Posted on 12/25/2009 1:01:29 AM PST by seanmerc
WASHINGTON -- The spirit of Christmas seems to have escaped Congress, maybe even the country.
Have you ever encountered such mean spiritedness and political conniving as are now on display on Capitol Hill?
In the past, we have had great philosophical divisions in the struggle for civil rights, especially when southern legislators ran the show. In praise of democracy, fortunately they lost.
And of course there also was the "red scare" fomented by Sen. Joe McCarthy, R-Wis., in the 1950s when he led the commie-hunting movement that ended up victimizing government officials, academia and Hollywood. We recovered from that, too.
Once again we are engulfed by a climate of malice, much fostered -- sorry to say -- by Republicans, who have made it their mission to see President Barack Obama fail. One line of attack is their stand against universal health care, a position that appeases a handful of insurance companies. The Obama administration didn’t help by making a deal with the drug industry to block the purchase of inexpensive medicine from Canada. Are the politicians in hock to these firms and lobbyists for campaign funds?
Millions of dollars have been poured into television commercials designed to scare Americans about health care reform. "Big government" interference in health care is the bogeyman, ironically even to some who receive government-provided health care through Medicare or Medicaid or the Veterans Administration. There is a disconnect here when they would deny such benefits to others.
Despite the hard times the nation is suffering, there is little magnanimity on the part of the privileged lawmakers, who don’t have to worry about their own government-financed health coverage.
Meanwhile, the president’s decline in public opinion polls clashes with his own self estimate.
In a year-end interview with The Washington Post, Obama gave himself high marks for putting the country on the road to economic recovery with the $797 billion stimulus package. Wall Street financial houses were not allowed to fail, but thousands of workers elsewhere lost their jobs and are still struggling to get back on their feet.
In the Post interview, the president said "the most important thing we did this year was to ensure that the financial system did not collapse.’’
But on health care reform -- the jewel in the crown -- the president has made too many compromises that ended up weakening the proposals. Perhaps the president’s biggest mistake was to let Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, carry the ball on health reform. Baucus and his committee produced wimpy legislation that can hardly be called a "reform" bill.
Obama let the liberals down in his own party by never fighting for the public option or a single payer system, the heart of real reform that works like Medicare. Anyone who thought the president would support a government-run health insurance system to compete with high cost private insurance companies was whistling in the dark.
Obama is so eager for any health legislation that he’s willing to compromise it to nothingness. It was left to former Democratic chairman Howard Dean to take a tough line. Dean, a physician, sharply criticized the Senate bill because it lacked a government-run insurance option that would compete with private insurers. The House version of the health legislation does contain such an option.
Obama defends his role. "Nowhere has there been a bigger gap between perceptions of compromise and the realities of compromise than in the health care bill," the president lamented. "Every single criteria for reform I put forward is in the bill.’’
In reality, the legislation is a bonanza for the fat cat insurers.
The disappointment is great among those who thought the president was another Franklin D. Roosevelt or Lyndon B. Johnson. Both overcame Republican opposition in pushing liberal social legislation to help the underprivileged in American society. Hopefully, when voters elect a new Congress next year, the country will remember which political party led us into economic free fall and two unwinnable wars.
and must not forget the beliefs of the John Birchers either.
yow, two hours into Christmas.
that picture is torture!!!! If he fails America win’s...
They seem to fail to understand the reason their readerships and viewerships are falling is because their former subscribers got sick of their propaganda. They’re now preaching to the choir and even the choir’s getting sick of the leftist propaganda.
The mainstream public realizes that we’ve been patronized by the MSM with their belief that we can’t tell the difference between wishing for President Ogabe’s leftist policies to fail and wishing for him to fail. We all want him to be a success in life, we just don’t want his success to come at the detriment of America. We want to see him happy, we just don’t want to see him happily pissing on the Constitution of the United States.
That old skank defines the term “coyote ugly”. If one cared to even look under those tents walking around in Baghdad or East Dearbornistan, that is what they would probably see except with the mustache unshaven.
**...made it their mission to see President Barack Obama fail”**
We just don’t want to see BARKY Become another FDR... other than that, Barky should go away and live a long futile life in Obscurity... just like Jimmuh Cahta
The writer of this reflects well the colossal economic ignorance that characterizes the Democrats. She fails to note that universal health care will affect hundreds of millions of Americans, and effectively destroy our country.
Obama has already experienced being treated as a nobody in his Copenhagen visit; this is our future under socialism, a goal of the Obama Administration. Except they forgot that we will be treated as a third world nation by other countries, especially if we miss or are late in paying our UN dues and reparations.
Ho, ho, ho, ho, ho.
The old bat is obviously having memory troubles. She remembered the political party for the misdeeds she attributes to the republicans, but she apparently can’t recall that the racist southerners were all democrats - like LBJ (who seems to have conveniently converted once he became president?).
A question about the pictures you posted: One's a really ugly turkey, but what is the one on the right?
Helen look at the Whitehouse's Rahm Emanuel and tell me which party is the one with malice:
Remember this Helen??
At a Clinton victory dinner in Little Rock in 1992, Emanuel celebrated by reciting a hoped-for necrology of Democrats who had "f$*#ed" the president-elect. After every name, he stabbed a steak knife into a table and screamed, "Dead man!"
Or how about this one Helen?
On Election Night, 10 minutes after CNN called the House for the Democrats, Emanuel climbed up on a table in DCCC headquarters and addressed his cheering, victory-starved staff, celebrating the party's biggest win since 1992. He wanted to wrap up the campaign with a message for the Republicans.
"Since my kids are gone, I can say it," he shouted. "They can go F*&@ themselves!"
Helen, keep repeating the DNC talking points, however the facts just don't line up with your story. The party of malice is the party in control of the WH, Senate and House!
Uhhh...helen baby, Joe McCarthy DID expose real life communists in our government. Clearly, you have a problem with that.
Actually, the real error is McCarthy did NOTHING to prosecute Hollywood, Acadademia, or government officials.
McCarthy was in charge of the department of the Army. It was HUAC that found the other commies.
And wasn’t the Democrats mission during 8 years of Bush to make sure that he failed?
I see Helen is using botox ,,,, WOW!!! what a difference .
Speak for yourself. I wish nothing good for Bozo, he deserves nothing good to happen to him for he is obviously trying to kill off large numbers of Americans, either by starving them or by with holding medical treatment from them. Want him to fail? He** yes, I wish he would resign tomorrow or be impeached(neither is likely to happen but a person can dream).
Ah, fair Helen. As intelligent as she is beautiful.
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