Thursday, December 19, 2013

Truisms: The Case against Liberalism

I hesitate to write this post because it’s going to require that for the sake of argument I accept the premise that liberalism is a well-intentioned, idealistic ideology intent on “making the world a better place.”  Really I would just as soon slam my hand in the car door than accept such a falsehood, but for the future of the nation I will make the sacrifice. 

Now to further set the stage, let’s have a word about truisms.  I’m a big fan of true crime shows.  I’m fascinated by the ways crimes are solved and how our justice system works (or doesn’t!).  Sometimes I will imagine that I am on the jury, and I’ll weigh the evidence to decide whether or not I would convict the accused.  During this process I will look for evidence that definitively points to guilt.  These are the truisms of the criminal justice world.  If the victim’s head is found in the defendant’s refrigerator, that’s a truism that pretty much seals the deal for me. 

Certain truisms in life are like the irrefutable pieces of evidence in a trial.  No reasonable analysis can be made while ignoring them, and yet that’s precisely what liberals do every day.  They ignore basic truisms that we know to exist; truisms that, if heeded, would make liberal policies impossible to sell (hence the reason they always lie).  Here is a sample of the truisms that come to mind:

Truism #1 – The more you reward certain behaviors, the more of them you’ll get.

I’d like to see someone dispute this perfectly simple fact.  Every parent and pet owner understands it.  And yet our federal, state and local governments, guided by the hand of liberalism, can’t spend money fast enough to reward people for not working, for making bad decisions and for sneaking into this country illegally; hence the number of people doing all of those things has EXPLODED.  Creating a nation of thieves and freeloaders does not fall under the heading of “making the world a better place,” particularly when it’s hardened the hearts of normally generous Americans who usually don’t mind helping people down on their luck but who’ve grown cynical and weary from decades of seeing their tax money squandered on people gaming the system.  The truly needy are the ones who will suffer in the end, so that’s a FAIL for liberalism.

Truism #2 – There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Too bad whoever coined this phrase doesn’t get royalties on it, as it is said over and over to confront the liberal lie that stuff which comes from the government is “free.”  Liberal goodies are all paid for by somebody, of course, but apparently saying, “You’ll now get free birth control forcibly paid for by your neighbors” just doesn’t have the same cheery ring to it.  As long as the freebies have to be paid for by somebody, the bill is going to eventually come due, so promises of free lunches are harbingers of liberal FAILURE.

Truism #3 –People are not careful consumers when they’re spending other people’s money.

Anyone want to dispute this?  Would government bureaucrats be spending billions of dollars on lavish conferences, robotic squirrels, bridges to nowhere, useless studies, benefits for dead people, and of course the infamous and overpriced Obamacare website if all of it were coming out of their own pockets?  The increasingly suppressed role of the consumer in healthcare is one of the top reasons that healthcare has become so expensive in recent decades.   We don’t know or care what it costs because the insurance company is paying the bill.  So what is the liberal response to this truism?  Answer:  take more power from the consumer and give it to the government.  FAIL.

Truism #4 – The correlational relationship between supply, demand and price is a well-known fact.

If you understand why dog poop is cheaper than diamonds then you understand Economics 101, which means you have no excuse for believing the ludicrous lie that Obamacare would somehow magically reduce the cost of healthcare, given that demand would be greatly increased while supply would be stagnant at best (I’ll give the libs that generous assumption so they can stay focused on the main point here).  We’ve already begun to see the effect of liberal meddling with the insurance and healthcare industries while pretending that the truism of supply and demand does not exist, and it is an EPIC FAIL.

Truism #5 – The pursuit of self-interest is the nature of human beings.

Businesses, like any other rational consumer, strive to pay the lowest possible amount for labor and other goods needed for their operations.  They profit whenever there’s a large pool of unskilled workers competing for jobs.  This competition for low-skilled jobs and the pressure it puts on wages is the worker’s incentive to seek the education, skills or experience they need to increase the value of their labor and better satisfy their own self-interest.  As they do so, the pool of unskilled labor shrinks and businesses have to offer more to attract good people.  This natural system works well until the liberals start messing with it.  By waiving their pens and insisting that the unskilled should be paid an artificially high wage because liberals deem that they deserve it, they rob businesses of the right to pursue self-interest and they upset the natural consequence of that - a better skilled and more productive work force.  It’s a lose-lose for everyone, and a major FAIL.

Truism #6 –The law of natural consequences is necessary to a functional society.

Liberals took away the natural consequences of having children out of wedlock (i.e. stigma and poverty), and now we have an epidemic of single mothers unable to adequately support their families.  The welfare rolls and Medicaid, in particular, have skyrocketed and are part of the growing debt that threatens to destroy this country.  By legislating and continually raising the minimum wage they took away the natural consequences of failing to become a skilled worker.  Now we have people who march and scream for better wages instead of aspiring for better jobs.  By removing or softening the consequence of walking away from mortgages and credit card debt, liberals have made it harder for everyone to get a loan.  Now they want to let people pass the buck for student loans they amassed at liberal-run universities.  Without natural consequences we are a nation of irresponsible freeloaders with little consideration for anyone but ourselves.  FAIL, FAIL, FAIL and FAIL.

