It all started when she recounted an Oprah show in which the first lady of talk went to Europe to compare their universal health-care-equipped societies to America’s.  My friend told me she found herself wanting to be Danish, because they rank among the happiest people, with a government that provides rather extensive services. 

The expense of such government care is a tax rate of 50 percent, according to the Danish woman who spoke to Oprah, and no one minds the high rate, because they get so much for it.  Oprah’s interviewee went on to say that they don’t consider themselves socialist; they simply consider themselves civilized. 

While the Danish woman may not have been comparing her country to the U.S., my friend unmistakably was.  I light-heartedly told her that I believe we’re civilized too.  To which she responded: “I don’t know.”

This is a person who’s been dismayed in the past when some conservatives called liberals unpatriotic!  You don’t think your country is civilized, I thought? Are you kidding me?

I immediately began dispensing United Nation’s statistics about how Americans give away a higher percentage of their earnings than any other people on earth.  She conceded that was civilized.  How gracious, I thought. 

Then it hit me: she must not know that as rich as we uncivilized capitalists are believed to be, there are still a fair number of countries richer than we are.  According to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, the per capita gross domestic product makes Americans the 12^th or 13^th richest country.  Denmark is fifth.  Call me crazy, but perhaps that has something to do with taking a 50 percent tax rate in stride.  The Danes can afford it.

While I was still reeling, she changed the subject from Oprah and the Danes to infant mortality rates.  I was informed that most western nations have a significantly lower infant mortality rate than the U.S. – further evidence, apparently, of how uncivilized we are. 

I asked for the facts behind the statistics, noting that so often when people discuss the need for health care reform in the U.S., they point out that our higher cost does not yield Americans greater longevity.  Of course, they neglect to factor in that we drive more than most Europeans and therefore have more car accidents; that we have more guns and people inclined to shoot them than most western countries, and therefore more shooting deaths.  Americans die more often for reasons that have nothing to do with a doctor’s care or lack thereof.  So I wanted a detailed evidentiary argument for how the U.S. infant mortality rate indicates that we are uncivilized.  I didn’t get one.

Having reached a point where I just wanted the whole maddening conversation to be over, I announced that the taxes and extensive services would be fine with me if it weren’t for a little old thing called the Constitution.  I’m a rules girl, I said.  If you don’t like the rules, change them – but you can’t just ignore them and go on your merry way, as I believe liberals do every time they want to pass a new government program without the constitutional authority to do so.

“Right,” she said taking the bait.  “We have to change the Constitution.”

Speak for yourself! I thought, waving goodbye.  The Constitution was written by a bunch of men who forced a king to leave them alone.  They painstakingly detailed the constraints of federal government power.  They wanted the government to be small and unobtrusive; they wanted the freedom to fail or succeed on their own.  They asked little of their government in exchange for the government asking little of them. They had the right idea; there was nothing uncivilized about it. 

Talking about altering those fundamental principles simply puts a burr in my britches.

Now that I’ve calmed down, I must acknowledge that while embarrassing and ill-advised, the choice was not insane.  The Nobel Prize Committee may decide on anyone they choose, including those undeserving.  The prerogative is indisputably theirs.  But here’s the thing:

I was in Johannesburg and Soweto in April of 1994, reporting on the first all-race elections of South Africa.  I had the privilege of a front-row seat at a Mandela speech, given from a Soweto soccer field.  To say I was Impressed was then and remains an inadequate description.  For enduring 27 years in prison and embracing as friends the guards who kept him captive, for agreeing to a joint government with those who had kept him imprisoned, for renouncing the violence that had justified his capture and imprisonment to the apartheid regime, and for rallying a people to fight on for as many decades as it took to achieve legal equality, Nelson Mandela was a most deserving recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

The fact that a president who has yet to accomplish anything other than impeccable delivery of an eloquent speech is now in the same category of world achievers as Nelson Mandela is both baffling and enraging.  Those who drank the kool aid might argue that my conclusion is to be expected, given my frequently-recorded disdain of the current U.S. president and my stated admiration for the former South African one.  However, my outrage is just as deep-seeded when comparing Mr. Obama to those whose accomplishments are questionable to me. 

