First, please explain to me why providing meaningful access to health care for all our citizens is so evil?
Second, you don't have to be Iranian to hate President Bush, not when there are so many other reasons to find him reprehensible.
It's not the government's job to provide health care to everyone. And in the countries where it's been implemented, it's been disastrous. Want to see the problems with socialized medicine? Check out the info on this website:
http://www.angelfire.com/pa/sergeman/issues/healthcare/socialized.html
And of course you don't have to be Iranian to hate Bush, but I fail to see how patriotic Americans can "hate" Bush or consider him reprehensible . . .
If it's because of the war in Iraq, puh-lease! I suppose we were supposed to sit back and do nothing after 9-11. May I quote from a recent column by Victor Hanson in The Modesto Bee:
"The truth is that, thanks to Bush, bin Laden's original bases in Afghanistan are lost. His al-Qaida followers in Iraq are being systematically decimated -- with the help of Sunni tribesmen repulsed by jihadist atrocities. A recent poll from the Pew Research Center revealed a precipitous drop in support among Middle Easterners for the tactics of suicide bombing, and a growing unpopularity for bin Laden himself."
Bush is not perfect, but he's trying to head off the al-Qaida threat on foreign soil . . .or would you rather that we sit back and do nothing and just wait for them to attack us again?
CoffeeMom,
I'd probably be going too far to think that because you didn't respond to my follow up comments on Rush (the meat, potatoes, and extra gravy of this thread) that you'd accepted the truth about him? Oh well, I can always hope. On to the next 2 issues.
The parody implies there's something inherently wrong with making sure that everyone has meaningful access to health care ("meaningful" is the key word) I asked what is so evil about that notion, and you only responded by saying it's not the governments job. You know what else isn't the government's job? Taking your tax dollars and shipping them off in foreign aid packages to places like Egypt (you know, the place where Mohammed Atta was from) Taking your tax dollars and funding billions in pork projects that serve no pressing need. Taking your tax dollars and bailing out entities like Amtrak, airline carriers, or insurance companies who don't want to honor their policies. None of those things are the government's job either, yet they do it. So, it seems there's a disconnect when we allow our wallets to be plundered for those type of things while disregarding something about which there ought to be some sort of moral compulsion to address.
I'm pretty familiar with the arguments against socialized medicine, still I don't see residents of the UK or Canada dropping like flies. There's no doubt we have great healthcare providers here in the US. However, if our present system isn't flawed, please tell me why Americans crossed the border to get prescriptions filled in Canada, and why Americans fly to places like Bumrungrad Hospital in Bangkok, Thailand to get treatment and procedures that they can't get or afford here?
By the way, that website link you provided was great. I mean where else could I find nuggets like:
Although many of the uninsured would like coverage, a number have chosen to be self-
insured. These people are not poor. - Doug Bandow, Bradley Smith, Lawrence Reed, April 15,
1994 [Mackinac Center for Public Policy]
Not only do those statements lack internal logic, they have the strong tendency to induce the "Say what?!" response.
But the bottom line is this...you say socialized medicine is disastrous. Let's assume it has some serious flaws, AND that we'd be too dumb to learn from the mistakes of other countries, having less than desirable access to health care IS NOT worse than having NO ACCESS to health care.
* * *
You fail to see how "patriotic" Americans can hate Bush? Is that because there is no tradition of political dissent in America? Is it because the 1st Amendment, which protects political speech most of all was abolished and no one told me? Let me give you a few reasons why someone might find Bush reprehensible.
1. He suborns perjury from his subordinates, the most recent example being Alberto Gonzalez. Call me old fashioned, but I don't think it's proper to tell your subordinates to lie to Congress.
2. He approves of "unique" interrogation techniques, endorses outsourcing of torture through the use of "renditions", and he refuses to put prisoners on trial. Now he is correct in saying that Common Article III of the Geneva Convention does not apply to "unlawful combatants." Still, the United States, which I believe is the best country on earth, does not torture and we do not hold people in prisons forever without a trial. My country is far better than that. Even if you can create a scenario which you feel justifies torture, you simply must put people on trial. If they are found guilty, then give them the maximum punishment allowed by the jurisidction in which they are tried, be it the death penalty or life imprisonment, but give them a trial. (and, Bush is no Lincoln, so you might not want to go down that road)
3. He uses the military as a prop, whether its for cheap photo ops or to vocally support whatever his hare brained plan du jour is. Do you really believe absolutely everyone in the military thinks he is right about everything? Of course not, but they are a captive audience that Bush parades in front of a camera whenever he has the chance. There's a reason why you don't hear any significant (attributed) dissent within the military, and it's the same reason why generals don't offer criticism until they retire. The reason why is that to openly disagree, question, or criticize Bush is a crime under the UCMJ. The threat of a court-martial has a tendency to make people keep their opinions to themselves.
4. He debases Christianity. If you're going to cloak yourself in the Shroud of Turin to get the religious vote, it's a bit inconsistent to turn around and promote perjury, torture, and suspend habeas corpus, among other things.
5. He thinks his accountability to the American people ended once he was re-elected. It's admirable to not be consistently swayed by whichever way the winds of public opinion may be blowing on any given day. However, to essentially say that you don't care what the vast majority of Americans emphatically want, well that makes things seem less like a democracy and more like a dictatorship. Government of the people, BY the people, FOR the people.
6. It is obvious that he read Orwell's 1984. However, rather than reading it as a cautionary tale, he apparently thought it was a how-to Tyranny For Dummies guide. If Orwell were still alive he would have eviscerated Bush long ago.
I'm not sure if you like those apples, but there's a lot more of them just hanging from the branches of the Tree of Knowledge.
No, I never espoused sitting on our hands after 9/11. I fully endorsed the actions in Afghanistan. What I did not endorse was creating a second front before we had gotten Bin Laden. As others have learned (Russians, British) even if you bring your "A game" to Afghanistan, you're lucky to avoid a disastrous outcome. When you're going after public enemy #1, you don't take any action that reduces your chance of capturing him. And as to creating a second front, if you're serious about bringing justice to those who brought about 9/11, then after we got Bin Laden, we should have gone to Saudi Arabia and taken out the Wahhabi extremists, then to Egypt. The butchers of 9/11 came from those three countries almost exclusively, but they are our "friends." And I say, with friends like those who needs enemies.
As to your quote from Victor Hanson, I think the first key word is "original". The second key word is "decimated." Decimated, hmmm, you mean more than four years after "Mission Accomplished" for every 100 Al Qaeda we've killed, there's 900 still alive? Does that "decimate" language take into account the new terrorists that spring up to replace those who have been cut down? If Victor thinks everything in Afghanistan and Iraq is so rosy, I would encourage him to go to the State Department's website and read the travel warnings for both countries, perhaps even take his family on a vacation as I hear Kabul is beautiful this time of year.
I know I know, we're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here...and if we pull out of Iraq, they'll follow us to Pete's Garage...
Listen, if it's simply a matter of them following us wherever we go, pull all the forces out of Iraq and move them to Afghanistan, that way you can kill two birds with one stone. Besides, preventing another attack here has more to do with internal intelligence gathering and cooperation by our various agencies than it does with maintaining a stalemate in Mesopotamia.
Bush is not perfect? That must have hurt to say.
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Topic: Great new Rush parody (Read 7001 times)