The thing about truisms is that you can’t escape them, even if you’re a liberal.  There is no justice, social or otherwise, when we reward people for bad behavior.  Ignoring the basic laws of economics and suppressing the natural human drive for self-interest does not result in “economic equality.”  The “liberty” and “freedom” that liberals unbelievably profess to stand for cannot exist when we amass power in the government where some take it upon themselves to “spread the wealth” earned by others. 

Based on a preponderance of the evidence presented, there is no way that liberalism, as defined by liberals, can ever do what it purports to do.  It can never be anything but doomed.


˜CW

Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Here We Go Again

With Hillary Clinton being the presumptive nominee for the democrats in 2016 the anti-Hillary campaign from the Right has already begun and we can expect that it will increasingly inundate the blogosphere and the world of campaign commercials over the next two years.  Hundreds of millions of dollars will be spent to remind voters about Travelgate, Whitewater, Hillarycare, Vince Foster, disappearing and reappearing documents, Benghazi and the political partnership masquerading as a marriage with Bill Clinton.  All of this matters, or at least it should, yet it’s also a distraction from the more fundamental argument for why people like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton should not be elected, which is this:  They’re liberals, they’re leftists, and they’re wrong for this country.  In fact they’re wrong for ANY country, so perhaps conservatives should agree to align themselves behind one bumper sticker for this campaign:  “It’s Liberalism, Stupid!”

Liberalism has given us the welfare nation, the entitlement society, a nation of illegal immigrants and illegitimate children, a declining dollar, a shrinking workforce, Obamacare, and a debt crisis that’s about to explode in our faces and alter life as we know it.  It’s cost the U.S. its world ranking in education, its AAA credit rating, its credibility and its common sense, not to mention its soul.  It’s destroyed nations before and it’s destroying us.  If we can make that case, if we can get that message across, then the campaign against Hillary becomes quite simple and it goes like this:  “She’s a leftist.  Any Questions?”  More importantly, the argument is timeless and non-discriminatory.  It applies to every leftist that comes along, saving conservatives the time, energy and resources of reinventing the wheel and building a different case against each and every opponent, as we now do. 

Let us remember that the strategy we have now isn’t working.  We throw everything and the kitchen sink at them and they throw the same back at us and in the end we lose.   We make it about the candidate, not about ideas, and when their ideas fail they simply produce another candidate.   It’s time to use our elections – both our primaries and general elections - to remind and/or educate voters about the effects of progressivism and what they can expect in the future if it continues. 


˜CW


Monday, November 11, 2013

Ronald Reagan, EMTALA & the Roots of Obamacare


I was visiting at a friend’s house one day when her three-year old son asked to look at photos.  My friend told him, “We’ll look at the pictures after [CW] leaves.”   He looked at me and I immediately knew what was going through his young mind.  The solution to his problem was plainly obvious and simple, and without another second’s hesitation here’s what he said to me: “Leave.” 

I can definitely relate to that little boy, because ever since Obama began lobbying to create the massive entitlement program known as Obamacare on the basis that hospitals are overwhelmed treating the uninsured for free the solution was obvious to me:  stop doing that.  Problem solved.  But like my friend’s child who had to learn a lesson about the delicacies of polite behavior with company, I’ve had to learn the hard lesson that mistakes made by those in government can virtually never be undone (which is the reason, of course, that Obama is so desperate to march forward with Obamacare in spite of its infamous problems).  When I suggest that instead of ruining the country with Obamacare we simply put an end to the mandate for free-loading it usually earns me a blank stare, as if I’d suggested doing the impossible.

Let me just say that most people pay their federal income taxes because the potential consequences for not paying can be pretty dire.  I’m no fan of our federal tax system but there’s a lesson to be learned here, to wit:  the possibility of bad consequences is usually sufficient to make most people want to avoid them.  Thus if the consequence of being uninsured means that you could potentially get hit with a huge medical bill or else face penalties akin to those of not paying your taxes, trust me when I say that a lot more people would get insurance voluntarily and much of the purported impetus for Obamacare would go away.  But since common sense seems to be off the table, let’s at least look at who we have to thank for helping to sow the seeds of our destruction.

When I brought this subject up in my last post, a commenter (hat tip to Drpete) pointed me to The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA), described this way in a 2012 article in Forbes:

“EMTALA, one of the great unfunded mandates in American history, required any hospital participating in Medicare—that is to say, nearly all of them—to provide emergency care to anyone who needs it, including illegal immigrants, regardless of ability to pay. Indeed, EMTALA can be accurately said to have established universal health care in America—with nary a whimper from conservative activists.  In response, many health policy types worried about a “free rider” problem, in which people would intentionally go without health insurance, knowing that federal law required hospitals to care for them anyway.”1

EMTALA inexplicably included no requirement for free-loaders to reimburse hospitals at a later time.  It was passed in 1986 by a republican Senate and a democrat House and signed by… Ronald Reagan.