For example, I question the accuracy of global warming statistics and the methods used to arrive at them.  We live in a world where, ever since the creation of the broadcast news creature called the weatherman, there are constant jokes about what a waste of space weather people are.  Their predictions are simply unreliable.  If the forces of nature are such that no matter how much scientific knowledge we have, weather predictions are wrong (and often so), then how can anyone in their right mind trust the accuracy of predictions about the state of our atmosphere several decades from now?

When I was a child in the 1970s, the big fear was that another ice age was coming; the planet was allegedly cooling at a rapid pace.  By the 1990s, global warming was the threat, and the predictions at that time were that we’d be dealing with significantly higher oceans by now.  Instead, the earth’s temperature has declined in the last decade, leading a growing number of scientists (almost all outside of the United States) reevaluating those computer models upon which carbon footprint controls are based.  Yet, none of these rather large and valid questions about the accuracy of climate change data detracts in any way from the time, effort, passion, and  bona fide work that Al Gore put into informing the masses about an issue he believes detrimentally affects all of humanity.  I don’t think his conclusions of gloom and doom are right, but I had no issue with him receiving the Nobel Prize for his lifelong work.  That’s the key that’s missing from any sentence describing why the Nobel was awarded to Barack Obama.

But who says there’s a need to look out for one another?  The U.S. Constitution contains no such need.  But it does say plenty about freedom.

Many on the left would say morality and compassion require that we “look after one another,” but those justifications are completely unrelated to the law and therefore to government.  Government must actually choose to legislate on the basis of morality; it is not required to do so.  And chosen it has, more than once, to pass laws based on allegedly shared values.

Laws against prostitution and drugs are prime examples of the government legislating morality.  Examples of government-legislated compassion are social security and Medicare, into which all taxpayers pay and the benefits of which all taxpayers are supposed to reap.  In this way, entitlement programs differ dramatically from all proposed forms of health care reform thus far, as well as government programs that are designed to have individual citizens look after one another, whether they want to or not, using the federal government as the intermediary social worker. 

Americans aren’t happy having government choose to contribute their hard-earned dollars to a charity that’s not of their choice, which is what “looking after one another” amounts to.  The brilliance of FDR and LBJ in setting up the social security and Medicare funds, respectively, was that they knew getting something back for the dollars put in made it more palatable to the public. 

President Obama believes in charity for charity’s sake, without taxpayers getting anything on the other end but the satisfaction of having helped their fellow man.  Good for him.  That’s an honorable ethos and one easy to agree with in a personal sense - but not a governmental one. 

Charity for charity’s sake is, in fact, a valuable thing that people should try to give if they can.  But when they can and do, it should be to the charity or persons of their choice, in the manner of their choice and not to the federal government, for the government to decide who’s deserving and why.  President Obama, as an individual, is free to give as much to as many people as he can personally afford, purely for the satisfaction of having helped his fellow man; but he shouldn’t be allowed to foist that ethos onto the rest of the population.

Unfortunately, most liberals seem to believe that government should do what individuals aren’t willing to do, while being the very individuals who aren’t willing to do more for their fellow citizens.  Various polls and studies repeatedly show that conservatives, the ones arguing for freedom, those citizens who know that the Constitution establishes a small central government, and that the document literally enumerates the freedoms the government is supposed to protect, do a much better job of looking out for one another without order of the feds.  They give more time and money to both secular and religious organizations than those who self identify as liberal Democrats, for nothing more than the satisfaction of helping their fellow citizens.  No wonder they don’t want the government telling them they have no choice but to give more.

Those who believe taking care of the less fortunate is a moral obligation should be required to live their belief, not simply fill out their tax return.  Liberals want to just pass a program to help the less fortunate and tax the public for it.  Their way is lazy; it requires no thought, no effort, and no genuine gift of anything.  What’s moral about that? 

In any political battle in the U.S. between freedom and the need to look out for one another, freedom should win.  It should win for constitutional reasons and for moral ones. 

Wait.  We’d heard that before.

