But, for the sake of argument, let us concede the president’s current number of 30 million uninsured. In order to do something for the 10 percent of the population outside the current system, why is it necessary to destabilize the arrangements of the 90 percent within it?
Well, says the president, not so fast. Lots of people with insurance run into problems when they change jobs or move to another state. OK, In that case, why not ease the obstacles to health care portability?
Well, says the president, shuffling his cups and moving the pea under another shell, we’re spending too much on health care. By “we’re,” he means you and you and you and you and millions of other Americans making individual choices over which he casually claims collective jurisdiction.
And that, ultimately, gets closer than anything else he says to giving the game away. For most of the previous presidency, the Left accused George W. Bush of using 9/11 as a pretext to attack Iraq. Since January, his successor has used the economic slump as a pretext to “reform” health care. Most voters don’t buy it: They see it as Obama’s “war of choice,” and the more frantically he talks about it as a matter of urgency the weirder it seems. If he’s having difficulty selling it, that’s because it’s not about “health.” As I’ve written before, the appeal of this issue to him and to Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank et al is that governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture – one in which elections are always fought on the Left’s issues and on the Left’s terms, and in which “conservative” parties no longer talk about small government and individual liberty but find themselves retreating to one last pitiful rationale: that they can run the left-wing state more effectively than the Left can. Listen to your average British Tory or French Gaullist on the campaign trail, pledging to “deliver” government services more “efficiently.”
Steyn believes that Obama will ram something through, whatever the cost to his minions in Congress for just this reason.
It is Obama’s historical moment, this health care “reform”. It is not a reform, but a reforming that he seeks. To remake the American Nation into an image of him and his left-wing views.
At least one million people showed up today in Washington to (borrowing from the great William Buckley) stand athwart history, yelling Stop!
We have to make this stand and we have to make it now. We have to make it painfully clear to Democrats (and some Republicans) that they may not politically survive Obama’s planned rendezvous with history.
If they pass it anyway, we have an even better slogan: 40 in ’10 and Repeal!
UPDATE: NRO has the same Steyn piece.
The first estimates I heard were of a million, which I thought had to be wild. Then, as they grew, a million seems a reasonable guess. Now the estimates are shrinking again, so I guess it’s “Who knows?” And who issues the final figure, anyway? The DC Police?
Don’t know that there is ever any “official” figure. But the police estimate is usually taken as fact. It is not exactly a science, however. The pictures say a lot about how many were there – and it was A LOT.
The phrase, “can you hear me now?” occurs to me just now.
President Obam and all the Fed politicians better listen up real fast, because I fear that like in 1861 here in the deep south, it will be the time to put the whiskey on the high shelf, and take the guns down from the wall.
Just as Rep. Wilson pulled the curtain back on the “aliens”(which Bam! had moved to dodge with 30M) even Snowe’s “trigger” is over-exposed.
I see Democratic gridlock-they know they’re screwed with the size of the 9/12 crowd. Kevlar and safe-havens are their first concern now. Whether they can get re-elected will wait.