Postmodern politics: It’s all about the narrative

 

Commentators have called it the single most important story of the Obama years.” It is the story of the thoroughgoing ignorance of the Obama regime bolstered by the all-but complete incompetence of the American media.—on whose ignorance and stupididy the Obama White House relied.

Across the US, wherever people gather to talk national security, the hot topic for days now has been the New York Times Magazine’s big interview with Ben Rhodes, President Obama’s foreign policy guru-cum-salesman. Especially inside the Beltway, Mr. Rhodes’ pointed comments about his work—particularly his admissions about manipulation of the media to sell Mr. Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran—have caused a stir that’s unlikely to die down soon.

What Rhodes admitted is essentially what every clear-eyed critic of the Iran deal has been saying al along: that it does nothing to tie that regimes’s hands in acquiring a nuclear weapon, and the Obama administration knew this, but didnt care..

But the greater revelation even that that, which on its own should be the story of the Obama years, is

1. to the White House, the domestic politics of having a deal was of far greater importance than anything the deal said; and
2. they could rely upon an incompetent press gallery to sell the deal to the American public.

These last two points were made simply as frank admissions, as if they should be thoroughly uncontroversial. It’s not just that the press gallery is chockful of left-wing zombies --- although they are --

Mr. Rhodes made it plain that the reporters he deals with every day—that’s the essence of his job—are idiots.
    “They literally know nothing,” he explained. “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns.” It’s difficult to deny the truth of that statement, and any journalist who’s being honest won’t try. With the decline of foreign bureaus, a distressing number of those reporting on national security and foreign affairs are pretty much as Mr. Rhodes described them.

And it’s not just the press gallery. Rhodes himself, Obama;s senior foreign-policy advisor, has no apparent quilfications for the job either – a failed novelist, a lecturer in creative writing, and precisely zero background in international relations.

As one commentator decribes it, this is idiots led by idiots.

But it really should be no surprise that a 'creative writer' is essentially in charge of advice to a seniot department of state, because today policy it's not about reality, it's all about crafting “the narrative.'

If you control the narrative, you don't just control what gets reported. You control what people see and hear.

This is the era of postmodern in political policy: not how it is, but how it appears. So why wouldn’t policymakers be taking advice from a writer of fiction?

This bullshit is all-pervasive.

The fuss about John Campbell leaving TV3 was totally predicated along these lines.It wasn’t because he rated his fine diction that Martyn Bradbury et al were all so incensed at his departure. It as because he saw him as an ideological brother. The line about him being NZ’s finest boradcaster? That was just “narrative,” spun for

John Key’s failed tax cut promises? Don’t worry, just control “the narrative” about taking off “the sharp edges of the recession” and then dangle them again next election.

Central bankers and their economists implicated in global financial meltdown? No worries, just write a narraitve about how it was the markets that failed, not their models.

British voters eventually threw up their hands at the lashings of spin that Tony Blairs ultimately-failed administration brought into office. But all he was doing was applying postmodernism to politics: that it’s not about controlling reality, it’s all about controlling appearances.

It is what the astute Ayn Rand used to call The Primancy of Consciousness in Action.

The Obama team knew this all from day one. They were the boy heroes of “crafting the narrative.” What else are “ Hope and Change” if not a triumph of story over reality.

Asked in his early days as president

'What's the particular requirement of the president that no one else can do?'
[Obama] answers: 'What the president can do, that nobody else can do, is tell a story to the American people' about where we are as a nation and should be."

As an incredulous Peggy Noonan commented at the time:

"Tell a story to the American people? That's your job? Not adopting good policies? Not defending the nation? Storytelling?!" [Emphasis her’s]

After Ben Rhodes’s revelations about the reality behind the ‘narrative’ woven by fiction writers around the Iran deal, we now know that is quite literally true.

.

The ACTUAL State of the Union #SOTU

Last night Obama delivered his annual State of the Union speech.

Here, however, in one array, is the actual State of the Union. Nowhere near as pretty as his speech . . .

. . . which, in fact, folds like a pup tent in a storm under a simple fact-check:

[Pic by Zero Hedge]

Quote of the day: On the happiness (or otherwise) of dictators

"It’s a great mistake to think that dictators are motivated by a rational
calculation of their own happiness. They are motivated by an irrational
obsession with raw power, power for its own sake, which they pursue far
beyond the point where its benefits might conceivably justify the effort.
Whatever opulence there is in their palaces, whatever empty satisfaction
there may be in the pomp and circumstance of their office, it cannot outweigh
the burden of living in fear, doomed to endless scheming and intrigue."
~ Robert Tracinski, from his article ‘No, Obama Critics Don't Admire Vladimir Putin’

Iran has a deal

The negotiations were hardfought …

… and conclusive:

RELATED POSTS:

