Conservative Libertarian Outpost

“What has been most unsettling is not the congressmen’s surprise [at the passions of the protesters] but a hard new tone that emerged this week. The leftosphere and the liberal commentariat charged that the town hall meetings weren’t authentic, the crowds were ginned up by insurance companies, lobbyists and the Republican National Committee. But you can’t get people to leave their homes and go to a meeting with a congressman (of all people) unless they are engaged to the point of passion. And what tends to agitate people most is the idea of loss — loss of money hard earned, loss of autonomy, loss of the few things that work in a great sweeping away of those that don’t. People are not automatons. They show up only if they care. What the town-hall meetings represent is a feeling of rebellion, an uprising against change they do not believe in. And the Democratic response has been stunningly crude and aggressive. It has been to attack. Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the United States House of Representatives, accused the people at the meetings of ‘carrying swastikas and symbols like that.’ (Apparently one protester held a hand-lettered sign with a ‘no’ slash over a swastika.) But they are not Nazis, they’re Americans. Some of them looked like they’d actually spent some time fighting Nazis. Then came the Democratic Party charge that the people at the meetings were suspiciously well-dressed, in jackets and ties from Brooks Brothers. They must be Republican rent-a-mobs. Sen. Barbara Boxer said on MSNBC’s ‘Hardball’ that people are ‘storming these town hall meetings,’ that they were ‘well dressed’, that ‘this is all organized,’ ‘all planned,’ to ‘hurt our president.’ Here she was projecting. For normal people, it’s not all about Barack Obama.” –columnist Peggy Noonan

“So what has the White House told supporters to do when you run across those who spread ‘disinformation’ about the new attempt by the Obama administration to install the anti-competitive practices of a ‘public option’ into a federalized universal health care initiative? Report them. … Pardon me for asking such an obvious question, but what concern is it to the President or his administration if private citizens have disagreements, discussions, and dissections of his proposed take over of the health care industry? Last I checked I had the constitutional right to do so. But now he wishes to turn one citizen against another? … The mistake this White House continues to make, seemingly on a daily basis, is that they reveal very much what they truly think of freedoms of the American political process.” –radio talk-show host Kevin McCullough

“For years, Democratic politicians said the health-care problem was about ’47 million uninsured Americans.’ Whatever the merits, many people were willing to do something for those with no health insurance. Suddenly, these voters discovered that ObamaCare is about them. When did that happen? Every policy wonk in America may have known this was always an everybody-into-the-pool proposal, and Mr. Obama has talked himself blue saying people could stay with the insurance they’ve got or the doctor they’ve got, ‘if you’re happy with that’ and don’t like the public option. A lot of people simply don’t believe this. How come? White House adviser David Axelrod said this week, ‘Our job is to help folks understand how this will help them.’ It could be they’ve already thought about that. For many people, the first six Obama months already have been an unsettling Dantesque tour through levels of government ‘help’ they never knew existed. Normally government activity flows by like unnoticed sludge, but Obama’s celebrity got everyone watching. What people have seen is: an $800 billion stimulus package designed by Congress, a $4 trillion budget, massive outlays by an alphabet soup of Treasury and Federal Reserve programs, Barney Frank the symbol of Democratic goals, and then the federal absorption of GM, an American icon. After all this, ObamaCare looks like a bridge too far. They are proposing the biggest federal social program in a generation, which no one can understand (or explain), and which requires permanent federal tax increases starting with the wealthiest but threatening to engulf the middle class. The harder the White House and Democrats push this idea, the worse it could get for them. Americans may have arrived at the limit of how much government they want or will pay for. If Barack Obama can’t sell more of it, no one can.” –columnist Daniel Henninger

“Any serious discussion of government-run medical care would have to look at other countries where there is government-run medical care. As someone who has done some research on this for my book ‘Applied Economics,’ I can tell you that the actual consequences of government-controlled medical care is not a pretty picture, however inspiring the rhetoric that accompanies it. Thirty thousand Canadians are passing up free medical care at home to go to some other country where they have to pay for it. People don’t do that without a reason. But Canadians are better off than people in some other countries with government-controlled medical care, because they have the United States right next door, in case their medical problems get too serious to rely on their own system. But where are Americans to turn if we become like Canada? Where are we to go when we need better medical treatment than Washington bureaucrats will let us have? Mexico? The Caribbean?” –Hoover Institution economist Thomas Sowell

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