PBS Props Up Obamacare by Glorifying Corrupt Castrocare

“Useful Idiots”  is the title given to the following article by Scott W. Johnson at PowerLine  about the  Public Broadcasting System’s   fraudulent report by Ray Suarez  alleging glories to  the Marxist Castrocare ……the Cuban version of Obamacare.

“One would have thought we were well past the day when the the folks at PBS would be shilling for Castro and Communism, but one would be wrong. Mary Anastasia O’Grady brings us a remarkable example of Castroite stupefaction in her Wall Street Journal column “A Cuban fairy tale from PBS,” noted here by Tim Graham at NewsBusters. O’Grady finds reporter Ray Suarez declaring the glories of Cuban health care in a three-part PBS NewsHour series last week.

Suarez took the Potemkin village tour of the Cuban health care system; O’Grady notes that the NewsHour series was taped in Cuba with government “cooperation,” so it is not exactly a great surprise that it went heavy on the party line. Yet Cuba is a national museum of Communism, the clock having been stopped around the time that Castro seized power half a century ago. It is something of a ramshackle paradise for political pilgrims that has been exposed as such many times over.

O’Grady contrasts Suarez’s series with Los Funerales de Castro, the 2009 memoir by Vicente Botin covering his four years in Cuba as a correspondent for Spanish Television:

Botín tells about a Havana woman who was frustrated by the doctor shortage in the country. She hung a sheet on her balcony with the words “trade me to Venezuela.” When the police arrived she told them: “Look, compañeros, I’m as revolutionary as the next guy, but if you want to see a Cuban doctor, you have to go to Venezuela.”

The NewsHour has posted Suarez’s installment on Cuba’s purported emphasis on preventive care online. This seems like a sick joke. One would indeed be well advised not to succumb to an illness requiring medical care in Cuba.

Suarez reports that, according to the World Health Organization, the country has earned bragging rights. The average Cuban lives to the age of 78. That’s slightly longer than the life span of the average American. The cost of health care in Cuba is less than $400 a year per person. In the U.S., the annual tab is almost 20 times higher. As George Orwell said, “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” Not that Suarez is exactly an intellectual.

Suarez wants us to understand that we have much to learn from Cuba and Castro. The Maximum Leader has created a system producing better outcomes than the United States at a fraction of the cost. You might think he’d look a little harder to discover how such a “miracle” was accomplished. Is it for real?

I can believe that the per year per person cost of health care in Cuba is minimal; health care professionals are slaves who are paid slave wages and medical infrastructure is, shall we say, deficient. Commenting on Michael Moore’s film Sicko, Jay Nordlinger provides a slightly more realistic portrait than Suarez’s:

Testimony and documentation on the subject are vast. Hospitals and clinics are crumbling. Conditions are so unsanitary, patients may be better off at home, whatever home is. If they do have to go to the hospital, they must bring their own bedsheets, soap, towels, food, light bulbs — even toilet paper. And basic medications are scarce. In Sicko, even sophisticated medications are plentiful and cheap. In the real Cuba, finding an aspirin can be a chore. And an antibiotic will fetch a fortune on the black market.

A nurse spoke to Isabel Vincent of Canada’s National Post. “We have nothing,” said the nurse. “I haven’t seen aspirin in a Cuban store here for more than a year. If you have any pills in your purse, I’ll take them. Even if they have passed their expiry date.”

The equipment that doctors have to work with is either antiquated or nonexistent. Doctors have been known to reuse latex gloves — there is no choice. When they travel to the island, on errands of mercy, American doctors make sure to take as much equipment and as many supplies as they can carry. One told the Associated Press, “The [Cuban] doctors are pretty well trained, but they have nothing to work with. It’s like operating with knives and spoons.”

And doctors are not necessarily privileged citizens in Cuba. A doctor in exile told the Miami Herald that, in 2003, he earned what most doctors did: 575 pesos a month, or about 25 dollars. He had to sell pork out of his home to get by. And the chief of medical services for the whole of the Cuban military had to rent out his car as a taxi on weekends. “Everyone tries to survive,” he explained. (Of course, you can call a Cuban with a car privileged, whatever he does with it.)