• “[The crisis] began in 2002, when at a public press conference in Washington DC, an Iranian opposition group, the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MKO) exposed details of undeclared Iranian nuclear activities, which had progressed much further than anyone had suspected. At least, almost anyone. While it was the MKO that revealed Iran’s nuclear secrets to the world, diplomats in the know told me the information had come from Israeli intelligence.
      “It was perhaps a fitting start to a crisis that has lasted almost exactly 13 years. From the beginning it is Israel that has – not unreasonably – driven international suspicion over Iran’s nuclear ambitions and it is Israel that today, along with Saudi Arabia, is smarting the most at the deal that has just been made between Iran and the P5+1 (the five Security Council powers and Germany).”
  An historic day for Iran and a horrifying one for Israel – David Patrikarakos, SPECTATOR
• “The optimistic Iranian view is grounded in the expectation that the deal will usher in a normalization of relations between Iran and the West, lifting both the sanctions regime and the threat of war. …
      “… the mood in Tehran is, in general, ‘very happy.’ Ordinary Iranians ‘obviously like what has happened’ primarily because ‘they expect money to arrive, which will help the economy and create jobs.’
      “But he noted several critical caveats. To begin with, expectations among ordinary Iranians are very high: they expect substantial economic improvement, and if that fails to materialise, [there is] a likelihood of serious political instability, which “could go in a terrible direction for Iran.’
      “For many years, the Iranian government has, with some good reason, blamed the U.S., Europe and their sanctions regime for the economic suffering of Iranians. ‘They no longer have that pretext, which means they have to deliver,’ he said.”
  Iranians' View of the Nuclear Deal: Optimistic, with Significant Caveats – Glenn Greenwald & Murtaza Hussain, THE INTERCEPT
• “Since 1979, when the revolutionary Islamists took power in Iran, the regime has hoped to be treated as a normal power even while behaving as a rogue, terrorist state. For years it has sought to super-charge its regional and international standing by acquiring nuclear weapons technology – a stated ambition which has repeatedly been proven by the regime’s game of cat-and-mouse with the international inspectorate of the IAEA. For years Iran has repeatedly been caught lying and cheating, with undeclared facilities and secret facilities built to enrich uranium not to the levels needed for civilian use (in a country flowing with natural energy resources) but to weapons-grade level.
      “Thanks to the Vienna deal the Obama administration claims that it has managed to bring Iran’s nuclear project under a more rigorous international watch and so to have avoided military conflict with the country. In reality America and her partners (including Britain) have been out-negotiated from the start.”
  The Iranian regime is anti-Western and anti-Semitic. Can we really trust its nuclear deal? – Douglas Murray, THE SPECTATOR
• “It is worth noting what the Iranians say the deal entails. This is from FARS, Iran’s news agency:
          Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani said his country has achieved all its four goals in the
      agreement that his foreign minister Zarif signed with the six world powers in Vienna on Tuesday.
          President Rouhani said his nation started talks with the world powers in a bid to remove all
      sanctions while maintaining its nuclear program and nuclear progress as two main goals…
          None of the Iranian nuclear facilities will be dismantled or decommissioned.
          Furthermore, nuclear research and development activities on all types of centrifuges, including  
      advanced IR-6 and IR-8 machines, will continue. …
  How Iran Describes the Nuclear Deal – POWERLINE
• “Barack Obama has repeatedly signalled during the past six and a half years that that his No. 1 priority in foreign affairs is not China, not Russia, not Mexico, but Iran. He wants to bring Iran in from the cold, to transform the Islamic Republic into just another normal member of the so-called international community, thereby ending decades of its aggression and hostility. In itself, this is a worthy goal; it’s always good policy to reduce the number of enemies. (It brings to mind Nixon going to China.) The problem lies, of course, in the execution.
  Could the Iran Deal Be the Worst International Accord of All Time? – Daniel Pipes, NRO
  
• “It seems to me inevitable that, given the obvious flaws in the Obama administration’s nuclear deal, Iran will obtain nuclear weapons (barring outside military intervention) at roughly the time of its choosing with or without the deal. It also seems clear that, with or without this deal, the international sanctions regime will largely collapse, thanks to President Obama’s decisions first to negotiate with Iran and second to loosen sanctions before a real agreement was reached….
      “There is …no likely upside to Obama’s deal.”
  The Iran Deal - What Difference, at this Point, Does it Make? – Paul Mirengoff, POWERLINE
• “In defending the nuclear deal reached with Iran in Vienna today, President Barack Obama said that the agreement cut off Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon. In fact, it does the opposite. The deal makes it far easier for Iran to develop nuclear weapons for four basic reasons.
      “First, it allows Iran to continue hiding much of its nuclear research. Second, its main restrictions last for only eight years. Third, it lets Iran continue developing ballistic missiles. And fourth, it provides billions of dollars in sanctions relief that Iran will use to further its nuclear aims.”
  Fact Check: Deal Makes it Easier for Iran to Develop Nukes – Joel Pollak, BREITBART
  Here’s the Truth About 6 of Obama’s Iran Deal Claims – Michaela Dodge, THE DAILY SIGNAL
• “The agreement legitimises Iran’s nuclear program, allows it to retain core nuclear facilities, permits it to continue research in areas that will dramatically speed its breakout to the bomb should it choose to flout the deal, but also enables it to wait out those restrictions and proceed to become a nuclear threshold state with full international legitimacy. Here’s how….”
  16 ways of looking at a catastrophe – David Horowitz, TIMES OF ISRAEL
• And finally, remember this?
  

