A more complete picture

As I have listened to the fawning media coverage of the life and death of Edward Kennedy this week, there are a couple of major life events that have been mysteriously missing.  In particular, there is one name rarely mentioned at all, or when it was, in a quick, passing whisper.  As Mark Steyn points out in Airbrushing Out Mary Jo Kopechne:

When Kennedy cheerleaders do get around to mentioning her, it’s usually to add insult to fatal injury. As Teddy’s biographer Adam Clymer wrote, Edward Kennedy’s “achievements as a senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne.”

You can’t make an omelette without breaking chicks, right? I don’t know how many lives the senator changed — he certainly changed Mary Jo’s — but you’re struck less by the precise arithmetic than by the basic equation: How many changed lives justify leaving a human being struggling for breath for up to five hours pressed up against the window in a small, shrinking air pocket in Teddy’s Oldsmobile? If the senator had managed to change the lives of even more Americans, would it have been okay to leave a couple more broads down there? Hey, why not? At the Huffington Post, Melissa Lafsky mused on what Mary Jo “would have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history . . . Who knows — maybe she’d feel it was worth it.” What true-believing liberal lass wouldn’t be honored to be dispatched by that death panel?

We are all flawed, and most of us are weak, and in hellish moments, at a split-second’s notice, confronting the choice that will define us ever after, many of us will fail the test. Perhaps Mary Jo could have been saved; perhaps she would have died anyway. What is true is that Edward Kennedy made her death a certainty.

While it is one thing to “not speak ill of the dead”, it is quite another to have someone’s entire existence disappear down the memory hole because it is an inconvenient detail for “the Lion of liberalism”.

Another person who might beg to differ concerning the present canonization of Ted Kennedy is Robert Borck.  It has been almost comical to hear commentators wax on and on about how Kennedy was “a man of principle” and, while he forcefully fought for his positions, he “never got personal or petty”.  Really?!?

When a man is capable of what Ted Kennedy did that night in 1969 and in the weeks afterwards, what else is he capable of? An NPR listener said the senator’s passing marked “the end of civility in the U.S. Congress.” Yes, indeed. Who among us does not mourn the lost “civility” of the 1987 Supreme Court hearings? Considering the nomination of Judge Bork, Ted Kennedy rose on the Senate floor and announced that “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit down at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution . . . ”

Whoa! “Liberals” (in the debased contemporary American sense of the term) would have reason to find Borkian jurisprudence uncongenial, but to suggest the judge and former solicitor-general favored re-segregation of lunch counters is a slander not merely vile but so preposterous that, like his explanation for Chappaquiddick, only a Kennedy could get away with it. If you had to identify a single speech that marked “the end of civility” in American politics, that’s a shoo-in.

While a person’s life must be defined by more than a couple of mistakes, it is also true that, until those events are dealt with honestly, they will always remain as the unacknowledged gorilla in the room.  It will be interesting to see this afternoon how many will remain willfully blind to the furry creature lurking in the corner!

Wellstone funeral II?

Dems need to be careful or this will backfire too…

Burning down the house

In trying in recent weeks to put my finger on exactly what it is the single worst feature about the Obamacare proposal, there are many things that come to mind… massive government control, exploding deficits, very real possibilities for abuses in the area of abortion and euthanasia… to name just a few off the top of my head.

However, it seems to me that the place to start is with the fundamental underlying premise – that we just have to do “something” about the uninsured.  While I don’t accept the inflated figure so often tossed around of “45 million without healthcare” (particularly since a large percentage of those simply lack health insurance, not health care … many of these by their own choice) , it is probably reasonable to say that there is some number uninsured through no fault of their own… likely in the range of 10-15 million.  Using the high end of that range for argument’s sake, that works out to approximately 4.25% of the US population.   This would seem to be in line with a number of national polls that show 80-85% of Americans as generally satisfied with their own healthcare. (There always seems to be 10% who complain about everything!)

So, in essence, what we’re talking about doing is tearing the entire system apart and remaking it for the sake of 4.25% of the population.  Maybe that makes sense in Obamaworld, but it makes absolutely no sense to me.  Judging from the huge numbers of people showing up at Congressional townhall meetings to speak out against this plan, it seems that it doesn’t make much sense to a very large number of others as well…and is further demonstrated by the absolute freefall the plan is experiencing in national polls.

In trying to capsulate this into an understandable illustration, I came up with the following:  Suppose that my house has some serious plumbing problems.  There are a number of approaches I can take to relieve the problem: fix it myself (not likely), find a friend with more knowledge to tackle it with me or pay a professional to fix it.  One thing that I’m not likely to do, however, is burn down the whole house so that I can build a new one with better plumbing!  I’ m particularly not going to try this approach if my neighbor tried it a few years ago and is now facing bankruptcy because of his giant mortgage on the new house…and his plumbing still leaks!