So deplorable is the state of health care in Cuba that old-fashioned diseases are back with a vengeance. These include tuberculosis, leprosy, and typhoid fever. And dengue, another fever, is a particular menace. Indeed, an exiled doctor named Dessy Mendoza Rivero — a former political prisoner and a spectacularly brave man — wrote a book called ¡Dengue! La Epidemia Secreta de Fidel Castro.

(Dr. Miguel Faria has more on ¡Dengue! here.)

University of Oklahoma Professor of Anthropology Katherine Hirschfeld actually conducted ethnographic field work in Cuba on the health care system for 10 months in 1997. She experienced the effects of Cuban health care first hand: “Hirschfeld, then a 29 year-old doctoral student, was hospitalized in May 1997 with dengue fever in Santiago. Doctors were expected to keep the outbreak quiet, she says. And she was sent to a secret ward where an armed guard stood before her door.”

In a paper on her field work in Cuba, Hirschfeld noted some of the difficulties: “Formally eliciting critical narratives about health care would be viewed as a criminal act both for me as a researcher, and for people who spoke openly with me.”

Professor Hirschfeld’s increased awareness of Castro’s tyranny caused her to ask a question that evidently did not occur to Suarez: “to what extent is the favorable international image of the Cuban health care system maintained by the state’s practice of suppressing dissent and covertly intimidating or imprisoning would-be critics?“

Professor Hirschfeld’s book is Health, Politics, and Revolution in Cuba Since 1898. Professor Hirschfeld discovered that Castro has been cooking the books on his health care system, another revelation that would undoubtedly come as a shock to Suarez.

Suarez’s report on Cuban health care in 2010 is a disgrace. When Congress gets around to examining the funding of National Public Radio in connection with the termination of Juan Williams, it ought to do likewise with respect to the Public Broadcasting System.

With Suarez’s report, PBS returns to its venerable Cold War role as one of Communism’s useful idiots. Why now? I believe the answer is obviously Obamacare. Suarez wants to persuade Americans that a state-run health care system is just what the doctor ordered. Like NPR, PBS is a media adjunct of the Democratic Party.”

Comment:  Regarding Obamacare and Castrocare……Marxists of a feather must stick together.

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What Has Happened to America to Cause…… Bad is Good, Ugly is Beauty, and Freedom is Out-of-Date?

The Improbables

There are a number of improbables, anomalies, paradoxes, ironies, absurdities — call them what you wish – on the national scene that simply defy reason. We usually fault an ignorant media as culpable for creating narratives that have no basis in fact and yet are rarely questioned. Here are some of the glaring examples and you decide how the unlikely became the gospel.

1. How did 20-minutes-of-fame Julian Assange construct the façade of an idealistic crusading electronic muckraker?

He seems much more likely a part P.T. Barnum showman/part celebrity narcissist. While promising to embarrass a number of banks and capitalist CEOs, he just contracted for $1.7 million in book deal advances — after enjoying his house “arrest” at the mansion of a supportive aristocrat, and after protesting the unwanted fame that has come his way rather than to be shared among the WikiLeaks board.

Assange talks of absolute transparency as an ipso facto virtue, but is shocked that his own protocols of leaking now are turned on himself — as we learn from preliminary legal leaks that he is a sexual cad at best, and more likely a creepy sort of honey-tongued predator. Amid his jet-set Westernized odysseys — predicated on the bounty and security of U.S.-European culture — Assange was certainly not too eager to root out and leak to us many state secrets from Russia, China, or Iran. What would we think of Assange had he given credit to his team at WikiLeaks; globe-trotted in Africa, the Middle East, China, and Russia to inform the world about Mugabe, Chinese plans toward Tibet, Ahmadinejad’s nuke project, or Putin’s attack on dissidents; or donated his profits to dissidents?

2. When did global warming so easily get away with becoming “climate change”? With record winter low temperatures again this year in Europe, and similar freezing weather in the U.S., we are given a number of contorted exegeses from climatologists and green activists that, in fact, argue terrible cold is proof of global warming. One wonders: if it were now 80 degrees in New York or dry and 70 degrees in London, would we be told such unseasonable heat was not an artifact, but likewise  real proof of climate change?