[Cartoons by Michael Ramirez, Investor’s Business Daily. Hat tips Zero Hedge, Powerline, Small Dead Animals]

Cunliffe: A Future Reality-Show PM?

After last night’s half-hour broadcast in what was once considered a “news hour,” you can now see why David Cunliffe had resisted even the agreeable John Campbell’s invitation to visit him in his home: because his wife is a bigger star  than he is.

At least, that’s what you’d think if you believed all the feedback on Twitter. The word you’re looking for is “gushing” …

Mind you, Campbell was very agreeable, wasn’t he, posing the question of whether this was even journalism we were watching.

But given Cunliffe’s earlier resistance to having Campbell inside his home, you wonder whether a Cunliffe premiership (if it should ever come to pass) might look more like Obama’s careful management of the media rather than the warts-and-all access we’re (somewhat) used to. Some of the White House Press Corps are calling Obama a reality-show president. With our ever-compliant media here, is this our future too?

And the crowd went … mild

That awkward moment when you do a show and only one person bothers to clap.

[Hat tip Bosch Fawstin for both video and quip]

Guest Post: Ten Things to Expect from Obamacare in 2014

Since the arguments about partial government shutdown and debt ceilings were linked to opposition to ObamaCare, I figured some of you might like to know something about it. So here, courtesy of the Casey Daily Dispatch, is Dan Steinhart introducing Dr Elizabeth Lee Vliet to brief you.

Obamacare's health exchanges opened on October 1, with a system so crummy that even the Washington Post is calling it a disaster.

Though Obamacare has been America’s law of the land for 3½ years, this marks its first major milestone that impacts Americans on an individual level. That's because Obama designed his crowning achievement to phase in slowly, over nine years—probably a good idea considering it's a hive of onerous regulations and 20-something new taxes that, if unleashed all at once, would wallop the US economy. Better to boil the frogs slowly.

The next major milestone is approaching fast. On January 1, the individual mandate will take effect, forcing all Americans to either buy health insurance or pay a penalty. Well, almost all Americans. If you happen to be friends with Obama, or a donor, union, or political ally who supports him, you may get a waiver, which you'll read more about below.

Given that the impact of Obamacare will only grow from here on out, I asked Dr. Lee Vliet—physician and acclaimed Obamacare expert—what we should expect as the calendar turns to 2014.

Importantly, Dr. Vliet is independent in every sense of the word. Not only is she an independent physician, she's also a registered political Independent, and has no ties to pharmaceutical, insurance, political, or any other interests. Like any good doctor, she is professionally concerned with one thing and one thing only: her patients. You'll find her criticisms of Obamacare quite harsh, but only because she's disturbed about the impact it will have on her patients…

Ten Things to Expect from Obamacare in 2014
Elizabeth Lee Vliet, M.D.

It's been clear to anyone paying attention that the October "rollout" of Obamacare has been a turbulent, confusing disaster. Sloppy IT systems and technological failures combined to cripple Obamacare's sign-up systems. Security flaws put Americans at risk for identity theft.

In an almost comical understatement, President Obama summarized these massive failures as "a few glitches." I think that Luke Chung, IT expert and president of database solutions firm FMS, explained the situation much more accurately:

"What should clearly be an enterprise quality, highly scalable software application felt like it wouldn't pass a basic code review. It appears the people who built the site don't know what they're doing, never used it and didn't test it."

Chung went on to call it a "technological disaster."

Think about what this ineptitude means in the bigger debate about Obamacare. The administration spent 3½ years and $698 million of taxpayers' money to develop this software. They've known since earlier this year that the system wasn't ready to support the rollout of the exchanges. Yet they proceeded anyway, apparently unconcerned about their faulty software costing Americans millions of hours of frustration and lost productivity.

These same bureaucrats continue to assume more and more control of our medical care. What does their incompetence say about how they will handle making life-or-death medical care decisions?

Like a parasite taking over its host, Obamacare will commandeer almost 20% of our economy, crowding out private options. With 2014 fast approaching, what should we expect in its next phase?

