Justifying the Means

When I was ten years old, I cheated on a geography test. I didn't need to cheat and I was foolish to do it but

I wanted to get 100% so badly that the temptation overwhelmed my better judgment and I got caught by my teacher, Mr. Azar. Mr. Azar was really cool, he was the only male teacher I had in elementary school and I liked him a lot, so the fact that I deliberately disobeyed his instructions only amplified my embarrassment. Even worse, Mr. Azar had been one of my father's students at Indiana State University so they knew each other and Mr. Azar knew that my father would be deeply disappointed when he learned of my behavior, so he wrote a synopsis of my cheating on the test sheet and told me to bring it home for my father to read and sign and then return it the next day. Needless to say, it was a thoroughly humiliating experience that has stayed with me my entire life as an example of how much dealing falsely with others can cost me.

Bill Clinton never gave a damn about dealing falsely with others or embarrassment or humiliation but he cared a lot about what he wanted at any given time, whether it was money or marijuana or sex or dodging the draft or getting elected. After six terms as Governor of Arkansas, he left his state just as poor and hopeless as when he found it and then went on to continue his sociopathic behavior for eight years in the White House where he ruined the careers of the Travel Office staff, drove Vince Foster to suicide, enacted the largest tax increase in history at the time, groped Kathleen Willey, passed on Osama bin Laden, lied about Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky and pardoned Marc Rich. Obeying the law or social norms or even being nice to people were meaningless concepts to him because what he wanted was more important than anything else but in one respect, Bill Clinton's amoral and boorish behavior was less threatening because it was amoral and boorish. We were appalled and disgusted and shocked and we cheered his impeachment but we understood that what we were witnessing was the conduct of an egomaniacal boob driven to gratify his base desires. That is not what we are witnessing now.

Priest-King is committed to creating the model American commune that he has envisioned since his youth. From Saul Alinsky and Bill Ayres and Jeremiah Wright he has received a seething hatred of traditional America and the radical revolutionary doctrine needed to change it, because America was founded by rich white racist European men for their own selfish and greedy purposes and deserves to be broken up and rebuilt. He sees himself as the champion of all the people who are left out, ignored, cheated, deceived and bullied by traditional America, all the people who don't have a chance in a meritocracy where individual freedom, enterprise, self-reliance and limited government are supreme. The poor, feminists, minorities, homosexuals, unions, radical environmentalists, drug users and illegal immigrants all lose in such a meritocracy so traditional America has to be smashed and its broken bits and pieces swept up and reshaped into a fairer, more just society, a society that Karl Marx would be proud of. So, if this society would be not only a dramatic improvement over the original but a model for all societies across the globe, and reforming its health care system is a step toward that society, then anything Priest-King does is justified in achieving it, including brazenly lying to the American people, but here's an important distinction: Priest-King wants to lead the American people into the socialist sunrise and he empathizes with some of them but he doesn't love them and he certainly doesn't trust them. Obamacare is all about rigid state control of health care which by definition eliminates personal choice over which plan vou have or how high the premium may be. Heretofore, the majority of Americans have made choices with which Priest-King vehemently disagrees so he cannot allow them to continue making those choices in the future, else the New America will never be achieved. HE DOESN'T TRUST US TO MAKE OUR OWN DECISIONS, PERIOD. He alone has the knowledge, the wisdom, the expertise, the understanding and the insight needed to decide the fate of 313 million Americans and no-one can gainsay him, he has a sense of mission and an epic self-image that drives him so when he deliberately, consciously and repeatedly lies as to the effects of Obamacare, it is not to gratify some base physical desire but to accomplish a grand design and thus his lies are far more dangerous. Priest-King sees our freedom as an impediment to the America he wants to build and we can't be trusted to make our own decisions, so if he has to mislead us in order to accomplish his goal, then that is perfectly acceptable to him and perfectly antithetical to his oath as President.

As of this writing, over 3.5 million Americans have had their current health care coverage cancelled as a direct result of Obamacare. They can't afford the stratospheric premiums and deductibles of the new plans and they have no idea how they will get the care they need. There is real human pain being inflicted by Obamacare yet Priest-King insist that he didn't lie when he assured the public that, "lf you like your plan, you can keep your plan," and implies that the public should have known that their plans might be changed or even eliminated under the new regime. So it's our fault or the fault of the evil insurance companies who cancelled your plan, even though Obamacare requires them to cancel plans that don't comply with the new standards. The fact that millions of people are now exposed to medical and financial peril, and tens of millions more in the next year, is actually a good thing, he expounds, they'll find that Obamacare is sooo much better than their old defective plans so the lies continue, the suffering and the pain expand and deepen and the country slides toward catastrophe. After witnessing the horrors caused by Vladimir Lenin and Benito Mussolini, by Francisco Franco and Adolf Hitler, by Mao Tse-Tung and Ho Chi Minh, by Fidel Castro and Danny Ortega, you would think that Americans would be smarter than to fall for the same shopworn charms of socialism but we're not. Over sixty-six million of my fellow citizens thought they could get something for nothing from a Leftist demagogue weaned on Chicago goon politics and only now do they realize the depth of their mistake. Maybe it's not too late, maybe Obamacare can be stopped, maybe the damage can be contained and maybe America can be saved, but if it is indeed too late and the damage is irreversible, then we will know exactly when our doom was sealed and why: The moment we cast a vote for Barack Obama and because we believed a lie.

