(SCENE: Mitch BERG climbs out of his car and fishes a big gym bag full of firearms and ammo out of the back seat. He walks toward the front door of the firing range – and notices Avery LIBRELLE, walking, alone, with a picket sign. The sign says “A Millian Americans Are Picketting This Gun Rang”. BERG hides his face, and tries to time his approach while LIBRELLE is walking the other way – but a piece of shiny tinfoil attracts LIBRELLE’s attention back toward BERG).
LIBRELLE: Hey, Merg!
BERG: Oh…uh, hi, Avery. What’s new?
LIBRELLE: I think MoveOn.Org has the right idea! It’s time to start arresting teabaggers for sedition!
BERG: Sedition?
LIBRELLE: Speaking out against the government!
BERG: I know what sedition is. That’s not what the House Republicans or Cruz or Paul did.
LIBRELLE: The “Affordable Care Act” is the law! And the law is the manifestation of government! And if you oppose The Law, you oppose Government, meaning you oppose the will of The People!
BERG: Well, no. The GOP majority in the House carried out the House’s Constitutional duty to take care of the nation’s purse-strings – a job for which the voters of this country gave them the majority at the polls in 2010 and 2012.
LIBRELLE: Yeah, but the people also elected President Obama twice. He is the government, and his laws are the laws of the land, the revealed word of the people!
BERG: The President is not “the government”. The government is the executive branch – the President and his staff and the rest of the bureaucracy – the Legislative branch, and the judicial branch, and – don’t forget this – all of the checks and balances in between all of them.
LIBRELLE: Well, the “Affordable Care Act” is now the law.
BERG: So? The First Amendment says we have the right to free speech, to assemble, and to petition to seek redress of grievances. Which is, in every particular, what the Tea Party is and always has been.
LIBRELLE: What are you, a constitutional scholar? I’m pretty sure those are all collective rights, just like the Second Amendment.
BERG: What now?
LIBRELLE: Anyway – Obamacare is the law, which means it’s the will of the people, and the government IS the people, so fighting the law is fighting the people. “Sedition” is probably the nicest word for it.
BERG: Again – what now?
LIBRELLE: I’d call it “Treason”.
BERG: “Treason?” Actively betraying your country to an enemy in wartime?
LIBRELLE: Yep. This country’s been at war against poverty since the sixties. Obamacare fights poverty. Undercutting the people in the War on Poverty IS betraying your country in wartime. That’s the very definition of treason! We should sic the military on all of you!
BERG: Huh. The military. (Takes stick of gum from pocket, unwraps it, pops gum in mouth).
LIBRELLE: Tanks. Choppers. Whatever it takes.
BERG: To preserve democracy.
LIBRELLE: Yep.
BERG: Huh.
(BERG drops shiny tinfoil wrapper onto the ground. LIBRELLE chases it, allowing BERG to make his escape).
(And SCENE).
Again, Berg, you have been into my Facebook TL.
Over the weekend, a lefty friend shared a HuffPost article (with ‘Right Wing Watch’ and ‘Raw Story’ as the only sources) about some “Senior Leader” of the TEA Party that once proposed suing the gays for killing people with AIDs the same way the cigarette companies were sued for killing people with cancer sticks who recently came out in favor of the government shut down over the raising of the debt ceiling. My friend went on to note how terrifying it is that ‘all these nutjobs’ could shut down our government while one of her other friends noted that these ‘TEA Party people’ are the kind of people that need to be ‘watched’ as this is how Hitler got his start.
A quick googling of this TEA Party “Senior Leader’ noted that he led a TEA Party group that could hold its meetings in the average public rest room with enough room left over that other patrons could continue to use the facilities. He had never been elected to anything, had never advised any campaign and held no role in any larger TEA Party organization. When I noted that this guy had a following of maybe thirty people and that he might not be worth the expense sending to re-education camp – well the vitriol really got cranked up.