Philology usually is a good barometer of ideology: when global warming became climate change and now is evolving to “climate chaos,” you can see a case study in deductive thinking, as symptoms are fudged to conform to a preexisting diagnosis. Circular reasoning also is characteristic: we convince the coal-devouring and nuclear-producing Chinese that there is a soon to be big (Western-subsidized) global market for wind turbines and solar panels, given the spread of Gorism among Western elites and grandees, then we frighten Americans that the Chinese will soon capture the entire “green” market that we fostered unless we … (fill in the cap and trade / green subsidy-grant blanks).

3. How did authoritarian and Islamist Palestinian groups become reinvented into traditional Western victimized minorities — analogous to women, gays, and minorities? Hamas, for example, is not known for free speech, gender equity, tolerance of homosexuality, or equality of the races (cf. the past West Bank newspaper cartoons of Sec. Condoleezza Rice). Visit any campus free speech area, and the PA or pro-Hamas literature is handed out right next to the Latino, black, gay, Native American, or feminist booths. Go to the Voice of Aztlan website, and the pro-Palestinian anti-Semitic rants appear cheek by jowl with Alta California chauvinism. How did such an intolerant illiberal movement piggy-back onto self-proclaimed progressive agendas? Multiculturalism? Anti-Semitism? Oil interests? Fear of terror? I suppose the transmogrification of a tiny outnumbered Israel of 1966 into a surrogate United States — its seven-million population now supposedly lording its “excessive” power over 400 million Arabs in the Middle East — explains a lot too.

4. How did professors convince us that their universities are progressive, anti-capitalist, and against the grain institutions? Private elite schools — a Yale, a Stanford, a Princeton, a Vassar — exist by reason of their endowments, gifts that in large part come from the very wealthy who excelled under the capitalist system. Part-time lecturers and temporary faculty usually teach classes for pennies on the university dollar. The difference between a Wal-Mart greeter and a Wal-Mart check-out clerk is far less than the pay differential for the same class taught by a part-timer versus a full professor.

Few institutions have created such an elite aristocratic hierarchy — tenure, vast pay discrepancies for classes, annual salary based on 3/5s of the year in the classroom, peer reviews in lieu of quantifiable data on performance, lack of oversight — as the reactionary university.

5. How did Barack Obama invent himself into a bi-partisan, working across the aisle, no more red state/blue state unifying figure? Mellifluous rhetoric and a partisan myth helped to promulgate that myth, I grant. But still, how did the U.S senator with the most partisan voting record in the Senate (to the left of the socialist Bernie Sanders from Vermont) and a devout attendee of one of the most divisive and racist preachers imaginable refashion himself so successfully? Was it the simple declarations — as in something like “I say I am bipartisan, therefore I am bipartisan”? Did all forget that our pre-mid-term election president evoked phrases such as “enemies,” “sit in the back of the car,” and “hand to hand”?

No matter — as soon as Obama was “shellacked” with a 63 seat loss in the House, and his polls hit 42 percent approval, he dropped all the prior rhetoric about “I won and you lost” or “elections matter”—and now announced to his “enemies” that he could “work together” to get things done. Had Obama increased the House Democratic majority by 30 more seats in November, would he now be praising the virtues of bipartisanship? Had the vanity of Rev Wright not convinced the huckster preacher to hawk his Trinity racist rants on incriminating DVDs, would he now be a frequent “healing” presence at the White House?

Lurking somewhere behind all these improbables is a rather small Western elite that is enormously influential in the media, government, the arts, universities, and Hollywood. And what it would like to believe, often simply must be believed — and so it usually is.

Leftwinger Eugene Robinson Knows Greed Almost Always Trumps Principle

With the collapse of traditional American values and  principles, leftwing opinionizer, Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post,  knows the realities of modern day……Greed will triumph over Principle.  

‘What is in it for me’…….is the politics of his LEFT…..and ‘what is in it for me’……is the business   of the amoral and immoral American.  We are an America without ethics, he intimates, so Obama’s coup d’etat over the health care industry will prove a defeat for the naive conservatives who believe they can put an end to this Obama Marxist into the American body.

