POLITICS and PUNDITRY

Healthcare: Table & Floor

The most important health care reform question remained unanswered by the president’s speech last night, and by his reprise this morning at a second nurses association meeting: no one knows how he plans to pay for his health care reform effort.  But at least we know he plans for it not to add a cent to the deficit. 

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.

Reporting Parental Outrage

At noon on the East coast on Labor Day 2009, CNN is doing a story about the president’s speech to school children.  The story doesn’t come close to being objective.  The controversy over the plan and the speech is being described as conservatives being “angry and afraid” that the president is going to “indoctrinate their children’s young minds.”  Some parents are “going as far” as to keep their children home from school, CNN reports.

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.

Radical Republicans

In the company of liberal media elites today, while watching one of the final town hall meetings of the Congressional August recess, I listened as one elderly fellow citizen after another was mimicked by these so-called elites in exaggerated southern accents, without regard for whether they were from the south.  The media members called these town hall attendees dumbasses for denigrating socialist medicine while praising Medicare. The news producers screamed at them through television screens for “not realizing” that a public option was better for everyone.

“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.