Posted by
Defend America on Saturday, March 06, 2010 12:50:47 PM
March 6, 2010 7:00 A.M.
It’s About Government, Not Health Care
What the Dems are doing makes perfect sense. For them.
So there was President Obama
giving his bazillionth speech on health care, droning yet again that
“now is the hour when we must seize the moment,” the same moment he’s
been seizing every day of the week for the past year, only this time
his genius photo-op guys thought it would look good to have him surrounded by men in white coats.
Why is he doing this? Why let “health” “care” “reform” stagger on like
the rotting husk in a low-grade creature feature who refuses to stay
dead no matter how many stakes you pound through his chest?Because it’s worth it. Big time. I’ve been saying in
this space for two years that the governmentalization of health care is
the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. It
redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in
fundamental ways that make limited government all but impossible. In
most of the rest of the Western world, there are still nominally
“conservative” parties, and they even win elections occasionally, but
not to any great effect (let’s not forget that Jacques Chirac was, in
French terms, a “conservative”). The result is a kind of two-party
one-party state: Right-of-center parties will once in a while be in
office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on regardless.
Republicans seem to have difficulty grasping this basic dynamic. Less
than three months ago, they were stunned at the way the Democrats
managed to get 60 senators to vote for the health bill. Then Scott
Brown took them back down to 59, and Republicans were again stunned to
find the Dems talking about ramming this thing into law through the
parliamentary device of “reconciliation.” And, when polls showed an
ever larger number of Americans ever more opposed to Obamacare (by
margins approaching three-to-one), Republicans were further stunned to
discover that, in order to advance “reconciliation,” Democratic
reconsiglieres had apparently been offering (illegally) various cozy
Big Government sinecures to swing-state
congressmen in order to induce them to climb into the cockpit for the
kamikaze raid to push the bill through. The Democrats understand that
politics is not just about Tuesday evenings every other November, but
about everything else, too.
http://article.nationalreview.com/427119/its-about-government-not-health-care/mark-steyn