I regret to say, I believe he is right.   The Left and the greedy unprincipled are too overwhelming an alliance to heal America’s moral, social, and economic  wounds.  Marxist dictatorship is our future……for  Robinson a victory for  his progressive devotion, and for America, I believe, an  inevitability  for  a culture whose  people are abased by  false gods.

Robinson writes…..”GOP Lacks Power to Make Big Changes”….

“WASHINGTON — It’s been not quite two months’ time since Republicans won a sweeping midterm victory, and already they seem divided, embattled and — not to mince words — freaked out. For good reason, I might add.

Sen. Lindsey Graham captured the mood with his mordant assessment of the lame-duck Congress: “Harry Reid has eaten our lunch.” Graham’s complaint was that the GOP acquiesced to a host of Democratic initiatives — giving President Obama a better-than-expected deal on taxes, eliminating “don’t ask, don’t tell,” ratifying the New START treaty — rather than wait for the new, more conservative Congress to arrive.

It was a “capitulation … of dramatic proportions,” Graham said in a radio interview last week. “I can understand the Democrats being afraid of the new Republicans. I can’t understand Republicans being afraid of the new Republicans.”

Oh, but there’s reason to be very afraid.

I don’t want to overstate the Republicans’ predicament. They did, after all, take control of the House and win six more seats in the Senate. But during the lame-duck session, it seemed to dawn on GOP leaders that they begin the new Congress burdened with great expectations — but lacking commensurate power. It’s going to be a challenge for Republicans just to maintain party unity, much less enact the kind of conservative agenda they promised to their enthusiastic, impatient voters.

In the Senate, there could be as many as 11 Republicans who might defect and vote with the Democrats, depending on the issue. There’s a small but newly assertive group of moderates — Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, Scott Brown of Massachusetts and independent Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — along with newcomer Mark Kirk of Illinois, who seem likely to fit that mold. And judging by the vote tallies in the lame-duck session, a half-dozen other GOP senators are willing to go their own way.

This means that if Majority Leader Reid plays his cards well — and recently he has been playing very well indeed — it will be difficult for Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to keep enough of his troops together to sustain a filibuster. The new Senate will be considerably more Republican than the old Senate, but whether it’s actually more conservative remains to be seen.

On the other side of the Capitol it’s a different story, with the tea party movement ousting Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The new House will be decidedly more conservative than the old House — and that’s the problem.

The presumptive next speaker, John Boehner, can easily block initiatives that Obama proposes. But Boehner has said repeatedly that he understands how tentative his majority is and how temporary it could prove to be. My reading of the electorate is that voters want Congress to tackle big problems, rather than waste the next two years mired in gridlock. But not all of the necessary solutions will go over well with the tea party crowd.

The most obvious example is the ballooning national debt. “Cut wasteful spending” is a nice campaign slogan, but it’s flat-out impossible to cut enough spending to close the budget gap. And now the big goodies-for-everyone tax deal has been signed into law. Likewise, “entitlement reform” sounds good — but ignores the fact that beneficiaries of government programs feel, well, entitled.

Any comprehensive solution that sets the nation on a path toward fiscal health will mean that at least some of us pay higher taxes. I wish Boehner luck in explaining this fact of life to his tea party freshmen. He’ll have a hard enough time even persuading them to keep the government solvent by voting to increase the debt ceiling, which will soon be necessary.

Of course, Boehner will be able to win Democratic votes for legislation that absolutely, positively has to pass. But if I know Pelosi, who will be minority leader, she’ll exact concessions.

Republicans face what, for them, is an unpleasant but inescapable reality. Ideologically, most Americans describe themselves as moderate or conservative; but when it comes to getting assistance from the government, most Americans are moderate or liberal. Look at health care, the issue that won the election for the GOP. According to polls, voters clearly favor the benefits that Obama’s reforms will provide. All they really oppose is the insurance mandate that makes those benefits possible.

The idea of small, limited government may be appealing, but this is a big, complicated country. As some Republicans already know, and others soon will learn.”