Here's my list Top Ten list for 2014:

Rand and Cruz in the House

During his marathon 21-hour speech on the US Senate floor yesterday, filibustering against the failing ObamaCare plan, Senator Ted Cruz read from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged …

[Hat tip Julian D.]

Obama jumps the warmist shark [updated]

With most US businesses still struggling to make a profit, the US economy struggles to fire. So Obama has chosen to pour more cold water on the still weak and sporadic flames.

With the globe simply failing to do what the global warming models say it will, the global warming “science” has arrived at a failed dead end. So he’s declared the debate over the science “obsolete.” (That’ll do it.)

And so called “green jobs” have been costing the US taxpayer up to $2 million per job in subsidies. So he’s elected to “create” many more.

He calls it his Climate Action Plan of June 25 2013.  This can’t fail to end badly.

(Is he really this desperate to get Edward Snowden off the front pages?)

[Cartoon is Blunt, by Knutz]

It’s called a constitution

Already, in the first 100 days of his second term, the Prez is discovering that even in its current state a constitutional republic is not quite yet a dictatorship.

Which is the real point of having a written constitution, right?

Your second time…

You might have seen the patronising approach the Obama campaign has taken towards women?

The likes of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued that women were just as capable of rational deliberation as men [writes Rich Lowry]. The conceit of the Obama campaign is that, to the contrary, they are quite susceptible to a few powerful dog whistles and unable to see beyond their gender. To paraphrase a notorious post on the Obama campaign’s Tumblr page, “Ladies vote like their lady parts depend on it.”
    The twenty-something filmmaker and actress Lena Dunham captured the sensibility perfectly in an instantly mocked video likening voting for Obama for the first time to having sex for the first time. “You want to do it with a great guy,” Dunham gushes. As the conservative writer John O’Sullivan noted, if Dunham can really compare “the excitement of her first vote to losing her virginity, one can only encourage her to persevere: Sex really will get better.”
    Dunham’s pitch is fashioned, of course, to young, single women in particular. (One hopes that by age 35 or so, older and wiser, she will look back on the spot with embarrassment.) But single women in general are key to Obama’s coalition. He wants government to occupy an outsized role in their lives, as captured in the symbolism of his campaign. Obama was implicitly the husband of Julia, the cartoon character created to demonstrate the cradle-to-grave assistance rendered by his programs; Obama is implicitly Lena Dunham’s lover.

I hope she thinks more deeply about her second time round…

[Pic hat tip Catallaxy Files]

R.I.P. America—and It Serves You Right!

In case you weren’t already aware, with the decision overnight by the US Supreme Court to not strike down ObamaCare as unconstitutional—despite even its own own advocates being unable to show how it could be—it’s now clearly evident that, as a Constitutional Republic, the United States of America is now extinct.

Lindsay Perigo has more…

America, qua Land of the Free and Home of the Brave, just died. Qua travesty thereof, good riddance. Cowards and cretins—now a majority of Americans—don't deserve the liberty that has just been definitively removed from them. They don't deserve the freedom they won't miss.
    Even without the Supreme Court's thoroughly anti-American decision on Obamacare today, the Founding Fathers would scarcely recognize the semi-police state that their republic has become…

Read on here.

One-minute budget Obamanomics

Despite the headline talk of cuts, Obama’s budget plan is to use the miracle of big numbers to do nothing at all (much like British Prime Minister Cameron). This short video explains the ruse:

[Hat tip to an anonymous commenter]

Peter Schiff et al: The Day After [update 7]

The day after the Republicans forced the resignation of Speaker Pelosi and gained the biggest political turnaround since the War, Peter Schiff asks, which bums will the voters throw out in 2012?

And the day after Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke (“Helicopter Ben” to his friends) announces it’s about to start spraying around a half-trillion dollars worth of paper out of his whirly-bird, Schiff ponders whether this golden shower from the Fed presages an even bigger paper shower from the government—and wonders how that will sit with the people who just voted out last year’s big-spending bums.

UPDATE 1: PaulHsieh tells America’s newly-elected representatives that they should Celebrate Tuesday's election results, “but don't forget who put you in office and why — namely, the independent-minded Tea Party voters.” If they’re going to “dance with the one that brung them,” he says, they need to stay true to three basic principles…

1) Americans don’t want “ObamaLite”…
The 2010 vote was a powerful message from Americans rejecting the socialist policies of President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid — including the bailouts, the out-of-control federal spending, the higher taxes, and the nationalized health care scheme.
Voters elected Republicans to halt and reverse these policies — not compromise to pass watered-down versions of those same bad ideas…
2) Don’t mistake this as a mandate to pursue a divisive “social conservative” agenda
The Republicans’ electoral rebound has been driven by millions of independent voters like the Colorado small businessman Ron Vaughn, who told the New York Times, “I want the Democrats out of my pocket and Republicans out of my bedroom…
3) Respect the Constitution
The newly elected (or re-elected) congressmen and senators must remember that rightful authority flows from the U.S. Constitution…Nothing enraged Tea Party protestors more than seeing elected officials betray this solemn promise … and although some pundits like Dahlia Lithwick think it’s “weird” for legislators to consider whether a proposed bill is constitutional, that is indeed one of their primary responsibilities.