Misery Loves Company

Here's some more grist for the mill:

• The White House and Kathleen Sebelius promise that the HealthCare.gov website will be completely functional by 30 November. Meanwhile, the site continues to crash and when it's available, people cannot complete their applications for coverage and submit them. In fact, HealthCare.gov was unavailable during Secretary Sebelius' testimony to the House on Wednesday the 30th, at the same time she assured the Representatives that it was working.
• During her testimony, Secretary Sebelius also refused to provide an estimate for the number of Americans who have actually purchased health insurance through HealthCare.gov, promising that the administration would publish that estimate by 15 November. Her refusal was consistent with administration policy since White House spokesman Jay Carney and Priest-King himself decline to provide that information, likely because it is an embarrassingly low number.
• FoxNews reports that the major private health insurance companies in the United States are being intimidated by the administration into remaining silent on the entire Obamacare issue, also likely to prevent embarrassment for the President's signature legislative achievement.
• Appeals from a growing number of Democrat politicians notwithstanding, Priest-King refuses to grant a waiver for the individual mandate for any length of time, understanding of course that he has no legal authority to delay or alter any part of the law.
• Those states that are operating their own health care exchanges refuse to publish ratings for the various health care plans that would help citizens make more informed choices about the coverage they buy. The information is readily available but the refusal to provide such ratings seems intended to lure citizens into buying more expensive plans unwittingly.
• As of 29 October, about 1.5 million people have had their individual health insurance policies cancelled. One woman's monthly premium rose from $54 to $557, others have seen their premiums rise 800% with deductibles of $24,000, clearly unaffordable for the average American. This evidence directly contravenes Priest-King's repeated assurances that nobody who preferred their existing health coverage would lose it and that the average American would save $2500 under Obamacare.

The issues with the HealthCare.gov website are bad enough but eventually they will be solved - the administration will spend whatever they have to spend, hire whomever they have to hire and even blow it up and start over if necessary but the technical problems will be fixed. The website is merely the symptom of the law it implements, however, so if premiums and deductibles climb to stratospheric levels and millions of people lose their insurance and people are being herded blindly into health plans they cannot possibly afford and buying coverage they don't need, then the law is working as intended. Obamacare was designed to drive private health insurance providers out of business, forcing their customers into a single government-run construct where they would be trapped forever in a hopelessly wasteful, corrupt, unfair, unjust, complicated, socialist true believer's wet dream of a health care system, so the disintegration ofthe private health insurance market is expected. Imagine! Every American enrolled in Obamacare whether they like it or not, charged whatever premiums the government sees fit to charge, resources shifted from the healthy and the young and the industrious to the sick and the old and the indigent, everyone receiving the same mediocre level of care as slowly and inefficiently as a disinterested government can provide it: Rapture!

This end state - the elimination of the private health insurance market in favor of a massive government program - has been a goal of the Left in this country for decades. John Dingell advocated for the cause as early as the 1950's, Ted Kennedy (bang the drum slowly) championed it in the 1970's and of course, more recently, Priest-King himself predicted and embraced a single-payer system at a meeting of the Service Employees International Union in San Francisco in 2003. To the Left, the only way to ensure that everyone in America receives a nominal level of health care is to eliminate every other possibility and channel everyone (and their resources) into a government system that distributes those resources more fairly, from a healthy, middle-aged and prosperous businessman at the height of his earning potential to an 85 year-old illegal immigrant with tuberculosis and emphysema, for example. Government-controlled health care is an indispensable component of the socialist society that Priest-King envisions and is such a lofty goal and moral imperative that any means are justified in achieving it - requiring the aforesaid businessman to purchase prenatal coverage is one example and Priest-King repeatedly and deliberately lying to the American people is another. (We know, courtesy of NBC News, that the IRS briefed Priest-King in July 2010 that as many as two-thirds of those Americans who buy their own health insurance would lose their coverage as a result of Obamacare, amounting to some 16 million people, yet he continued to assure the country that "If you like your plan, you can keep your plan, period.") And make no mistake: As millions of people lose their insurance and choose to pay an annual fine rather than pay exorbitant premiums, Priest-King will resort to any means to ensure Obamacare's survival. The IRS will become the henchmen of the Sheriff of Nottingham, garnishing wages, condemning property, seizing tax refunds, confiscating retirement funds and savings accounts, grabbing America by the throat and choking every possible penny out of the unrepentant scofflaws because by God, America will be bent to Priest-King's will and nothing is going to stop him.

And what happens when the (illegally granted) waiver for the business mandate expires in September? Businesses across the country have already been cutting hours and staff to compensate for the extra burden imposed by Obamacare and when faced with certain doom, they will pink-slip their employees in the millions and muddle through as best they can. When Priest-King dictates mandatory minimum standards of coverage for each person whether they need something or not, driving up costs, what are private insurers to do but pass those costs on to their customers, and what are the customers to do but shed workers as fast as they can? The same IRS document obtained by NBC News indicates that as many as 93 million people will lose their employer-provided health insurance as a consequence of Obamacare yet Priest-King presses the accelerator to the floor, damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead. The entire health care system in the United States could collapse and it will be absolutely unnecessary. This is the new paradigm, America, and if you were stupid enough to vote for Priest-King once or even twice and you thought you would sail through a radical Leftist administration untouched, then you're not only a fool but a damned fool, but look at the bright side: You've got plenty of company.