Representative Joe Wilson’s outburst was the only new and original content to an otherwise warmed over presidential address.  Mr. Obama tossed a bone to Republicans in taking administrative action toward tort reform; and he threw another to the left wing of his party by not pulling the public option off of the table. 

At the end of the night - and an unnecessarily long speech - the president may have earned a bump in the polls that’s not likely to last, but little more.   Without telling the chamber how he wants the plan paid for, he left the most important detail on the floor to be kicked around by warring factions while putting all his energy into discussing the items on the table.

To illustrate the distress involved in Barack Obama speaking to the nation’s kids, CNN has a young, blonde, presumably conservative woman, crying on the television screen – literally – while “thinking about [her] children and how upset it truly makes [her]” that the president is going to speak to them.  CNN clearly chose a person who is strongly overreacting to a controversy that is, nevertheless, legitimate. 

That legitimacy isn’t even mentioned until the report is half over.

The gripe that all parents who are conscious of and concerned about constitutional lines, separation of powers and federalism have a right to make is this: the White House has no business distributing a lesson plan to schools.  Education is a state issue, and the Department of Education is expressly prohibited from offering and imposing curriculum.  The president’s initial request that students write about what they can do to help him was insult added to injury; it was not the sole injurious action.  His removal of that request from the lesson plan does nothing to address how completely inappropriate and illegal it is for the Department of Education to offer a lesson plan at all. 

This administration keeps finding new ways to try to insert the federal government into the lives of individuals without their permission.  Doing so with children is doubly unacceptable.  Parents therefore have a right to be upset about this scenario – no matter what the president says in his speech. 

It’s not the worst thing the administration can do; it’s not as if the draft’s been reinstated and pre-teens in middle school are eligible.  Still, when a national mainstream news organization strongly implies that outrage over this issue is just another fringe reaction of those who want to hate Obama regardless, it’s an inaccurate portrayal of the true nature of the controversy and therefore irresponsible reporting. 

But the mainstream media can’t seem to do any better these days – and that’s something to be truly outraged about as well.

“When did Republicans become radicals who want to overthrow the government?  What’s going on here?”  One of them asked derisively, smiling ear to ear, as one does when getting away with making fun of someone behind his back.

According to Gallup, almost 90 percent of Republicans are self-described conservatives.  Conservatives, almost by definition, believe in sticking as close to the original script as the evolution of time (and, therefore, culture) will allow.   That original script is the U.S. Constitution, a document that is pretty specific about what the federal government is supposed to do for the people and is unabashedly explicit in describing what the federal government must allow its citizens to do, like it or not (right to say what one wants, practice the religion of one’s choosing, keep the police from entering one’s house without a warrant). 

As seasons have turned into decades and then centuries, the Court itself has inferred even more things that the federal government must allow its citizens to do, even though the document doesn’t clearly say so (right to privacy and abortion).  Barack Obama himself is on record as describing the constitution as a document of negative rights: it says what the government can’t do to its people not what it must do for them. 

He doesn’t like that.  Conservatives do. 

Conservatives like the original script; they like that it takes the enormous feat of an amendment to rewrite it.  They resent like hell someone trying to change the rules without permission – or worse, ignore the rules all together – and rewrite the document without the agreement of a supermajority of Congress and three-fourths of the states. 

The people in control of the legislative branch and the one at the helm of the executive branch represent a government that doesn’t respect the original script and the rules that govern changing it.  For conservatives, that’s precisely a government that should not be allowed to remain in office.

When did Republicans become radicals who want to overthrow the government?  That’s what they’ve always been when the government tries to do more than the Constitution says it’s supposed to do.  That fact has clearly slipped by some of those exceptionally smart, appallingly condescending liberal media elites.

Perhaps the effectiveness of next week’s address will be found in an unexpected about face.  Wouldn’t it really be a “game on!” situation if President Obama said, “I don’t care that Middle America doesn’t trust me; I don’t care that independents and moderates are sorry they voted for me.  I believe that every single person living in this country – legally or illegally – is entitled to government-funded health care.  And that’s why I’m directing Congress to ram through not only a public plan but something as close to single payer as we can possibly get away with.”