According to an article from the website for The National Center for Biotechnology2:

“Although only 4 pages in length and barely noticed at the time, EMTALA has created a storm of controversy over the ensuing 15 years, and it is now considered one of the most comprehensive laws guaranteeing nondiscriminatory access to emergency medical care and thus to the health care system. Even though its initial language covered the care of emergency medical conditions, through interpretations by the Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) (now known as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services), the body that oversees EMTALA enforcement, as well as various court decisions, the statute now potentially applies to virtually all aspects of patient care in the hospital setting.”

And…

“Although the initial intent of EMTALA was to ensure nondiscriminatory access to emergency medical care, its practical ramifications have broadened significantly over the years and arise from 3 sources: the statute's original language (5); the interpretive guidelines that have been issued by HCFA, which are not merely suggestions but have the force of law; and the various federal court decisions that have resulted from alleged EMTALA violations.”

Ezra Klein, liberal columnist with the Washington Post, summed up why EMTALA is a Progressive’s dream:  A universal health-care insurance program is the logical endpoint of the bill Ronald Reagan signed into law mandating (pretty much) universal emergency hospital care.3

That’s government racketeering explained in a nutshell:  create the problem (strain on hospitals due to mandated free care) and use it as an excuse for wealth transfer, which is what universal healthcare amounts to in the end.  And look how perfectly it works.  The requirements under EMTALA are ostensibly what led to “Romneycare” and inspired the Heritage Foundation and Newt Gingrich to propose government- mandated health insurance coverage, giving liberals and libertarians a fair basis for pointing to “conservatives” as the ones who first proposed health insurance mandates. 

I suppose it’s fair to say that the federal government’s involvement in decreeing that hospitals provide free care didn’t exactly begin with Reagan.  My brief research on it traced the start back to 1946 with passage of The Hospital Survey and Construction Act (or the Hill–Burton Act), a bi-partisan sponsored law passed at the behest of Harry Truman in 1946 with a democrat senate and house.  It was amended and extended over the years by various administrations and congresses before culminating in the disaster that is EMTALA, which vastly expanded the free care decree.

I don’t know what Reagan and other republicans were thinking when they passed this law.  I think it’s fair to say…they weren’t.  Now we’re all paying the consequences.

~CW

1http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2012/02/07the-tortuous-conservative-history-of-the-individual-mandate/

2http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1305897/

3http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2011/01/repeal_emtala.html




Thursday, October 31, 2013

Marco Rubio: Thinking Inside the Box

I’m going to have to put a shield of Plexiglas around my TV to protect it from the onslaught of household objects that I routinely hurl at it these days, so maddening is it to watch the nonstop parade of politicians who are either lying or putting up a hopelessly inept fight against the lies.  In an interview with Marco Rubio last night Greta Van Susteren talked about the latest demon slithering out from the Pandora’s Box known as Obamacare:   people being dropped from health insurance plans deemed “substandard” by the elitists running our government.  Gee, what a surprise.  Playing devil’s advocate, Greta asked Rubio what should be done about people who have plans that don’t cover basic insurance needs like hospitalization:  “…if someone gets hit be a car,” she asked, “and then ends up in the emergency room, it somehow becomes an expense for the rest of us, no?” 

The correct answer is “No,” followed by something like this:

"The false premise that the rest of MUST pay for those who fail to plan for their own medical needs is the foundation that the entire Obamacare scheme is built upon.   Who says the rest of us have to pay their bills?  WHO wrote that law? 

"What’s happened here is a classic example of liberals insulating people from the laws of natural consequences and subjecting the rest of us to the laws of unintended consequences.   We see this over and over again, whether it’s the rest of us paying for welfare babies, someone else’s college expenses or a mortgage that someone walked out on.  If you’re an adult who fails to plan for yourself or your child and you wind up in the emergency room, you should be prepared to face the consequences and pay that bill even if you have to do it on a long-term payment plan.  Ironically, simply letting things work the way they should have would have been the best way to naturally entice people to buy insurance on their own.  So why did we stop doing it that way?  My guess is that if you follow the liberal policy trail you’ll find the real problems started with the increases in out-of-wedlock births and illegal immigration, two groups that have pushed the limits of the system and made collection particularly difficult.  So if you really want to solve this problem, the first order of business is to get liberals or progressives or whatever the heck you want to call them out of the business of running our government." 

Here’s Rubio’s response:

 “…that needs to be up to the individual to choose what kind of insurance plan they have.”

Huh?   As you can see, he not only missed a prime opportunity to explain how liberal policy led us to the debacle of Obamacare (assuming he’s ever bothered to think about it), he didn’t even answer the question that was asked, exposing him and all republicans to the charge that we have no answer to Greta’s question.  

We are doomed.

˜CW


Monday, August 26, 2013

Sometimes, Senator Lee, Motive Does Matter

Recently I saw the old Hitchcock movie, Lifeboat.  The story centers around a group of Americans whose ship is sunk by a German U-boat, leaving them stranded on a lifeboat.  Soon the U-boat is also sunk, and an evacuated German sailor seeks refuge with the Americans in the lifeboat.  The Americans disagree about whether or not to let him on the boat but ultimately they do.  The plan is to try and guide the lifeboat to Bermuda, but they have no compass and are unsure about the accuracy of their course.  Eventually the German sailor takes charge of the boat and the mission, including pretty much all of the rowing, as the others aren’t experienced sailors and they’re growing weak from hunger and thirst.  Unbeknownst to them the German was actually the captain of the U-boat and has a secret stash of water and sugar pills, as well as a compass.  Eventually they realize that instead of aiming for Bermuda he’s been rowing them to a rendezvous with a German supply ship. 

