President Obama’s speech on health care reform was both bold and informative. He started by explaining how the system is utterly broken. He ended with a rousing tribute to the late Ted Kennedy, making the case that reform in our time is not just a practical initiative, but a moral imperative.
In between, he set out to dispel all the spurious rumors and bogus claims made by the opposition of reform, private citizens and public officials alike. Obama remarked, “The best example is the claim ... that we plan to set up panels of bureaucrats with the power to kill off senior citizens. Now, such a charge would be laughable if it weren’t so cynical and irresponsible.”
This was an applause line, and the majority of congress stood up in solidarity with Obama’s anger over such shameless fear-mongering, but several prominent Republican did not stand or clap, apparently displeased with the president coming out against euthanasia.
The bitter theatrics of the GOP reveal how out of touch they really are, and how quickly they are marching towards irrelevancy. The audacity of hope versus the audacity of nope.
Obama then touched on the rumor that illegal immigrants would receive government health care, something specifically addressed in the language of the bill:
Congressional Bill H.R. 3200, Sec. 246 no federal payment for undocumented aliens. “Nothing in this subtitle shall allow Federal payments for affordability credits on behalf of individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States.”
Enter from stage Right, the representative from South Carolina’s second district, Joe Wilson.
Joe Wilson: (suddenly) You Lie!
Obama: (looks on in annoyance) Not true.
Annoyance is perhaps, a soft word. Rewatching our president’s reaction on Youtube brings up two other words: surprise and disgust. I am an Obama supporter all the way, but I have to note that he would be ill prepared for British Parliament.
Some of the most entertaining television I have ever seen is the beyond lively debate that takes places between the opposing parties in British Parliament. There is taunting, heckling, laughing, jeers, cheers, and a generally unabated ruckus that party leaders, including the Prime Minister has to speak over to make their arguments heard. The astoundingly vocal opposition causes every minor detail in policy to be questioned and worked over, oftentimes in the face of undisguised mocking and merriment by their opponents.
One asks, is this a superior system? Would we have gone to war with Iraq if President Bush had been laughed at by some 40 democratic senators with Fox, CNN, and MSNBC cameras upon him? I’d like to think a less-than-talented orator such as Bush would have crumbled and caved, and the lives of almost 4,300 American soldiers would have been saved.
Where does civil discourse get us that angry, uninformed shouting cannot? A favorite remark of my father is how perhaps the greatest example of civil discourse in our nation’s history, the Lincoln/ Douglas debates which concerned slavery and states’ rights, did nothing to stop the inevitable feud that would lead to the Civil War.
So, again, is this a superior system?
Ultimately, no further review of British Parliament reveals itself to be more about time-wasting clownishness than actual deliberative legislating.
The lunacy of suspicion upon this president is frightening at times. To give perspective, just as the majority of conservatives or libertarians are not birthers, I myself was never a truther.
As much as I believed George W. Bush was a bad president, a terrible president, perhaps one the of the worst stewards of the executive branch our country has ever experienced, I never believed he was actively, intentionally trying to destroy America.
He just had atrocious policy. To hear the rhetoric spewed forth from the most shrill and paranoid of our grand electorate, you would think Obama was a robot sent from the future, intent on stripping away everything we hold dear about our constitution and sovereignty.
With his health care speech, I think Obama hit it out of the park, and Joe Wilson did him a favor. Fun fact: Joe Wilson’s likely opponent in the 2010 congressional race, Rob Miller, has raised over one million dollars in campaign funds since Wilson’s now infamous outburst.
Will politicking and manipulation of people’s worst fears ever be replaced by truth and moral goodness? The absurd and often ignorant nature of the health care debate proves an old axiom of Mark Twain’s “It’s not the people who don’t know something that cause the most trouble; it’s those who know something that just ain’t so.”