The Democrats would never get something so radical enacted.  Obama would be a one-term president for sure.  Republicans would dominate in the 2010 and 2012 elections.  But at least the country would finally have a president with chutzpah enough to admit publicly what most of us already know he truly wants and let the chips fall where they may.  That kind of about face might be his most honorable act since entering national public life.

“He’s a killer, a cheat, a drunk – why should his name give him the nomination?” she screamed.  I’d make the silly mistake of asking if she was torn in the election between her home-state senator and a president she’d worked hard to elect just four years earlier.   As it so happened, she’d turned against the youngest Kennedy during the Chappaquiddick scandal.

“He just let that poor girl die,” she exclaimed when I asked what Chappaquiddick was.  I was still in elementary school in 1980.  I’d heard the name of the place, and I’d heard it related to Senator Kennedy, but I’d never known what happened there back when I was still an infant.

Before I could ask additional questions, my aunt was off to the races telling me every offensive thing Ted Kennedy had reportedly done, including attempting to cheat his way through school and cheat his way out of a marriage.   Long story made short: my aunt couldn’t stand Ted Kennedy.

Years later the summer of 1980 incident ran through my head as I stood next to Ted Kennedy at a function at Georgetown University while his nephew was a student there. There were stares and whispers from the students crossing his path – but all were smiling.  I contrasted their smiles with my aunt’s scowl and marveled at the opposition of reaction, wondering how much age played a part in one’s assessment of the man.

Maureen Callahan’s article in the New York Post today confirmed the role of age in how one views the last surviving son of Joe Kennedy.  Women in their twenties are even more ignorant of Chappaquiddick than those of us who were infants at the time, and my generation clearly remembers the William Kennedy Smith trial, while they likely do not.

How lucky for him to have an entire generation of liberal Democrats who don’t know there are big reasons not to revere him, despite the multitude of legislation with his name on it.  Five days is more than enough time to dedicate to the life and times of Edward M. Kennedy.  May he – and “Camelot”, whatever that might have been – rest in peace.

It’s been a given for months now that the liberal lion of the Senate was dying of brain cancer, and that he’s always wanted to pass universal health care.  Beltway regulars know that a lawmaker’s reputation is sterling once s/he dies and the inclination is to grant the legislator’s last wish.  In short, it was to be expected that the death of Ted Kennedy would increase the probability of passing a health care bill – no matter how flawed.

The true challenge now is to resist that inclination for the sake of the nation.

Covering more (if not all) of the nation’s uninsured citizens must start with fixing the problems with efficiency and fraud that exist in Medicare and Medicaid.  It simply defies all logic to entertain creation of a new system of any kind, without fixing the flaws in the one the country’s had for 40 years.

Did the president want to reassure a stock market that just hit a high for the year?  Does he believe the reappointment of the one who rescued Wall Street quite generously will keep the market climbing?

Is he sending the loudest possible message to National Economic Advisor Larry Summers, who desperately wanted to be nominated Fed Chair?  Perhaps this is his way to punish the man who advocated repealing the law that kept investment bankers and regular ones from comingling their business activities.  It was the repeal of the Glass Steagall Act under President Clinton and the resultant comingling that laid the groundwork for the collapse of the housing market and the ensuing Great Recession.

Perhaps Barack Obama, tired of bad press and falling approval ratings and conscious of the release of news that the deficit will be $9 trillion in 10 years (instead of the previously estimated $7 trillion), simply offered up a Wag-the-Dog news moment to keep his poll numbers from falling farther.   That motivation can only provide a partial explanation, since a) it’s not at all sure to work and b) he could have chosen other manufactured news moments unrelated to the potential growth of the U.S. economy.  As a matter of fact, he did choose another one: the investigation and probable prosecution of CIA interrogators, as well as removing the task of terrorist interrogation from the CIA and placing it under the National Security Agency.  There’s a lot happening while the president’s on vacation, actually.

But back to the question: why Bernanke again, when he didn’t notice the precarious nature of the bubble before it burst and his solution to the explosion was to pour trillions of good dollars after bad – an act many believed exceeded his power as Fed Chair. 

Maybe there’s no one else remotely acceptable.  That’s the truly sobering thought.