Comment:   I also believe the Republicans are squeezed.  If they succeed in advancing anything to heal America, Obama will reap the harvest from it and get re-elected……a disaster for the country.   If they allow the country to slide further into the Marxist abyss, even though these  Obamaphiles occupy the  White House and the Senate,  it will be easy for the Eugene Robinsons of the Marxist media to blame inaction not upon their dogmatic brother running the show, BHO, but on his,  what Robinson will call, his racist opponents…..(the ones who won’t have much power in the 112th Congress, anyway, as he writes in this article.)

Thomas Sowell Questions Obamaland’s Secrecy behind Forced Euthanasia Policy

And asks if the Constitution has  any meaning anymore  in his current article, at Investors Business Daily:

“The Constitution of the United States begins with the words “We the people.” But neither the Constitution nor “we the people” will mean anything if politicians and judges can continue to do end runs around both.

Bills passed too fast for anyone to read them are blatant examples of these end runs. But last week, another of these end runs appeared in a different institution when the medical “end of life consultations” rejected by Congress were quietly enacted through bureaucratic fiat by administrators of Medicare.

Although Congressman Earl Blumenauer and Senator Jay Rockefeller had led an effort by a group of fellow Democrats in Congress to pass Section 1233 of pending Medicare legislation, which would have paid doctors to include “end of life” counselling in their patients’ physical checkups, the Congress as a whole voted to delete that provision.

Republican Congressman John Boehner, soon to become Speaker of the House, objected to this provision in 2009, saying: “This provision may start us down a treacherous path toward government-encouraged euthanasia.”

Whatever the merits or demerits of the proposed provision in Medicare legislation, the Constitution of the United States makes the elected representatives of “we the people” the ones authorized to make such decisions. But when proposals explicitly rejected by a vote in Congress are resurrected and stealthily made the law of the land by bureaucratic fiat, there has been an end run around both the people and the Constitution.

Congressman Blumenauer’s office praised the Medicare bureaucracy’s action but warned: “While we are very happy with the result, we won’t be shouting it from the rooftops because we are not out of the woods yet.”

In other words, don’t let the masses know about it.

It is not only members of Congress or the administration who treat “we the people” and the Constitution as nuisances to do an end run around. Judges, including Justices of the Supreme Court, have been doing this increasingly over the past hundred years.

During the Progressive era of the early 20th century, the denigration of the Constitution began, led by such luminaries as Princeton scholar and future President of the United States Woodrow Wilson, future Harvard Law School Dean Roscoe Pound and future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis.

As a Professor at Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson wrote condescendingly of “the simple days of 1787″ when the Constitution was written and how, in our presumably more complex times, “each generation of statesmen looks to the Supreme Court to supply the interpretation which will serve the needs of the day.”

This kind of argument would be repeated for generations, with no more evidence that 1787 was any less complicated than later years than Woodrow Wilson presented– which was none– and with no more reasons why the need for “change” meant that unelected judges should be the ones making those changes, as if there were no elected representatives of the people.

Professor Roscoe Pound likewise referred to the need for “a living constitution by judicial interpretation,” in order to “respond to the vital needs of present-day life.” He rejected the idea of law as “a body of rules.”

But if law is not a body of rules, what is it? A set of arbitrary fiats by judges, imposing their own vision of “the needs of the times”? Or a set of arbitrary regulations stealthily emerging from within the bowels of a bureaucracy?

Louis Brandeis was another leader of this Progressive era chorus of demands for moving beyond law as rules. He cited “newly arisen social needs” and “a shifting of our longing from legal justice to social justice.”

In other words, judges were encouraged to do an end run around rules, such as those set forth in the Constitution, and around the elected representatives of “we the people.” As Roscoe Pound put it, law should be “in the hands of a progressive and enlightened caste whose conceptions are in advance of the public.”

That is still the vision of the left a hundred years later. The Constitution cannot protect us unless we protect the Constitution, by voting out those who promote end runs around it.”

Comment:   There once was a time in my own life when Democrats and Republicans passionately believed and boasted that Americans are governed by LAW, not by MAN, believing that democracy was superior than a dictatorship.   But, those were the good old days before Barack Hussein Obama.

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Is The Washington Post Becoming More Honest About ObamaCare?