Hitchcock probably wanted viewers to contemplate themes about human nature, desperation and survival; but the main lesson I took away had to do with the importance of understanding what people’s real motives are.  That is to say you shouldn’t entrust someone with your boat or your life unless you’re certain that he wants to go in the same direction as you do.  Metaphorically speaking it’s a good lesson for a lot of areas in life, not the least of which is the election of our leaders.  That’s why I was greatly disappointed by an interview I saw a while back with Senator Mike Lee of Utah by Greta Van Susteren.  Senator Lee, a man whom I respect and admire, complained about Obama disparaging the motives of the GOP on their approach to Medicaid, and he went on to say that the two sides should not be questioning each other’s motives.  This “play nice” policy and misguided reverence for gentlemanly manners when we’re in a war for the soul of this nation dumbfounds me.  It’s yet another chapter out of the republican manual for How to Lose Elections (and the Country) in Ten Easy Steps.    Does Senator Lee really believe we can win a war with the devil by politely pretending that he isn’t the devil?  When would be a good time to start questioning Obama’s motives?  After the “transformation” is completed?

Motives matter.  They are critical to understanding why people behave the way they do and how they will behave in the future.   The destructive policies that republicans refer to as “failures,” the puzzling “incompetency” by what is supposed to be an intelligent man are really nothing of the kind.   They are a misdiagnosis of the problem, and the problem is that we pretend, or perhaps even believe, that Obama is motivated by the same things that we are.  People who are sailing on the great ship USA, who believe they’re sailing towards the American dream, to freedom and prosperity, need to understand that Captain Obama isn’t going there, and that’s by design.  His goals are to weaken this nation to make it ripe for the “transformation.”  The plan is to transfer wealth according to the leftist definition of who’s worthy and whose not; normalize and expand government dependency; take power from the individual and centralize it within the government for control by the Left; and gratify Obama’s ego by amassing personal glory for himself.  Everything he does, from vastly expanding our debt and our welfare systems to taking over our healthcare to making unconstitutional power grabs to arrogantly claiming credit for that which has been paid for not by him but by the American taxpayer, all of it can be traced to the motivates of this very dangerous and foolish man.

Yes I know, Senator Lee, that to delve into an examination of motives exposes republicans to the usual misrepresentations about their own motives.  But can we really not defend ourselves against charges that we want seniors to die, children to starve and poor people to go without healthcare?  Ironically, all of that is what will eventually happen when the nation collapses under the weight of socialist programs being imposed on us by the Left. 

Another reason we need to expose the Left’s motives is to make people understand the futility of logical debates about things like the debt ceiling.  We are never going to successfully appeal to the Left’s sense of reason about our looming debt crisis or about anything else because they don’t care unless it interferes with the larger plan.


So let’s have the debate.  Let’s pull no punches.  To whatever extent we can let’s force Obama and Hillary and all the leftists that presume to control this country to explain why their actions and their outcomes never align with the saintly, altruistic motives they pretend to be pursuing.  Could be that much of this country really doesn’t care where we end up as long as they’re comfortable along the way; but we’ll never know unless we finally have the debate.


~CW



Sunday, July 21, 2013

In Defense of Profiling



“The thought police would get him just the same.  He had committed – would have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper – the essential crime that contained all others in itself.  Thoughtcrime, they called it.  Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever.  You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.”
-          George Orwell, 1984, Book 1, Chapter 1


TheFreeDictionary.com defines profiling as “the use of specific characteristics, as race or age, to make generalizations about a person, as whether he or she may be engaged in illegal activity.”  In other words, to profile is to form an opinion.  This means that if profiling is akin to a crime, as it’s being parlayed by the media and the Left, then it is a ‘thoughtcrime’ a la Orwell’s “1984.”  It’s funny that when we read about ‘thoughtcrimes’ in that classic book it sends shivers up our spines; yet when it’s actually happening to us in real life we just go along like sheep.

Everyone on this planet makes generalizations about people based on characteristics like race, age, sex, appearance, etc., which is to say that everyone profiles.  I profile people.  As a woman, I am cautious about putting myself in vulnerable situations with men whom I don’t know, and the same is true for most of the women I know.  That’s because we know from stories in the news and/or from our own experience that when women are the victims of crime, especially violent crimes, it’s almost always at the hands of men.  So it’s just common sense and natural instinct that we would focus our self-protective energies on the people who statistically present the greatest danger to us.  And although they don’t call it profiling, profiling is precisely what parents train their children to do when they teach them about who they should trust and who they shouldn’t.  The following advice on profiling is from a blog on parenting:”

“… I was in the car listening to NPR and I heard a child safety educator say, ‘Stop telling your kids not to talk to strangers. They might need to talk to a stranger one day. Instead, teach them which sorts of strangers are safe. You know who’s safe? A mom with kids. Period. Your kid gets separated from you at the mall? Tell her to flag down the first mom with kids she sees.’” - http://www.checklistmommy.com/2012/02/09/tricky-people-are-the-new-strangers/#sthash.JjdqOkPO.dpuf

“…teach them which sorts of strangers are safe.”  That’s great advice, absolutely.  It’s also profiling, which we are being told by the Left is a bad thing to do.  I can’t help but smile at the irony of this coming from NPR.