Apparently those on the Left don’t really know too many TEA Party types. I came in for all kinds of ‘abuse’ from being told I’m an ‘extremist’ and a ‘right wing crazy’ to I must ‘live in a parallel universe’. When I noted that while a Senator, Mr Obama also opposed raising the debt ceiling a commenter went on for 500 words about how sick and tired he was of right wingers insulting this President by demoting him. When I noted that he needed to re-read what was written, he responded that I needed to get my news from somewhere other than “Faux News”. When I pointed out that my primary source of news was NPR, the one who had earlier claimed the the TEA Party is the 2nd coming of the 3rd Reich, told me I shouldn’t be allowed to listen as NPR is government funded and Rethuglicans hate government.
Like the professor who last week learned that TEA Party people are as scientifically sophisticated as any other group of people but still went on to note that he wouldn’t be aquainted with any regardless – this group is the Pauline Kael of this generation. In their minds there can’t be any way for Republicans to win elections because they don’t know anyone who disagrees with the Leftist point of view.
SE,
Back in 2010, this blog did a brisk trade in scouting out stories by the Twin Cities regional media and leftymedia about “Major Tea Party Leaders” who’d done one naughty or another, and showing that nobody who’d been organizing the regional Tea Party movement had ever heard of them.
Ever.
If they can’t dazzle them with brilliance…well, you get the idea.
The Founding Fathers explained the reasons for the proposed Constitution in pamphlets called The Federalist Papers 28, 29 and 46 tell us that the Second Amendment was intended to ensure that ordinary citizens could take up their guns to overthrow their own government, should it become necessary again.
But lefties are worried about vocal opposition to Obama-care?
Paul Ryan wanted to hand Americans a subsidy check and let Americans go discover the hard truths about healthcare for themselves. That may be cruel and economically inefficient, but it deals with the difficult political reality that the public is unwilling to let the government dictate their health care. I think that plan would be disastrous, but I concede his political point. I hear no voice from single payer advocates with an answer to the political questions above. Single payer care may be better than what we have, but how do we get there from here? Those are the questions that Pelosi and Obama faced, and they had no answers, which left us with Obamacare. What are your answers?
Maybe you could have these things called “health savings accounts”?
There are two major problems: The uninsured, and spiraling healthcare costs.
The second problem is more serious. The uninsured make for great news stories and they are largely a democrat constituency. Most people, something like 80%, were happy with their health insurance before Obamacare. Another classic poli-sci screwup by Obama, don’t fix what ain’t broken. Obamacare may end up with way less than an 80% approval rate.
Spiraling costs can be addressed several ways. The cheapest is marketplace competition. The most expensive is government rationing. The problem with market place competition is that it guarantees unequal outcomes, vain 50 year olds will get face lifts while poor kids don’t get the operation that will fix their crooked leg . . .
No such thing as a free lunch.
The problem with government rationing is the classic fault of command economies. You know what a year of your life is worth to you. A government bureaucrat knows how much a year of your life is worth to him.
BTW, did you know Chelsea Clinton’s Columbia degree is in Public Health? She’s not qualified to put a band-aid on a finger, but she’s qualified to run a government health care bureaucracy. Gotta love our elites!
“BTW, did you know Chelsea Clinton’s Columbia degree is in Public Health?”
– We are so f*cked that there are not words to describe how f*cked we are.
Clearly, the people who oppose the will of the people’s House — the most democratic half of the most democratic branch of our Federal Government — are seditious and should be tried for treason.
My logic is unassailable!
Governing is about making choices. For the most part those choices are about where to spend a limited amount of money. How do you choose between housing for the homeless, resources for schooling youngsters, and healthcare for the elderly? If you decide that denying any form of healthcare for the elderly is beyond the pale because healthcare is about human dignity, then you’ve made your decision already, and those kids and homeless people aren’t going to get the services that they might. If, on the other hand, you want to actually govern, and make rational choices about limited resources, you have to make some judgments about where the money is best spent. That is the quest for efficiency and good government.