The following article, “WaPo Suddenly Discovers ObamaCare Costs More, Helps Fewer,  is by Ed Morrissey at HotAir:

“The failure of ObamaCare’s Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan has been known for weeks, at least to readers of the Wall Street Journal and Hot Air.   The Washington Post catches up to the WSJ a mere 45 days later with this report from Amy Goldstein on the failure of PECIP to attract the 375,000 people the White House and Congress claimed needed the help of subsidies to get health-care coverage.  Even with the program falling 97% short of its stated goal, it’s still going to cost more than Congress allocated anyway:

An early feature of the new health-care law that allows people who are already sick to get insurance to cover their medical costs isn’t attracting as many customers as expected.

Er, that’s a rather strange understatement.  The announced expectations was that it would attract 375,000 people by the end of the year.  It has only 8,000 enrollees, which means it missed its mark by 97.9%.  If any other major and controversial government program missed its delivery goals by 97.9%, would the Post report it in such anodyne terms?  For instance, if 97.9% of a military-weapons system failed to get delivered on time, how would the Post report that?  I doubt that the opening paragraph would be that “the Pentagon didn’t get as many artillery weapons as expected.”

In the meantime, in at least a few states, claims for medical care covered by the “high-risk pools” are proving very costly, and it is an open question whether the $5 billion allotted by Congress to start up the plans will be sufficient. …

In the spring, the Medicare program’s chief actuary predicted that 375,000 people would sign up for the pool plans by the end of the year. Early last month, the Health and Human Services Department reported that just 8,000 people had enrolled. HHS officials declined to provide an update, although they collect such figures monthly, because they have decided to report them on a quarterly basis.

“Like the rest of the country, we thought we’d have pretty much a stampede. That obviously hasn’t materialized,” said Michael Keough, executive director of North Carolina’s plan. With nearly 700 participants, it is among the nation’s largest so far, but it has one-third of the people expected by now.

It’s important to remember that the $5 billion allocated to PECIP was based on … nothing at all.  Congress had no real evaluation of cost; they picked a number to get the bill passed while pretending that it wouldn’t increase deficits.  The Medicare actuaries predicted that the $5 billion, which was supposed to float PECIP for five years, would run out at the end of one.  HHS admitted that they had no idea how much PECIP would cost.  And instead of acting as a buffer for those turned down by insurance companies for their pre-existing conditions, the government might have to act just like an insurer by keeping sick people out of the pool.

So, as I wrote earlier, we have

revamped one-sixth of the American economy, created new federal mandates, and created chaos in system that worked for the vast majority of Americans, just to deal with eight thousand people?  Perhaps they should have tested the issue by creating the program separately first and determining whether the demand required a complete overhaul of a health-care system that mainly worked for the rest of us, instead of arrogating to themselves the task of dictating the shape of a market they clearly don’t understand.

Nice to see that the Post has caught up to the news more than six weeks later, and brought its wiffle bat to underscore its seriousness.”

Comment:   Perhaps there were no mathematicians  at the Washington Post or any other sample of the American mass media  at that time.  They perhaps forgot their arithmatic.  How else could they have missed president Barack Hussein Obama’s claim that 40,000,000 uninsured  Americans would be added to  coverage guaranteed by Obamacare with better service for all and AT  LOWER COST PER PERSON.  Add it all up, folks.   How is this possible except in Leftwing lalaland of Obamanomics?

Why Is There No Dennis Prager on the Democrat-Marxist Left?

I advertise the Dennis Prager Show  on Salem Radio whenever I can.  Well,  this  isn’t quite true.   Let me ‘clarify’.

I advertise Dennis Prager whenever I can.   It happens that about the only way one can get to know Dennis  here in the Twin Cities  is via the Dennis Prager Show at 1280 AM radio from 11AM to 2PM Monday through Friday. 

I ‘met’ Dennis sometime in October, 2004 when America was facing the prospect of electing one of the most devious, traitorous, selfish, hateful, self-interest, lying, calculating Caligula snake-in-the-grass to the presidency, plastic man JFK…..John F. Kerry, the paper doll Senator the people in Massachusetts love so deeply.