Teaching kids to profile is something parents instinctively do in order to protect their young and help ensure that they make it to adulthood.   The only difference between Left and Right when it comes to profiling is that those on the Right are truthful about it while those on the Left pretend they don’t profile so that they can adopt a false air of superiority over the Right and attempt to control us

So in light of all that let’s look at the case of George Zimmerman.  Was he profiling Trayvon Martin?  The answer is yes.  He may not have been racially profiling, but does anyone believe he would have called the police if he’d seen an elderly man or a middle-aged woman walking on the grounds that dark, rainy night?  The reason he had concerns about Trayvon is that it was apparent from his size and clothing that he was a young adult or nearly adult male.  And the reason that raised alarm was because young adult or nearly adult males commit the vast majority of violent crimes and property crimes in just about any area.  Mr. Zimmerman was doing the very same thing that women do when they profile and that children do when they profile as taught by their parents.  He was using the limited amount of information available to him to guide his actions, i.e. calling police and keeping an eye on Martin.  Those who defend Zimmerman by arguing that he wasn’t profiling unwittingly give credence to the false argument that profiling is bad and unnatural and that people should be answerable to others for their thoughts rather than their actions.

As for racial profiling, I wish someone would explain to me why race should be treated differently than gender, age or any other characteristic that’s naturally common to profiling, other than because the Left says so.  If crime stats vary by race, just like they do by gender and age, then it stands to reason that people will make judgments based on race, particularly in situations where they feel vulnerable.   To intentionally harm someone based solely on their race, gender or appearance is a crime – always has been, always will be.  But that’s not what profiling is.  It’s not a physical act.  To profile is to think, and as far as I know that’s still legal.  So far.

˜CW

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Redistributing Consequences



In an ideal world every able adult would assume responsibility for caring for themselves and for their own families.  This would result in a highly productive, well-cared-for society with very little need for welfare.  We should all want that, right?  Well in order to get to such a place, people must be taught to become responsible adults through exposure to the laws of natural consequences.  You touch the fire, you get burned – that’s how it works.  It’s a very simple, powerful dynamic upon which societies are able to function and flourish, therefore this can only mean one thing – liberals have to mess with it.  Here are a few examples.

The Single Mom Phenomenon
Experience over the centuries taught us that bearing children out of wedlock was not good for society for reasons that should be obvious.   People learned to frown upon this behavior, often considering it immoral, and public pressure against it became a very effective tool for societies to protect themselves from the irresponsible actions of others, as did the probability of financial hardship for those who chose that route.  But then along came liberals.  Seeing the opportunity to free themselves from the pesky judgment of society while at the same time holding themselves up as more compassionate and “open-minded” than everyone else, they embarked on a campaign to bully anyone who dared to pass judgment on illegitimacy.  Then, with the “War on Poverty” launched, they were able to eliminate the financial deterrents to out-of-wedlock pregnancy as well.  The result was that illegitimate births in the U.S. soared from 10% in 1960 to 41% in 2010 and, not surprisingly, welfare spending increased from about $20 billion to nearly a trillion dollars during that same time.  What a wonderful blessing for society, eh?

The Union Mentality
Unions, staunchly promoted and protected by the Left, are another prime example of the way liberals encourage people to disassociate themselves from the laws of natural consequences.  Unions are designed to allow people to choose low-skill careers or to be only mediocre at work without experiencing the lower pay and benefits that traditionally result from such choices.  Instead of encouraging people to advance economically through hard work, education, experience and unique skills, they encourage people to use bully techniques for what they want.  The result is a lower-skilled workforce, higher prices and failing businesses.  Yippee.

The Healthcare “Crisis”
This one is a two-fer for liberals, as their meddling has led to the removal of natural consequences for individuals as well as natural market incentives in the healthcare industry.  Through the adoption of Medicare and Medicaid the government has exponentially expanded the customer base for the healthcare industry, absent the essential consumer mentality that usually drives healthy competition and helps to balance supply and demand.  By creating an endless demand for healthcare, liberals have removed many of the natural consequences to providers for not offering affordable rates to those who must self-pay.  And whereas it used to be that the expectation of having to pay for your medical services caused people to do things such as self-ration their visits to the doctor, prioritize their spending, aspire to better-paying jobs and to make arrangements to pay for services over time, the government subsidizing of medical care for the “needy” along with forcing providers to treat people regardless of commitment to pay has made these behaviors a thing of the past.  And their answer to the mess they’ve created?  The multi-trillion dollar wealth-transfer fraud known as “Obamacare, thank you very much. 

