Maybe—I sure hope not…
My old friend Peter (we went to sixth grade together, and friends don’t get much older than that) has been absent from these pages for a while, and I was getting worried that I had offended him for the 9,498th time. So it was with relief and pleasure that I just fished his comment today out of the spam pile (how it ended up with messages like the one from someone called “Cheap Jordans Online”—what cruel parent names a kid “Cheap”?—to the effect that “Gentry and her NHM colleagues hoped that the much younger elephant fetus would contain enough genetic material to reveal whether it came from Africa or Asia,” I’ll never understand) and realized that it was a slam dunk “Comment of the Day.”
Peter is in just as gloomy a mood as when he last commented, and I’m sure Rand Paul’s latest misadventures fending off plagiarism accusations didn’t help ( my old 6th grade math partner is a dedicated libertarian, and bristles at my critiques of the Paul clan). I’m not quite so pessimistic. Still, the fact that the President of the United States just put a big dent in the Rule of Law by unilaterally changing a statute that was duly passed by Congress, and nobody, especially Democrats, who are terrified, Republicans, who won’t have the guts to risk the trap of NOT letting the President try to fix, however illegally, his own mes, and having his complicit newsmedia then blame them for it not getting fixed, as you know they would, and the public, which will live to regret standing for the proposition that Presidents can just ignore the Constitution if they are sufficiently desperate, bolstered by the media and principle-free, will do anything about it is alarming.
Actually, I think Obama’s “Hail Mary” unpassed amendment to the law Nancy Pelosi said we had to pass to find out what was in it—and wasn’t THAT the truth!—will deepen the ACA fiasco, and may–I’m hoping now—teach our leaders and the lazy, gullible fools who elected them the indispensibility of such ethical principles as integrity and process to democratic government.
But I’m not certain; Peter could be right in his grim diagnosis. He is an MD, after all. And he solved all the tough problems in Mrs. Penwarden’s class. She was a Nazi, by the way.
Here is Peter’s Comment of the Day on the post, As The Obamacare Ethics Train Wreck Accelerates, A Plea To The Bitter-enders: “Stop It. You’re Disgracing Yourself.”
“It’s game over, folks. I offer this quote, sent to me by a friend originally from South Africa. It comes from the Czech Republic …. Ken Peters Professor of Economics. Substituting where appropriate….
“The danger to South Africa [the United States of America] is not Jacob Zuma [Barack Obama] but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with the Presidency. It will be far easier to limit and undo the follies of a Zuma [Obama] presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such a man for their president. The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Zuma [Obama], who is a mere symptom of what ails South Africa [the United States]. Blaming the prince of the fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince. The Republic can survive a Jacob Zuma [Barack Obama], who is, after all, merely a fool. It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools such as those who made him their President.”
Ethics Alarms 
Well… there have always been fools around. Obama just found out that the best way to rally them is to play up to their non-existant intellect and offer them free stuff at the expense of those who work.
My question about Obama’s mess on this is what is to stop a future Republican president elect from saying:
“Obama already established the precedent that it is within the president’s prerogative to decide which parts of the ACA are going to be enforced and which are not. I have decided that on my inauguration day all parts of the ACA are henceforth null and void.”
George Will asked the same question on Fox Sunday.
What would stop a Republican from doing such?
Why sir, the Media and the Leftist politicians will suddenly find a new-found love of Constitutional law and separation of powers. Why, it would ring from one corner of the nation to another how that Republican President would be behaving like a horrifying dictator, worse than the bloody british prince we wrested independence from in the 1770s.
They would be crowing for his head on a platter for even the merest twist of the words of the Constitution.
You see, they have a double standard when it comes to getting their way.
And then lambasting the ‘racist tea-party members’ for their hypocracy of complaining about Obama doing it, and then embracing it when ‘our side’ does it.
Okay, ACA sucks. But basic health care shouldn’t fall through the cracks like under the pre-ACA systems. It clutters emergency care for everyone and preventative care and some rehab would prevent snowballing health issues for those whose age. health, and skills can’t support working two jobs. Those have been a problem for more than a decade. A better solution is needed not just dumping the broken ACA.
It isn’t a Right. It is just one more product offered in a market that has developed solutions to the aggregation of people’s wants and desires. Medical systems have only been recently perceived as a ‘right’ ever since the late 80s and through the 90s and 00’s as you see it being pushed more and more through advertising as the insurance industry scare tactics got everyone convinced they couldn’t live without constant and immediate availability of a doctor (Not True, Beth). They even cleaned up the presentation. It used to be called “Medical Insurance”. But that was too cold and clinical, so it slowly morphed to Health Insurance then Health Care.
It isn’t a Right. Therefore no member of society is obligated to make sure you can pay for it.
“It isn’t a Right. Therefore no member of society is obligated to make sure you can pay for it.”
Wrong. Poorly worded. No one is obligated to pay for your natural rights either. People are merely obligated to respect and not infringe on your rights. Yes, you have a right to purchase medical services, however medical services are not rights as the so called progressives like to call what are known as ‘positive’ rights. Which aren’t rights, just a prettied up way of saying you have no right to your property and privacy if the state feels other people have a right to your property and person.
Thanks! Correction noted.
Well, if the substitute-able quote is such a common thread across the globe, maybe what it actually suggests is that this is how human governments have been all along – including in the U.S. – and how they will ever be: in the grip of foolish tyrants adhering to one method or another, ruling over vast masses of helpless, hopeless, permanently impoverished, “lesser fools.”
that quote could, for example, be easily applied to Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, or U.S. Rep. Mark Sanford.
I think in the Declaration of Independence, it specially states that were are guaranteed “certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the *pursuit* of Happiness. . .” Obviously we don’t want a diseased citizenry running around spreading illness to those that are working and paying for their healthcare. That being said, perhaps government is incapable of efficiently caring for those who cannot work and we should encourage charitable institutions, such as churches/synagogues to create a healthcare system that works through generous tax deductions.
You guys arguing about health care, insurance, etc. are missing the point by a rather wide margin. The question is, simply, have we elected a king, and, if so, what do we now do about it. I know Jack doesn’t like Fox News in general and Bill O’Reilly but Jesse Watters and his “man on the street” interviews are very enlightening. I know Watters picks the most likely locales for his segments, but that anybody could be so abysmally DUMB about politics and current events is amazing…and depressing. However, we have nobody but ourselves to blame. In our zeal to protect voting rights, we have removed any sort of requirement for voting. Obama (or worse) is the natural result of that.