I met this Kerry sleaze some time late 1968 on television.  He was filming himself for future use while allegedly on the battlefront in Viet Nam.   He concocted winning  a couple “Purple” hearts or something like that for “bravery” and allegedly being ‘shot at’ or ‘shot up’ depending upon the tales he told.   His so-called wounds were never discovered.  His “medals” for outstanding service were thrown over the fence before a nationally  televised audience those 40 plus years ago…….until this JFK decided to deny himself  and  what he had said he said when he finally had the money and gall to run for national office in 2004.  He had a compliant mass media to help him win his crown.

Back in his hey day of  film making of his phony heroics on the front, he was carried coast to coast in various chariots by the anti-war lefty television establishments.   He was claiming  to be an eye-witness to American rape and slaughter every where  in Viet Nam.  Precisely what the New York Times and CBS were looking for.    He often brought his gang, ‘Veterans Against the War’ parading on television  with him.   That many of his buddy “Vets” dragged along with him were never in the service, much less being in Viet Nam,  seemed to be of on concern to anyone.  The American Left was on the move.   It was the noise that counted.

May I remind you I have these memories of this disgusting person as a believing and voting Democrat…….a person who had never voted for a Republican for president….even pulling the lever for George McGovern over Richard Nixon in 1972……and at the nadir of my political persuasion, Jimmy Carter in 1976.

Good soul, good friend and successful Classical Realist artist, Steve Levin was aware of my aversion to this JFK in 2004.  He shared my assessments of  Senator Kerry,  but without the personal experience of the television visits with this deviant which  I had to endure during those dark, very dark days of the Kerry-type  saboteurs  blabbing  lies on the home front.  

He had discovered this guy, Dennis Prager on radio  and was certain Dennis  would light up my intellectual candle.   Steve, clever and bright, and probably as concerned and worried as I was about this Imposter becoming president,  he persisted in nagging me to give Dennis a try.

So, at last one day in mid to late October, 2004 I did.    I turned him on to see if he’d turn me on.  I desperately needed political companionship beyond my good times commiserating  about my country with Steve.  

I gave Dennis a try.  I can’t remember precisely what he talked about nor what I was doing the first time I game him ‘my cherished listen’…….for about twenty minutes.    Steve called  to check on my promise that I would give Dennis a try.   I remember very clearly saying that I thought  he was “interesting”……..the Minnesota in me which tells everyone I would rather be  polite than  give a  negative.   “It seemed to drag a bit”, I do recall reviewing those twenty minutes for Steve when he pleasantly  pursued for more information. 

No friend I have ever had knew my mind  better than Steve.  He played on that a bit till I promised I would return to Dennis for a second listen.

I did…..and for a longer visit.   I liked his style….Dennis was winsome, pleasant, and a conservative.  Seemed reserved, quiet….and approached argument quietly with a sharp mind.  He advertised ‘clarity’.  Yeah, I could see how Steve could go for this guy, because the guy was so much like Steve.   “I’ll give Dennis and Steve another chance when I can…..” I thought.

 A day or two later, or perhaps even the next week, I was working and in my truck delivering some plants to one of our landscape projects.   I turned on Dennis.   He had begun his biography of my favorite “disgusting” in life, John F. Kerry.

“Vacuous, empty suit,……a NOTHING”,  I remember.   Emotionally, Dennis voice rose in volume and  dipped, no slid, in self control of words…….in other words, Dennis Prager knew John F. Kerry well.   “A dark cloud”  on the American horizon, I think Dennis described the Senator from the state of Massachusetts.  

“I fear for my country, if this ‘man’ becomes our president,”  I remember clearly from Dennis’ soliloquy about this Macbeth running to run America in AD 2004.

I knew then Dennis and I  had a meld.

I believe Dennis is an American treasure.  If I were dictator, an invisible one, I would maneuver so all Americans would listen to him, before they would vote for a Congress, President, or a Legislature anywhere.   He skillfully, clearly, passionately, honestly and with great integrity presents an American conservative’s approach to solving problems of consequence in our culture.  

No one in America can make Americans so appropriately proud and caring  for America and its people  than this conservative, Dennis Prager.   It is a good time to be a  conservative.   Deep thinkers are on our side.