Bought a house you couldn’t afford?  That’s okay!  The Left will force the banks to reduce your debt and the rest of us will absorb the cost in higher fees.  Borrowed too much for that expensive liberal college?  That’s okay!  The liberals are busy thinking of ways to help you get out of it and leave the taxpayers stuck with the bill.   Want to be an artist but the consequence of that choice is that you can’t afford healthcare?  That’s okay!  Liberals like Nancy Pelosi don’t think you should be deprived of doing what you love.  Let others be deprived instead.


Liberals are a plague upon society not only for their instinctive quest to insulate people from the consequences of their own behaviors and create a nation of irresponsible deadbeats, but also because they make all the rest of us bear the price that the others are spared from.  Worse still, they cannot be reasoned out of this behavior, because they are not motivated by concern for the nation or even concern for the disadvantaged, but by the need to appease their own egos.  That’s a need that knows no logic.  


~CW



Sunday, June 2, 2013

“No Access” my Ass!

Once upon a time a young boy came home and gave his mother his report card.  The mother opened the card and was disturbed to see that the boy had received bad grades in every subject.  She asked him, “Why did you get such bad grades in everything?” to which he replied, “Because I didn’t have access to the homework assignments.”  The mother told the boy not to worry.  Tomorrow she would call the school principal and demand that the child’s grades be adjusted upward due to his lack of access to the homework assignments.  When the boy’s father came home from work, the boy showed him the report card and once again explained that he didn’t have access to the homework assignments, which explained his poor grades.  The father looked at the boy carefully and asked, “Why didn’t you have access to the homework assignments?  Aren’t they written on the chalkboard?”  The boy replied, “Yes, they are, but I usually skip school.”

The moral to the story is this:  the dad is a conservative, the mom is a liberal.

Since approximately, um, January of 2009 we in the U.S. are increasingly being told that people all over the country are suddenly suffering from a lack of access to things.  People have “no access” to healthcare, “no access” to higher education, “no access” to contraception, “no access” to healthy food, “no access” to upward mobility, etc., etc., etc.  And this strange phenomenon is spreading to other parts of the world, as we learned from a recent post on this site about Muslim rioting in Sweden where the AP said, “’… youths in the southern and western Stockholm suburbs… see little future for themselves or access to Sweden’s prosperity.’”

What’s strange about the growing phenomenon of people having “no access” to things in today’s modern world is the nearly universal lack of curiosity about why people are suddenly so helpless in their lives, or why the pathways that used to lead to “access” are now blocked.  Instead, like the mother in the story above, they simply accept the claims of “no access” at face value and immediately set to work trying to solve a problem they don’t understand with solutions that are predictably wrong.

Just for the record, I understand what this game is all about and I know you do too.  Those who hail from the Left are uninterested in the reasons for people’s sudden lack of “access” to everything because these claims provide the ideal trigger for socialist schemes masquerading as “reforms,” like Obamacare.  Any time we hear the words “lack of access” the implication is that the private sector has erected some impenetrable wall which only the government can transcend by forcibly redistributing wealth.  But also, delving too deeply into the reasons that people now “lack access” to ordinary things is to expose the failures of liberalism, because in each and every case the “lack of access” can be directly traced to liberal government policies and individual behaviors that liberalism encourages.  Let’s look at just one example:  the lie about access to contraception.

In a publication titled “Quick Sheet:  Barriers to Contraceptive Access for Low-Income Women,”1 The National Institute for Reproductive Health tells us, “Unfortunately, many women face substantial barriers to accessing contraception. Barriers include lack of insurance, high cost, and pharmacy refusal. Low-income women disproportionately face barriers to accessing contraception…” (Emphasis mine).

Well in the first place, the “high cost” myth was dispelled soon after Sandra Fluke’s testimony to an all-democrat congressional panel last year when it was learned that women without insurance could get birth control pills from Target for a whopping nine bucks per month (and then of course there was the shocking revelation that abstinence is FREE).  And pharmacy refusal, that’s probably about denying birth control to eleven-year-olds which, to the Left, is interfering with their “reproductive rights.”  But let’s skip forward to the larger issue here.  Poverty is only a barrier to access to birth control products or any other ordinary item to the extent that someone has NO control over their own poverty.  Otherwise, it’s like saying you had no access to your house because you lost your key to the front door, yet the back door is wide open.  What evil presence is dooming these women to eternal and inextricable poverty, pray tell?  If the failure to improve your financial situation in life through work experience, education and the accumulation of valuable skills is limiting your access to basic things, or if your poverty is the result of making poor decisions in life, then those limits are self-imposed and there’s no “lack of access,” just a lack of action, ambition or common sense. 

I can go through every claim the Left makes about “lack of access” to things and dissect it, demonstrating that access is only limited by people’s own behaviors or by government meddling, trust me on this.  The “lack of access” campaign is an orchestrated plan by the Left to turn irresponsibility into victimhood, and to unilaterally establish “rights” which are not part of the Constitution:  the right to healthcare, the right to contraception, the right to free food, the right to a job, the right to higher education, etc., etc., etc., those “rights” being fulfilled by legislative coup d'états that force taxpayers to provide these things.   Because if there’s one thing – and only one thing – that the Left understands from the Constitution, it’s that when you have the right to something, others are obligated to honor that right.  That’s why we’re hearing more and more about “lack of access,” and that’s why conservatives must push back hard, Adam Corolla style (I beg you to watch.  It’s less than three minutes.):


In true conservative fashion, Corolla refuses to accept the “no access” lie and calls the liar’s bluff.  This should be a “How To” video for all republican talking heads, most of whom have been letting this “no access” business sail right over their heads without ever challenging the premise.

