Donald Trump
The Face of Republican Reason
Dear J,
Thanks for your email.
Arthur’s friend, Dean Roper
-- a life-long Republican and CEO of UNC Healthcare System – was (and is) a
staunch supporter of Obamacare.
During debate over The Affordable
Healthcare Act, Roper observed that our existing healthcare system was
destined for disaster.
Although Obamacare is far from perfect, it establishes a
beachhead and points the way forward.
Did you ever see Michael
Moore's "Sicko?" It is freely available at http://www.documentarywire.com/sicko
Watch the first three minutes. Then, if you watch the rest, you'll see a
"companion scene" in which a Canadian carpenter endures the same
medical emergency. The contrast between American healthcare and Canadian is
flabbergasting.
Evidence-based, single-payer
healthcare is the most cost-effective way to insure everyone, a method of reducing the per capita expense of quality healthcare by half.
Lamentably, America’s right
wing 1.) rejects “evidence” because Reason is “elitist,” and
2.) continues to believe that private health insurance -- despite egregious
failure for decades -- is the ONLY way to contain cost.
Mark my words: If the GOP
gets its way, half the population will soon be subject to three “death panels:”
“No coverage.”
“Denied Coverage.”
"Under-Coverage.”
Furthermore, American
conservatives will applaud the slaughter.
In the following GOP
presidential debate clip, Republicans actually cheer the death
of “the uninsured”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irx_QXsJiao
Sure, we can go there...
Somalia did. Sudan did. Yemen
did.
Here are the
numbers: http://blogs.ngm.com/blog_central/2009/12/the-cost-of-care.html Click to enlarge
graphic.
In Canada, where quality-of-care is pretty much the same as in the States – and where everyone is
covered, and no one goes bankrupt from the stratospheric cost
of privatized medicine – both males and females live significantly longer than
their American counterparts even though per capita healthcare
spending is half what it is in the United States. Click to enlarge graphic.
How do Republicans "get
serious" about healthcare? They discuss contraception and how to limit it.
Mingya!
There was a time when the
phrase “driven to distraction” was a colloquial reference to "going
mad."
Now, the intention of drive people to distraction is a pillar of “conservatism.”
Remind me again...
What is it
"conservatives" are conserving?
Surely, it bears no
relationship to "one person one vote" nor enacting the will of the
majority.
Increasingly, conservatives
cling to the past because they’re stuck there, hunkered down in a state of
“arrested development,” void of vision and any courageous inclination to work for
a future that “The Invisible Hand” does not "automatically" provide.
Even as we
speak, The Invisible Hand is in our pants, vacuuming our
wallet, giving us a quick "blow" job. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand
I recommend George
McGovern’s “The Case For Liberalism: A Defense of The Future Against the
Past”: http://humanities.psydeshow.org/political/mcgovern.htm
Excerpt: “My friend Bob Dole is fond of Robert Frost's
observation that a liberal is someone who won't "take his own side in a
quarrel." I will. I believe that the most practical and hopeful compass by
which to guide the American ship of state is the philosophy of liberalism.
Virtually every step forward in our history has been a liberal initiative taken
over conservative opposition: civil rights, Social Security, Medicare, rural
electrification, the establishment of a minimum wage, collective bargaining, the
Pure Food and Drug Act, and federal aid to education, including the land-grant
colleges, to name just a few. Many of these innovations were eventually
embraced by conservatives only after it became clear that they had overwhelming
public approval for the simple reason that almost every American benefited from
them. Every one of these liberal efforts strengthened our democracy and our
quality of life. I challenge my conservative friends to name a single federal
initiative now generally approved by both of our major parties that was not
first put forward by liberals over the opposition of conservatives. We
need conservatives, of course, to challenge liberal ideas and proposals and to
impel us to examine their soundness, but we cannot depend on conservatives to
offer constructive new ideas of the sort that might bring about a more just and
equitable society or a more peaceful and cooperative world. If we assume that
Lincoln, the first Republican president, was a liberal (which he surely was),
nothing inspiring has come out of the conservative mind since the age of John
Adams. As my friend and sometime debating partner William F. Buckley puts it in
his book Up from Liberalism, Conservatism is the tacit acknowledgment that
all that is finally important in human experience is behind us; that the
crucial explorations have been undertaken, and that it is given to man to know
what are the great truths that emerged from them. Whatever is to come cannot
outweigh the importance to man of what has gone before. The business of
conservatives is, in other words, to cling tightly to the past, and although
such a stance can be admirable, a stale and musty doctrine is of little use at
a time when the nation needs not to fear the future but to seek out ways to
improve it. Instead of spreading fear across the land, our leaders should
be asking themselves, and asking us, thoughtful questions about the world in
which we live.”
“Kennedy advisor, John Kenneth Galbraith epitomized our quandary: "The modern conservative is
engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the
search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
And finally, as Trump -- and
the rest of the Republican presidential field -- demonstrate: “If God wanted us
to vote, he would have given us candidates.” Jay Leno
Pax on
both houses
Alan
PS Most American
"conservatives" are unaware that the GOP's core agenda is set by
people as crass as Donald Trump. Although the rank-and-file think their party
stands for "religious principles," it is The Golden Calf that
rules, "conservatives" (whether they know it or not) lying prostrate at the altar. Plutocracy is alive, well, and "on the
ascendant."
Go ahead.
Make your day. Watch "Inside Job" at http://vimeo.com/23086688
From: JT
Sent: Monday, February 20, 2012 5:20 PM
To: Alan Archibald
Subject: Fw: TRUMP EXPLAINS DUMBO CARE!!!!
Let me get this straight . . .
We're going to be "gifted" with a health care
plan we are forced to purchase and
fined if we don't,
Which purportedly covers at least
ten million more people,
without adding a single new doctor,
but provides for 16,000 new IRS agents,
written by a committee whose chairman
says he doesn't understand it,
passed by a Congress that didn't read it but
exempted themselves from it,
and signed by a Dumbo President who smokes,
with funding administered by a treasury chief who
didn't pay his taxes,
for which we'll be taxed for four years before any
benefits take effect,
by a government which has
already bankrupted Social Security and Medicare,
all to be overseen by a surgeon general
who is obese,
and financed by a country that's broke!!!!!'What the hell could possibly go wrong?'
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