In a nutshell, that’s what I see the idiots in Congress doing – burning down the whole house of one of the best healthcare systems ever devised.  Is it perfect?  Of course not!  Nothing built by human beings ever is.  But there are plenty of ways of improving it without destroying it in the process… tort reform to stop frivolous lawsuits, allowing medical insurance to be sold across state lines, greater use of medical savings accounts, to name a few.

Like I said, fix the plumbing…don’t burn down the house!

Don’t worry…

All Aboard!

The rest of the story…

While Congressmen whine about the idignity of having citizens actually dare to criticize them and then the Botox Queen Pelosi trots out phony charges of protesters “carrying swastikas into townhall meetings”, the MSM dutifully (and with a straight face) reports all the Democratic party talking points as if they are the gospel truth.

Well, for all those who were subjected to the half-truth reporting of the “mob scene” at the townhall meeting in Tampa last night, here are a number of facts from eyewitnesses which the MSM couldn’t be bothered to mention…wouldn’t fit their agenda, don’tcha know!

First, while a large number of individual people opposed to Obamacare arrived more than an hour early and dutifully waited in line, eyewitnesses described large numbers of union people were let in a side entrance and filled up 180 of the 200 seats in the auditorium before the doors were opened to the general public.  How did anyone know they were union people?  Oh, I don’t know…the T-shirts they were wearing emblazoned with the SEIU logo and lettering might have been a clue!

Second, when the doors were finally opened, it was the union goons inside who were pushing against those coming in, trying to keep them from entering.  One elderly gentleman with a heart condition was shoved up against the wall by a guy half his age and twice his size with a forearm across the neck.  It was things like this that set off some of the loud arguing that was shown on TV clips.

Third, the Congressman that was supposedly there to “listen”, Kathy Castor, instead made a speech regurgitating all the stale talking points that have been repeated ad nauseum.  When people tried to ask her questions, more than one of the eyewitnesses described being threatened by SEIU members telling them to sit down and shut up.  That’s when things really got loud, as a number of people objected to the attempt to intimidate them into silence!

The incredible irony of all this is how morons like Nancy Pelosi and Dick Durbin can make all kinds of ridiculous accusations against conservatives about “manufacturing” public outcry against the imposition of socialist healthcare from above and the MSM dutifully reports these charges at face value, never bothering to look beyond the surface.

Of course, if they did, they might find that the accusations being hurled by the Left are nothing more than psychological projection, saying far more about those making the charge than it does about the accused!

What a surprise!

Remember all those campaign promises from the One that no one making less than $250K would have their taxes raised by “one single dime”?  Surprise, surprise…the Exhalted One was just kidding:

President Barack Obama’s treasury secretary said Sunday he cannot rule out higher taxes to help tame an exploding budget deficit, and his chief economic adviser would not dismiss raising them on middle-class Americans as part of a health care overhaul.

As the White House sought to balance campaign rhetoric with governing, officials appeared willing to extend unemployment benefits. With former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan saying he is “pretty sure we’ve already seen the bottom” of the recession, Obama aides sought to defend the economic stimulus and calm a jittery public.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and National Economic Council Director Larry Summers both sidestepped questions on Obama’s intentions about taxes. Geithner said the White House was not ready to rule out a tax hike to lower the federal deficit; Summers said Obama’s proposed health care overhaul needs funding from somewhere.

“There is a lot that can happen over time,” Summers said, adding that the administration believes “it is never a good idea to absolutely rule things out, no matter what.”

During his presidential campaign, Obama repeatedly vowed “you will not see any of your taxes increase one single dime.” But the simple reality remains that his ambitious overhaul of how Americans receive health care — promised without increasing the federal deficit — must be paid for.             (see the AP story here)

Oh well, what’s one more lie to add to the mounting pile….

Pic says much

I post this without comment from The American Thinker…

Obama’s revealing body language

Thomas Lifson

This picture truly is worth at least a thousand words.

I am stunned that the official White House Blog published this picture and that it is in the public domain. The body language is most revealing.

Sergeant Crowley, the sole class act in this trio, helps the handicapped  Professor Gates down the stairs, while Barack Obama, heedless of the infirmities of his friend and fellow victim of self-defined racial profiling, strides ahead on his own. So who is compassionate? And who is so self-involved and arrogant that he is oblivious?

In my own dealings with the wealthy and powerful, I have always found that the way to quickly capture the moral essence of a person is to watch how they treat those who are less powerful. Do they understand that the others are also human beings with feelings? Especially when they think nobody is looking.