In the meantime, always remember that two can play this game.  Next time your taxes are due send the IRS a note saying you didn’t have access to a stamp.

˜CW






Tuesday, May 28, 2013

What I Learned at the Huffington Post

Every once in a great while I’ll visit a leftwing site like the Huffington Post just to remind myself about the kind of mentality we’re up against.  I am especially curious about the Left’s perceptions of current events, and indeed what they believe current events even to be.  After a few minutes reading it is inevitably such a depressing exercise that I turn away in utter disgust, reassured in my long-held belief that we are doomed as a nation. 

The article linked to below, entitled “How America Became a Third World Country,” was featured as a front-page blog post on Huffpo the day I visited.  It gives us some interesting insight not only about what passes for intellectual discussion among the Left but also what the Left’s strategy is for redistributing blame as a century of socialist policy heads towards its inevitable conclusion:


The piece begins by describing a scene of horrific decay awaiting our country ten years from now.  The street lights will be off, the air will be brown and dirty, bridges will be collapsing left and right, the national parks will be closed.  The U.S. is going to be a real mess, apparently.   And what is the reason for our downward spiral into third-world status?  Is it because we’ve become a nation of socialists, where more and more of the trillions in tax revenues we collect every year are diverted to people who could and should be supporting themselves?  Is it because so much of the money that’s been used to support this experiment into socialism has been borrowed, and now our creditors want their money back?  No.  The reason we become a third-world state in this dark fantasy is because of the Sequester.  Yes, you read that correctly.  That tiny cut in the rate of our massive overspending – not the overspending itself - is going to lead us straight into Hell.

It’s hard to know whether the two ladies who co-authored this essay are as mentally challenged as they sound or if this is really just a clever, preemptive strategy cooked up by the Left to blame the sequester for the disaster they know is coming.  Stupid or dishonest?  That is always the question when it comes to the Left.  The entire essay is such an homage to absurdity that to critique it point by point, as I originally planned, would be like trying to edit a fifth-grader’s book report into a college thesis.  When people look at a graph of federal spending and refer to it as a “manufactured argument” for “austerity fever,” or they label sequester as the end of the world but are strangely nonchalant about Obama’s role in it or his vow to veto any attempt by congress that would let him re-direct the cuts where they would cause the least pain, it’s impossible to take them seriously.   So I’ll skip to the bottom line.

I grew up thinking, as many conservatives do, that liberals are merely stupid people who lack common sense.  But the more I watched and learned about liberalism over the years, the more I came to believe that their perfect record for being on the wrong side of everything pointed to something worse - a disease of the mind.  Liberalism, in a nutshell (pun intended) is an adult brain forever stuck on a child’s way of thinking, with the same dangerously underdeveloped sense of conscience that children often have.   Visiting Huffpo the other day it finally sunk in with me that it all goes together.  That is to say stupidity and the disease of liberalism go hand in hand.  The disease emanates from the desperate, childlike need liberals have to perpetually gratify their own egos, but you can’t be a liberal and not be stupid unless you don’t believe in a word you’re saying, in which case you’re simply a fraud.  Children, and therefore liberals, are stupid in the same sense that animals are “dumb.”  Their mental capacities are limited by their immaturity and their ignorance.  That’s the first thing I learned on my visit to the Huffington Post.

The second thing I learned is about the scheme mentioned above – the plan to hold onto power through the coming turmoil by rewriting history along with the laws of economics.   In The World According to Democrats, it is not the culture of entitlement they created, the over-spending or the printing of monopoly money that leads to economic crisis.  It’s any attempt, however small, to put the brakes on the party.  And given the liberal mentality, you can see how they arrived at that conclusion.  Hey, everything was fine in Greece until the mean old Germans imposed austerity on them, then all Hell broke loose, right?   Don’t even think about asking a liberal what led to the need for austerity. 

There is no reasoning with people who believe in a lie because they want to believe it.  That’s another thing I learned at the Huffington Post.  Where that leaves us, I’ll let you decide.

˜ CW



Sunday, January 27, 2013

Now is not the Time to Play Nice



“It was a sickness of the mind, and where sickness thrives, bad things will follow.”        

~ From the movie The Hobbit


There’s something about movie theatres that puts me to sleep.  I don’t know if it’s the darkness or if perhaps it’s self-defense against the explosion of deafening noise spewing forth at me, but it never fails that, despite my iron resolve to stay awake for the entire movie, I find myself quickly descending into unconsciousness shortly after the beginning credits are done.  I was on the path of my descent during the movie The Hobbit when the semi-conscious blogger in me heard the sage voice of the narrator uttering the words quoted at the top of this post.  Temporarily roused from my sleepy state, I reached down and began furiously fishing through my purse in the dark, searching for a scrap of paper and pen to write it down before I could forget (that’s about a ten-second window for me).  Eventually I found what I needed and, under the wary glare of my husband, I quickly scribbled it down before proceeding on to my nap. 