Read the whole article: GOP: Dance With The One Who Brung You.

UPDATE 2: Fresh from celebrating victories with “a couple hundred U.S. patriots at the Tea Party Patriot's election night party at the Capitol Hyatt in Washington, D.C.,” invigorated Christchurch blogger Trevor Loudon counts off some of the wins and losses.  “A Good night Was Had by Freedom Lovers - Dems and Communists, Not So Much.” He concludes:

The G.O.P. now controls Congress and has made big gains in the Senate and Governor's races. It's goodbye to your favorite House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and hello John Boehner the new Republican House Majority Leader!
This is the Republicans' last chance to prove they can be trusted to live up to their own principles.
If they don't , they will be finished - and so may we be all.

UPDATE 3: Scott Holleran reckons that it’s now time for the Tea Party movement “to shed its dingbats,” and for everyone else to begin choosing up sides in the power struggle(s) to come.

Having lost its highest profile races partly due to their blatant proselytizing for religion in government , the Tea Party movement, which represents a rejection of Big Government, should oppose the mixture of religion and state.
    Whatever else Tuesday’s election results may mean, the Tea Party movement clearly has the potential to shed its dingbats, to paraphrase Harry Binswanger, sponsor candidates who stand for man’s rights and capitalism, and restore the Republicans to the ideals of Lincoln, Jefferson, and reason. In the meantime, watch for strange, sudden alliances, power struggles, and a political shift in conflict from left/right to religious/secular.
    With the core principles of the GOP in play, a radically restructured Congress, and an overwhelmingly rejected but strikingly dishonest and divisive American president, it’s best to choose a side now; the battle has not yet begun.

UPDATE 4: David Galland from Casey Research tosses more cold water on the fresh blossoms of economic and political hope that many American readers may be feeling today, “I’m more convinced than ever that we’re about to go through a crash of epic proportions,” he says. “It won’t just be bad, it’s going to be horrific, worse than even I can imagine.”  And there’s really nothing even the few newly elected energiser bunnies can do about that. America has already made its fiscal bed—and now it’s too late. It’s already flat broke.

The debt problems are now so extreme that the Republicans, tea partiers, and desperate Democrats now rediscovering good old fiscal sanity have no feasible way of making a dent.   Even the stingiest Republicans are only talking about freezing spending at 2008 levels. For the record, that still means an annual federal budget deficit of just shy of half a trillion dollars.
Add to that approximately $150 billion in annual state budget shortfalls. And that’s before the economy is knocked sideways by the onrushing tidal wave of retiring baby boomers… or body slammed by the inevitable increase in U.S. interest rate expenses, as rates move up sharply from today’s unsustainable historic lows.
    The point is that, even to get back to 2008’s budget deficits, will require cutting almost a trillion dollars in federal spending. And that’s just for starters.

Sorry folks. Few Republicans, tea partiers or Democrats are even thinking in those terms. Which they would need to do to avert America’s coming sovereign debt tsunami, which is already tens of trillions of dollars underwater, and climbing fast. 

UPDATE 5:  Kris Sayce comments:

    Welcome to America’s Lost Decade
   …Or should that be Last Decade?
    This morning’s decision by the US Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) is the final act in American global economic dominance.
    If the US economy wasn’t already terminally ill, then this morning’s news from the FOMC has pushed it into terminal illness……
    I tell you what, for a bunch of people who are supposedly super-bright, what they’ve done is nothing short of criminally comical….

UPDATE 6: Here’s a nice parable explaining what all Ben Bernanke’s counterfeit trillions are doing.

UPDATE 7:  Congressman Ron Paul suggests that both he and his son, new Senator Randall Paul, will introduce 'End the Fed' legislation first day in office! (HT Capitalism)

Obama: Kenyan or Keynesian?

Here’s a little light relief while the American polling system grinds its gears (for which the Vodka Pundits’s drunk blogging of the results at least keeps the interest up).

A pair of suit-clad roving interviewers roamed the thickets of Jon Stewart’s Rally for Sanity asking whether the punters therein thought Obama was a Keynesian.

The results were hilarious. (This was a rally for sanity, remember.)

As Eric Crampton says, from whom I pinched this, “Happy election day, Americans. Somehow your voting system has to extract collective wisdom from these kinds of inputs.”