If I were dictator, that invisible one, I would maneuver to discover and install a Leftwinger, someone from the Liberal-Marxist front  to listen to,  who would offer the American audience, including me,  the same respect, the same honesty with the same clarity, skill  and deep thinking as Dennis.  But, alas, there is no one there.  Nowhere!

If there were a Dennis Prager among the Left, I would gladly listen to him as well as to Dennis……But there is no one there …….only Progressives  mouthing, with varying  degrees of the charlaton.  They hide and distort their sell or they remain silent except, if in government, when they vote.     It is difficult to sell Marxism to a population born into liberties.

Like Barack Hussein  Obama, ’Progressives’  preach a  language in public for television viewing and work  their Marxist mischief in the dark away from public view.   This pattern of government by duplicity and deceit works wherever the public celebrates pleasure over knowledge, ignorance over understanding…….the America I believe we have been living in for more than a generation.  

What is in you wallet of understanding of our American collapse?

Krauthammer Questions Defunding of Obamacare

Krauthammer:  “We Shouldn’t Defund Obamacare”.

Allahpundit at HotAir writes    “………… he’s making a shrewd point about retail politics, especially given the left’s desperate obsession with “branding” as the source of all of its problems. No matter how expensive ObamaCare gets, no matter how many unintended consequences there are, they’ll never admit that their signature domestic achievement is bad policy. There’ll always be an excuse, be it not enough Obama speeches on the subject or an insufficiently catchy name for the legislation (really!) or, inevitably, the idea that only by making the system more statist via a public option or single-payer will it truly thrive. Krauthammer’s point is that starving the beast will simply give them another excuse for its failure, so why not prop it up initially in the expectation that it’ll fail? My addendum, which I’ve suggested before: Since liberals were such fans of benchmarks for war funding, why not apply them to O-Care funding too? Make them prove after the first few years that they really have bent the cost curve, that there’s been no decline in quality of care, etc. If they can’t, the program is automatically defunded. Remember their early predictions about how the stimulus would affect the unemployment rate? This time, missing the target would mean something. As a sneak preview, here’s something brand new today from WaPo. I blame poor “messaging”:

One of the first parts of the new health care law ready for consumers – special health plans devoted to the insurance industry’s rejects – is attracting only a fraction of the predicted customers, prompting the Obama administration and states to step up their strategies to motivate people to buy them. At the same time, since the plans opened for business in the late summer and early fall, the medical bills so far are, in at least a few states, much higher than anticipated, raising the question of whether $5 billion that Congress has devoted to the program could run out even if relatively few people join.

Federal health officials contend that the plans, known as high-risk pools, are experiencing expected growing pains. It will take time to spread the word that they exist and to adjust prices and benefits so the plans are as attractive as possible, they say.

State-level directors of the plans agree, in part. But in interviews, they also said that the insurance premiums are unaffordable for some who need the coverage – and that some would-be customers are skittish about the plans’ stability as federal lawsuits and congressional Republicans are trying to overturn the entire law. The Pre-Existing Condition Insurance Plan, the program’s official name, is an early test of President Obama’s argument that the public will embrace the politically divisive law once they see its advantages firsthand. According to some health policy researchers, the success or failure of the pools also could foreshadow the complexities of making broader changes in health insurance by 2014, when states are to open new marketplaces – or exchanges – for Americans to buy coverage individually or in small groups.

Two obvious problems with Krauthammer’s scheme, though. One, as Steve Hayes suggests in the clip, you’re taking a major risk by funding the program even for a few years, even with the expectation built in that it’ll be defunded if it misses its targets. Dependencies develop quickly; if you want to kill a bad entitlement, kill it quickly before expectations calcify. Two: As a purely political matter, there’s no way the GOP could refuse to defund it. It would be taken as proof that Republicans have already lost their nerve; the base would be equal parts crushed and enraged, to the point where you probably would start hearing chatter about a third party in earnest. Like it or not, Republicans went all in on killing ObamaCare and now they’re forced to take every opportunity to undermine it, even if letting it get up and running for the purpose of showing the public how it doesn’t work might (but probably wouldn’t) make repeal easier. Oh well. Click the image to watch.”

Click below for the video:

http://hotair.com/archives/2010/12/27/krauthammer-we-shouldnt-defund-obamacare/