that doesn’t mean the “nation” spends more on the military than on helping people. If you added up all the money spent by the federal, state, and local governments, communities, individuals (charity) and organizations on “social uplift,” the number would easily eclipse what the federal government spends on the military (and that’s leaving aside military resources spent directly on helping people). But I guess the quote sounds nice, makes your point for you, and gives you the weight of MLK. So, why bother examining it’s truthfulness?

    What people (too many Americans, and probably most of the rest of the world) don’t seem to understand is that the government of the United States was set up specifically to limit the role of the federal government. It is supposed to do things (like spend money on the military) that only it can do, effectively, and stay out of the rest. This was done not only to protect individual liberty but to allow for the flexibility and dynamism that can exist when the states, local governments and individuals have the ability to experiment with creative solutions to various problems. The system has worked wonderfully for 200+ years, taking the country from birth to dominating force in the world in a very short period of time. I would much rather have 50 states or 500 private companies experimenting and trying to come up with the best, most efficient solutions for delivering health care than to have one plan, developed by a group of politically motivated hacks, force a one-size-fits-all system onto the entire country. That doesn’t make me crazy, or greedy, or uncaring about the sick. Just the opposite. I want our system to work the way it’s supposed to, to allow it to deliver the best solution — or, better yet, *solutions* — to help *everyone*.

    There are plenty of things the federal government can do, *within it’s intended role*, to help improve the US health care system. Not swallowing, without protest, the president’s ridiculous monstrosity of a plan doesn’t make us a country of idiots.

    Comment by stanzy | August 12, 2009


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