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

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

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

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

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

“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.):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42wbI7LxRns

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

¹ http://www.nirhealth.org/sections/publications/documents/contraceptiveaccessquicksheetFINAL.pdf

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:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mattea-kramer/sequester-cuts_b_3313013.html

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