‘The Agnew Clinic’ – Thomas Eakins

Two great artists focus on the essentials of medicine. Eakins’s ‘Agnew Clinic’ (above) is of a piece with his earlier ‘Gross Clinic’ – two portrayals that “clearly take the relation of hand and mind as their subject. Mind is vividly represented in both…

    “Eakins chooses to depict Gross and Agnew not in their studies as thinkers, but very much at work as doers. As surgeons and teachers in the midst of an operation, surrounded by hordes of others with various claims on their attention, they are in the middle of the most complex course of actions imaginable. This is a world in which action counts as much as thought–or, to put it more accurately, a world in which action can't be separated from thought..
   “The point of both paintings is precisely the ways that [he surgeons] Gross and Agnew bridge the realms of thinking and doing. Eakins brings the point home to us through a series of contrasts in which the meaningful connection of the two realms–of being with doing, of mental impulses to manual expressions–is flawed or absent in various ways. There are dozens of arms and hands visible (and invisible) in both paintings, and their sheer number and prominence draw our attention to them, but one of the things we slowly realize is that there are only a few in which hand and mind are linked in a disciplined, productive relationship–one in which mind informs hand and hand informs mind…” [Ray Carney, “Forming the hand of the mind”]

And why, to highlight that relationship, would Eakins choose a surgeon as his subject? Let another great artist offer you a very timely answer from her greatest novel.  The novel’s protagonist has just asked the “Dr Agnew’ of his day why he resigned:

    ‘I quit when medicine was placed under State control, some years ago,’ said Dr. Hendricks. ‘Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation? Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill? That was what I would not place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun. I would not let them dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or my choice of patients, or the amount of my reward.
    “ ‘I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything—except the desires of the doctors. Men considered only the 'welfare' of the patients, with no thought for those who were to provide it. That a doctor should have any right, desire or choice in the matter, was regarded as irrelevant selfishness; his is not to choose, they said, only 'to serve.'
    “ ‘That a man who's willing to work under compulsion is too dangerous a brute to entrust with a job in the stockyards—never occurred to those who proposed to help the sick by making life impossible for the healthy. I have often wondered at the smugness with which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle my mind—yet what is it that they expect to depend on, when they lie on an operating table under my hands? Their moral code has taught them to believe that it is safe to rely on the virtue of their victims. Well, that is the virtue I have withdrawn. Let them discover the kind of doctors that their system will now produce. Let them discover, in their operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man whose life they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of man who resents it—and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn't.’ "
             - Ayn Rand, in Atlas Shrugged 

Goodnight America.

NB: Three articles that make the necessary further points:

• "The Virtue of Treating People Like Animals: Why Human Health Care Should Mirror Veterinary Health Care"
• "Government-Run Health Care vs. the Hippocratic Oath"
• “OK Tea Party: Put up — or Shut Up”
• “Silver Lining”

90 seconds to ObamaCare [update 8]

If you can’t follow the rules, you just change the rules—at least, that’s the way you do it if you’re a politician.

Want to know the process whereby Obama’s nationalised healthcare is about to become law? The Democrats’ post-modern law-making process explained in ninety seconds [hat tip Vulcan’s Hammer]:

UPDATE 1: Rep. Alcee Hastings speaks:

    “There ain’t no rules here, we’re trying to accomplish something….All this talk about rules…. When the deal goes down… we make ‘em up as we go along.” [Hat tip The New Clarion]

UPDATE 2: “Get Ready for Health Insurance Slumlords,” says Brian Schwartz.

    “ObamaCare would force insurers to behave as slumlords, much like rent control does.” [Hat tip Thrutch]

UPDATE 3: “Mandatory Health Insurance; Wrong for Massachusetts, Wrong for America.”

UPDATE 4: If ObamaCare Passes Later Today..., then Paul Hsieh at the Freedom & Individual Rights in Medicine (FIRM) blog has some links for you.

UPDATE 5:

    “The sun has now set and risen again a total of 275 times since it first shone down on the Obama health plan.  Barring some unforeseen snag, the House of Representatives will hold the final vote on that legislation around 6pm Eastern Time today. It will do so without ever laying eyes on a complete cost estimate…”

Continue reading Michael Cannon’s ObamaCare Cost-Estimate Watch, Day #275.  And there’s this, ObamaCare’s Actual Price Tag:

    “To hear Democrats tell it, the Congressional Budget Office projects the legislation would cost a mere $940 billion over the next 10 years….the actual cost of the bill is nearly $3 trillion….
    “Yet this legislation would set in motion political forces that would make additional spending inevitable…”

UPDATE 6:

• THE TIMES (London), ‘ Barack Obama poised to win healthcare battle’: “The Bill, if passed, will bring near-universal health coverage to the US for the first time in the country’s history by requiring individuals to buy insurance and subsidise cover for those who cannot afford it… The passions fuelled by more than a year of furious argument from town hall meetings in Arizona to the floor of the Senate were on display again in Washington at the weekend.”
• POWERLINE, ‘Silver Linings’: “With Stupak's collapse [NB: Stupak is “an anti-abortion Democrat”], passage of the Democrats' government medicine bill is assured…”
• FOX NEWS: ‘House OKs Key Step Toward Health Insurance Overhaul’: “The House voted 224-206 Sunday to approve the rules for debate of a massive health insurance overhaul that evidently satisfies few but is viewed by House Democrats as better than nothing.”
• NY TIMES, ‘House Clears Path for Final Health Vote’: “By a vote of 224-206, the House of Representatives approved the key procedural measure necessary to pass major health care legislation…”
• CNN.COM, ‘Here's the latest on what's happening on Capitol Hill...’  “The vote to begin the debate on landmark U.S. health care legislation was 224-206, a good indication that Democrats have enough votes to pass the landmark measure itself…”
• ABC NEWS: ‘House Passes Health Care Bill, Sweeping Legislation on Its Way to Become Law.’ “Anti-Abortion Democrats' Decision to Vote 'Yes' Puts Bill Over the Top.”

UPDATE 7: Alex Epstein at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights observes “The White House says we ‘just can’t wait’ for its government solution to our health care problems. But today’s health-care problems were created by yesterday’s government ‘solutions.’”

    “Since the 1940s, on the idea that health care is a ‘right’ that others must provide, the government has made a growing number of Americans collectively responsible for each other’s care--through Medicare, Medicaid, and collectivized employer plans. These government programs incentivized people to spend much, much more on health care--since they were spending other people’s money--and warped the market. Without such intervention, we should expect health care to be like laser eye-surgery, which is not covered by Medicare or government insurance laws, but gets better and cheaper all the time.
    “America ‘can’t wait’--for the government to get out of health care. Disentangling government from that field is the task of true reform.”

Which, of course, is precisely the opposite aim to ObamaCare.

UPDATE 8: “Darkness Descends”

Stimulating corruption

Is this a “Green New Deal,” or eco-fascism? Corporate capitalism, Obama style?

Or just big fat corruption.

Hat tip Craig Ceely, who says,

    “I especially liked Rachel Maddow's triumphant "Ta-Daa....!!" at the end. Yeah, way to understand economics, Rachel.”

It’s sure as hell appropriate the story involves windows.

Take a look at the videos, then read up about the character of Orren Boyle in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.  To paraphrase Santayana, "Those who do not learn from fiction are condemned to live it."

Cuddling enemies while telling Israel to go to hell [update 4]

Before his election Mr Obama said of foreign affairs that he would talk to anyone, even murderers.

And he has.

But “anyone” seems to exclude allies.

“The governments of Iran, China, and Russia (among other regimes) have all, in various ways, insulted the U.S.and its president with no reaction, at least not a public one.”

All things are equal to the Obama Administration.

When Saudi Arabian leaders fund terrorism against America, Obama bows.

When Tehran, the home of Shi’ite terrorism, sends missiles into Israel by proxy, insurgents into Iraq by command, and publicly beats thousands of Iranians for the sin of protest, the Obama Administration offers gently soothing words.

When Hamas fires those missiles into Israel, blows up buses full of human beings, and calls for Jihad against America, the Obama Administration sends aid.

But when Israel, the freest country in the Middle East, builds houses—yes, build houses--the American State Department can only make threats, talk about “insults,” and deliver demands it knows can not be met.

It was once said of basic diplomacy that the principle to be followed was to  “keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” The Obama Administration can’t even be that cynical. They appear to believe in keeping their enemies close, and telling their allies to go to hell.

No wonder the number of their friends is dwindling so fast.

NB: Some background here:
Barack Hussein Obama vs Israel- SULTAN KNISH.
What Obama is Actually Trying to Do in Israel – THE ATLANTIC

UPDATE 1: Meanwhile, in Iran, a student is to be executed for throwing a stone during last year’s protests against electoral fraud. 

 

Shall we run a sweepstake on how long it will be before anyone from the Obama Administration denounces that? 

 

Or before my anti-Israel commenters do?

 

UPDATE 2: [From Ed Cline’s Rule of Reason website]:

    “Biden, a buffoon, will get over the humiliation. He has the resilience of a rubber mouse pad.
    “Obama and Company would rather not see that construction take place because it would upset the Palestinians. The stateless Palestinians, you see, seem to be a better ‘client state’ and ally to the U.S. than is Israel. The Palestinians do not recognize Israel’s right to exist -- indeed, Israel is missing from the maps Palestinian school books -- while Israel is expected to recognize their right to swamp Israel with its stateless manqués and so destroy it. The land at issue is land Israel won during the 1967 war.
    “Why would Obama and company side with losers? What could they possible gain in their ostensive fantasy of seeing Palestinians mix and mingle peacefully with Israelis in some Hegelian thesis-antithesis apotheosis? Daniel Pipes offers some advice to Obama, Clinton, and other policymaking denizens of the White House:

    ‘It concerns not a life-and-death issue, such as the menace of Iran's nuclear buildup or Israel's right to defend itself from Hamas predations, but the triviality of the timing of a decision to build new housing units in Israel's capital city. Wiser heads will insist that White House amateurs end this tempest in a teapot and revert to normal relations.’