“It was a sickness of the mind, and where sickness thrives, bad things will follow.”       

There is nothing I love more than to hear a little gem of truth and wisdom all neatly contained within one simple little sentence.  This is the DNA of argumentation.  It is inarguable, or as my teenage son would put it, “Boom!”

 “...where sickness thrives, bad things will follow.”   2 + 2 = 4.

Now, the sickness he was referring to was greed, and the reason it was a problem is because it was the king who was consumed with greed.  That’s why, conservatives understand, it behooves society not to vest power in kings (duh!) or in governments where people can make themselves king-like (double duh!).  No, what occurred to me when I heard “sickness of the mind” was liberalism.  I guess I have thought of it this way for so long now that I assume it to be an accepted fact among all conservatives, but recently I learned that I am sadly mistaken. 

Not long ago a conservative blogger friend of mine wrote a post urging republicans not to villainize the Left, but to instead accept liberalism as just a different political philosophy.  A wrong-headed philosophy, perhaps, but still one that is generally rooted in good intentions.  Believing that it is the nasty tone adopted by the “Angry Right” that’s scaring liberals away, he suggested we embrace a strategy of polite persuasion instead. 

I don’t mean to pick on my friend.  He’s not alone in his thinking; in fact his feelings are probably shared by a majority of republicans.  But I could not disagree more on either his view of liberalism or his suggested strategy for dealing with it.  A true understanding of liberalism would make clear why polite persuasion not only will never succeed, but has failed to succeed for the better part of a century now.  It is not our bad manners but our collective failure to expose liberalism for what it really is – a sickness of the mind – that has brought us to the current state.

If you want to understand the difference between conservatism and liberalism, skip the political section at your library and head to the psychology department.  Liberalism and conservatism have to do with state of mind, and it is the state of mind that leads to the choice of politics, not the other way around.  There is a reason that, despite the enormous odds against it, liberals and conservatives are at odds on virtually everything:  social policy, gun control, the role of government, entitlements, the environment, national security, immigration, etc., etc., etc.  This fact alone is evidence that something is amiss.  Why?  Because 2 + 2 is not adding up to 4, that’s why.  It simply is not possible that people with the same ultimate motives would adopt such polar opposite attitudes to everything that is of importance to this nation.  Find the explanation for that and you will understand the real difference between liberals and conservatives. 

Here’s where the discussion gets a little complicated, as I try to compress into one paragraph an explanation of what should easily take an entire series of books. The driving force behind all classes of liberalism is psychological immaturity.  Among other things this manifests itself in the push towards socialism as people either look to be taken care of at the expense of others, they seek power over others, they wish to see themselves as the benefactors of others, or some combination of the three.  Regardless of which it is, the motivating forces are the same:  there’s either the wish to be taken care of or the desire to gratify one’s own ego through power and/or self-congratulation.  And yes, there are always those who simply have chosen their “team” (democrat), but who could argue that this isn’t immature as well?

And that is the sickness:  the absence of a properly developed maturity of mind.  The traits that we frequently see in liberals are ones that we often associate with children.  They are often habitually dishonest and hypocritical, they cheat, they bully others to get their way, they engage in tantrums (i.e. riots), they seek adulation and they engage in childish idealism.  Liberals, particularly those in the elitist ranks like Barack Obama, exhibit an absence of conscience that enables them to engage in behaviors that conservatives generally would not.  And therein lies the key to understanding why a strategy of polite persuasion will never succeed.  We have vastly different motivations.  Trying to win them over with persuasion would be analogous to an air traffic controller on 9-11shouting advice to the hijackers on how to avoid crashing.  The ATC wants to save the plane and passengers.  The hijackers want to be martyrs.  They are not going to be persuaded by the ATC’s advice.

 As I watched The Hobbit (yes I did eventually wake up) I was struck by how easy it was to tell who the good guys were and who the bad guys were.  Cute little Hobbits with big, hairy feet – good.  Nasty looking Orcs with open sores and rotting teeth – bad.  It’s easy to recognize danger on the silver screen.  In real life, however, the danger we face is hidden in the faces of people who look pretty much like us.  Such handy camouflage often makes it difficult to see others as a danger and to confront them.  Conservatives’ homage to the rules of civility and polite debate have made us unwitting accomplices to the advance of liberalism, as playing along with the charade of liberalism as a noble pursuit only emboldens them. 

As we wrestle with our demoralization from recent defeats, now is not the time to play nice.  In fact, the time to play nice with those who would destroy this nation, whether intentionally or unintentionally, was never.  No, I’m not suggesting we grab our swords and axes and go after liberals the way the hobbits fought back against the Orcs.  But it is time to pull aside the smiling masks of people like Barack Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and others, and reveal the snarling, hideous Orcs underneath.  And the way this is done is to lay bare the true motives behind liberalism – the search for ego gratification, the quest for superiority, the pursuit of power and control, and the desire to take what belongs to someone else.  That is the only path to success, in my humble opinion.

~CW