Posted on 01/16/2013 7:21:39 AM PST by SeekAndFind
The president of the United States will release a binder full of new gun-control executive orders on Wednesday. Instead of standing alone, bearing full responsibility for the imperial actions he is about to take, President Obama will surround himself with an audience of kids who wrote to him after the Newtown, Conn., school massacre. This is the most cynical in Beltway theatrical staging — a feckless attempt to invoke immunity by intoning “it’s for the children” and hiding behind them.
What has happened to the deliberative process in this country? Public debate in Washington has deteriorated into Sesame Street sing-alongs. We are already inundated with logical fallacies: argumentum ad populum (it’s popular, therefore it’s true); argumentum ad nauseam (if you repeat it often enough, it will become truth); argumentum ad hominem (sabotage the person to sabotage the truth); and argumentum ad verecundiam (if my favorite authority says it’s true, it’s true).
To that list we can now add argumentum ad filios: If politicians appeal to the children, it’s unassailably good and true. The Obama White House has shamelessly employed this kiddie human-shield strategy at every turn to blunt substantive criticism and dissent.
During the legislative battle that rammed the federal health-care takeover through Capitol Hill and down our throats, President Obama and the Democrats piled up youth props around them like bunker sandbags. Nancy Pelosi wore babies as if they were Wonder Woman bracelets, one on each arm, to deflect troublesome questions about costs and constitutional concerns.
Obamacare stage managers paraded eleven-year-old Marcelas Owens of Washington State in front of the cameras to make the case for the half-trillion-dollar tax-hike plan. The boy’s “qualifications”? Owens’s mother, Tiffany, had died of pulmonary hypertension at the age of 27. A single mother of three, she lost her job as a fast-food manager and lost her insurance. She received emergency care and treatment throughout her illness, but died in 2007.
As I noted at the time, Washington State already offered a plethora of existing government-assistance programs to laid-off and unemployed workers such as Owens’s mom. For some reason, unexplained by the family or its zealous exploiters, she didn’t enroll. Moreover, she died nine months after she reportedly lost her health insurance. By the time she lost her employer-provided coverage, she was apparently already in dire straits health-wise. It’s not clear that additional doctor visits in the subsequent months would have prevented her death. Nor did Obamacare do anything to address the very real flaws with our employer-sponsored health-care system.
Young Marcelas Owens admitted he didn’t understand health-insurance reform and didn’t think it was “anyone’s fault” that his mom died. No matter. When it comes to big-government-by-anecdote, the anecdotes don’t need to be true and the solutions don’t need to actually solve our problems.
The intellectual infantilization of politics and public policy is nothing new, of course. The Clintons engaged in one of the most notorious examples of poster-child abuse when they made a spectacle of an ailing seven-year-old girl named Jennifer Bush. Her mother, Kathleen, wrote to the White House about the agonizing decision to “choose between purchasing groceries for the week to feed your family or buying needed medications for your chronically ill child.” The girl’s gall bladder, appendix, and fragments of her intestines had been removed in a desperate attempt to diagnose her mystery sickness.
Coached by her overbearing mother, Jennifer gave the Clintons a lucky silver dollar to bring them “good luck so everyone can have good insurance.” She dutifully told the press: “I pray every night that I can get better — and that everyone can have insurance.” Hillary trotted the family all over Capitol Hill for photo ops and press conferences on behalf of her health-insurance-mandate proposals.
Two hundred hospital visits and $2 million in medical bills later, and two years after Hillary propped her up, doctors discovered that the only thing wrong with little Jennifer was that her mother had been starving and exploiting her while splurging on trips, motorcycles, and home remodeling. Mrs. Bush was sentenced to five years in prison on two counts of aggravated child abuse and welfare fraud.
From health care to gun control, the Left has perfected this fallacious art of prop-a-palooza — the well-being of the children and the national discourse be damned. Political vultures in Washington refuse to do the one thing that might actually benefit the children they recklessly use and abuse as fodder: Grow up.
— Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies
Hey, you Kenyan Communist election stealing SOB, if you REALLY want to help our children, then push to STOP ABORTION!!!
Can any one combine the audio of Obummer giving a speech on expanding abortion access with the video of him using these children as pawns for gun control? That would certainly show the hypocrite that he is.
Exactly what happened.
Jennifer Bush was taken from her family in 1996 and her mother was accused of causing her to undergo unnecessary medical treatment, in a rare form of child abuse known as Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Prosecutors said Bush intentionally made the girl sick and poisoned her with doses of an anti-seizure medicine.
Bush, who denies she ever harmed her daughter, was convicted of aggravated child abuse and served more than three years in prison.
Kathy and Jennifer Bush have not seen each other since 1999 but have been exchanging letters under a therapist’s supervision for the past year. Bush is barred from seeing her daughter while she serves five years of probation.
Now that Jennifer Bush is an adult and has completed counseling, she wants to reunite with her mother, and they both want to attend an upcoming family event, said prosecutor Dennis Nicewander.
Formerly of Coral Springs, Kathy Bush now lives in Georgia with her husband, Craig, and their two sons, Jason and Matthew. Jennifer Bush lives in another state and does not want her location revealed. In a message she had prosecutors pass on to the newspaper, she said she wants to live the rest of her life “out of the spotlight.” She also said she wants to slowly assimilate into her family.
During the hearing, the judge asked several times whether anyone involved in the case had any concerns that Jennifer Bush could suffer psychological or physical harm.
The attorneys assured the judge that, while no one can predict the future, they think it is safe and advisable for mother and daughter to reconcile.
http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2005-07-22/news/0507211295_1_child-abuse-kathy-bush-judge
By the time Jennifer was eight years old, she had spent 640 days in hospitals and had undergone more than 40 surgeries. She had had her appendix, gall bladder, and part of her intestines removed due to what doctors believed was a gastrointestinal disorder. She was fed through a feeding tube.
Nurses and doctors testified they suspected Kathy Bush tampered with her daughter’s feeding pump, and gave her unprescribed medication. One nurse testified that she once heard Jennifer yelling, “No Mommy, No,” inside her hospital room.
From as early as 6 months of age, Jennifer was in and out of hospitals with a variety of ailments. After Kathy lost her job as a pediatrician’s office manager in 1993, she began caring for her full-time. Frustrated by her inability to secure health insurance for Jennifer, Kathy wrote to Hillary Clinton. Soon afterward, the Children’s Defense Fund invited mother and daughter to the lobbying event in Washington, where Kathy and Jennifer also testified before Congress about health care costs.
Meanwhile, back in Coral Springs, a suburb of Fort Lauderdale, Jennifer’s plight was attracting media attention—and more than $10,000 in charitable donations. Even as they accepted the money, say prosecutors, Kathy Bush and her husband, Craig. were installing a $20,000 swimming pool and buying a $25,000 motorcycle—purchases they say were not made with the donated money.
State officials investigated the matter as early as 1991 but, wary of the difficulty of proving such a case, didn’t take action until they received a complaint in April 1995 from a nurse at Memorial Regional Hospital in Hollywood, Fla. Police arrested Kathy Bush in April 1996. Within days, Jennifer was sent to Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Cincinnati, which has a unit specializing in feeding disorders. After watching the girl down pizza, hot dogs and candy bars, doctors concluded her feeding tubes could be removed.
http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20129563,00.html
Binders full of executive orders?! LOL.
Yes, don’t they have armed protection at his daughter’s school? I may be wrong but I thought I heard that on the news yesterday.
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