    “That advice is premised on the assumption that Obama and Company care about Iran’s nuclear buildup and Israel’s right to defend itself against Iran and the stateless beggars of non-existent Palestine, armed as they are by Hamas and Hezbollah. It presumes that the White House’s amateurs value ‘normal relations’ with Israel. It asks that Obama and his fellow amateurs appreciate that it is a matter of life-and-death for Israel.
    “But, in truth, Obama does not value Israel. He would rather see it compromise and negotiate itself out of existence. Just as he would rather see America submit to socialism.”

UPDATE 3: And meanwhile, while Biden and Obama and Clinton (Mrs) keep talking about “insults” from Israel, deadly rocket attacks against Israel began again this morning from her peace-loving neighbours in Gaza.  And do you think anyone of Biden or Obama or Clinton (Mrs) have taken time out from denouncing Israel for building houses to denounce the attacks, to denounce the Al-Qaeda linked attackers, to denounce Hamas—whose responsibility it is to control Gaza—or to denounce Tehran, who supplies the materiel for the rockets.  Do you think for one moment they’d open their yaps to denounce that?

Don’t make me laugh.  That might look too much like taking a moral stand.

UPDATE 4: Cartoonist John Cox posts a topical old favourite from his Cox and Forkum days …

 

America needs *you.* Now! [UPDATE 3]

This week is a critical week in the life of modern America. By the end of the week, Obamacare will either be on the books or in the ashcan. For America—and for the world that relies on American medical innovation—this is the week that really matters.

How close is it?  According to Paul Hsieh, in an email posted at Thrutch, it’s so close that the Democrats are actually “a few votes shy of the majority they need”!  So after all the shouting and hollering, why are they taking the risk this week of putting it to the vote when they’re not even sure they have enough votes? Because, says Hsieh,

    the Democrats are … (correctly) concluding that time is not on their side. They have made the calculation that if they push for it now, then maybe then can squeeze out the last few votes via a combination of threats and bribes...
   “On the other hand they recognize that if they wait much longer, then when these wavering Congressmen go back home for the Easter recess, they will get an earful from their constituents who are strongly opposed to the bill, and they'll lose even more support.”

So if they delay, they will fail.  If they don’t delay, they might fail.  On this calculation has Nancy Pelosi taken the bill to the house this week to get it passed. She hopes.

It’s your job, my American friends, to see that it doesn’t. To make sure that her hopes are dashed. Gird your loins now and take heart from the fact that, as Paul says, for both sides this is now or never.

Pelosi’s peremptory action shows that, no matter how much of a brave face she puts on it, you--her opponents--are winning. So keep the pressure on.  Write to your congressman. Tell your friends to write to their congressman.  And don’t just write: phone, fax, and e-mail too--and more than once.

What to tell them? Take Paul’s advice:

    If you need intellectual ammunition for them, one of my personal favorites is from the AFCM website:
    "Fifty Fallacies About Health Care" by Richard Ralston
    http://afcm.org/fallacies.html
    Jared Rhoads' Lucidicus Project also has a good set of OpEds:
    http://lucidicus.org/editorials/archive.php
    And of course, FIRM has its archive of articles/OpEds:
    http://westandfirm.org/articles.html
    “. . . This is the endgame, folks. Most political observers regard the health care bill as a 50-50 ‘toss-up’ or ‘too close to call.’ It really could go either way. What happens this week will set the course of this great country (for good or for ill) for decades to come.
    “Your voice could be the critical difference in swaying the right one or two minds. If you value your lives and your freedom, the time to speak up is *now*!”

Do it.

UPDATE 1:  From the New Clarion: We Deem Thee… LAW!

    The Democrats are intent on passing their health care reform even if it kills them. There is currently some question as to whether or not Nancy Pelosi has the votes to pass the Senate bill in the House. But the Dems have figured out a postmodern solution to this problem: pass the bill without a vote… Not reading a bill is old news. Now the House can pass a bill without even voting on it! 
“This postmodern logic fits with Nancy Pelosi’s reasoning on why we need this bill:

But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.’”

UPDATE 2: Oops.  Amit was posting Paul Hsieh’s call to arms. Corrected now.

UPDATE 3: Talking with a friend about the motivation for what looks like a doomed Dems’ bayonet charge, rushing blindly ahead with virtually no prospect of success, we both drew the comparison with the tunnel crash in Atlas. Anyone else see it that way?