March 15, 2010
New Column: Without Firing a Shot?
During the height of the Cold War, some feared the communists would take over the United States without firing a shot. Could it be that nearly a half-century later, we're on the verge of that becoming a reality?
President Barack Obama and Democratic congressmen won their respective elections -- no shots were fired -- and they are feverishly attempting to dismantle this nation's institutions, brick by brick.
The American people are getting a bird's-eye view of what the left, which completely dominates the Democratic Party, thinks of the Constitution, freedom and the right of the people to self-governance.
The people now attempting to govern us with an iron fist are Marxist-leaning in terms of not only the policies they support but also the ruthless tactics they employ to enact those policies into law.
As long as it served Obama's Machiavellian purposes to maintain a semblance of unity for his ambitious agenda, he donned his bipartisan cap. But as soon as he encountered intractable opposition from Republicans, God bless them, he began to show his true political colors.
Continue reading "New Column: Without Firing a Shot?"
Posted by David Limbaugh at 06:27 PM | Printer Friendly
March 11, 2010
Heads Liberals Win, Tails We Lose
The left habitually distorts and exaggerates to demonize and discredit its opponents but squeals like a stuck pig when conservatives use colorful language to call the left out. Unfortunately, some on the right encourage the left's squealing.
As for the liberals, it's hard to take them seriously when they register their indignation at, say, Sarah Palin for her "death panels" comment, other conservatives for describing Obama as a socialist or liberals as "liberals," or, most recently, Liz Cheney for calling seven Justice Department appointees the "al-Qaida Seven."
Liberals are the ones who knowingly lied in saying that "Bush lied; people died," that supply-side tax cuts are "just for the rich" and that Bush left people on the rooftops in New Orleans after Katrina because they were black. These weren't just harmless rhetorical barbs; they had and continue to have serious, substantively damaging consequences.
Nor are the above descriptions by Palin, Cheney and other conservatives a matter of tit for tat or a case of the left's wrong mitigating the right's. The conservatives' statements above are different because they have a strong ring of truth, and they are not just gratuitous; they serve the purpose of calling attention to what is truly going on.
I'm not advocating that we be uncivil or mean-spirited, but that we have the guts to tell the truth, using difficult-to-hear language when necessary. I dare say our failure to speak frankly and boldly has a lot to do with the horrible predicament we're in in this country. Speaking a little more truth to political correctness would be helpful. But the left's tactic of whining and crying foul at anything it chooses to be offended by, echoed by genteel enablers on the right, intimidates many from expressing truth for fear of public condemnation.
Continue reading "Heads Liberals Win, Tails We Lose"
Posted by David Limbaugh at 05:21 PM | Printer Friendly
March 08, 2010
Obama vs. Insurers and the People, Part 2
President Barack Obama obviously has no qualms about slandering people or industries that interfere with his agenda. In the same creepy manner he defamed the Cambridge Police Department without benefit of the facts, he is scapegoating the insurance companies based on his distorted version of facts.
In the past week, he has ratcheted up his war on insurance companies, who, he apparently figures, must be destroyed if he is to accomplish his Utopian dream of socialized health care. He made them the focus of his wrath again, in his umpteenth health care speech, Monday in Philadelphia. Even the White House blog, in a post titled "Moving Forward to Put the American People Ahead of Insurance Companies," frames this debate as between insurance companies and the people.
Who is Obama to be smearing health insurance companies for allegedly bankrupting people to increase their profits when his policy agenda is already bankrupting America to increase government power? As the late Milton Friedman asked the clueless leftist Phil Donahue, "Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest?"
It's not the insurance industry versus the American people; it is Obama's socialist leviathan versus the American people, with the insurance companies as necessary collateral damage.
Is it fair to accuse the insurance companies of arbitrariness when they refuse to cover what their contracts don't require them to cover? And isn't Obama implying that if the government were to take full control over health care, there would be no denial of coverage? We don't have to wait for his plan to take effect to know that's false. Everyone, including Obama, is aware of Medicare's denying or reducing reimbursements so drastically that an increasing number of doctors are refusing Medicare patients. Does he call that arbitrary?
Continue reading "Obama vs. Insurers and the People, Part 2"
Posted by David Limbaugh at 05:45 PM | Printer Friendly
March 04, 2010
Obama versus Insurers and the People
President Barack Obama's obsessive, opportunistic demonization of insurance companies in his quest to pass his not-yet-written health care proposal is growing tiresome. Aren't you getting sick of a president attacking American citizens and businesses as if they -- not Obama's beloved government -- were the enemy?
His repeated implication that insurance companies are the primary reason for rising health care costs is politically expedient, but it's still untrue. Government is the main culprit.
Throughout his yearlong push for Obamacare, he has called insurance companies every name in the book. He has blamed them for soaring costs, bludgeoned them for taking profits, condemned their executives' salaries and savaged them for denying coverage for pre-existing conditions.
He even says insurers are the final arbiters of who gets care and who doesn't: "And insurance companies freely ration health care based on who's sick and who's healthy, who can pay and who can't."
Obama has framed the entire debate as if it were an insurance problem. In his theatrical speech Wednesday -- while flanked from all sides by white-coated props -- he said, "We began our push to reform health insurance last March," as if the thrust of his health care efforts has been to rein in insurers and little else.
Continue reading "Obama versus Insurers and the People"
Posted by David Limbaugh at 02:55 PM | Printer Friendly
March 01, 2010
Health Care Summit Charade -- A Clinic in Obama Partisanship
For a guy who touts himself as bipartisan and demands bipartisanship from Republicans, President Barack Obama had a funny way of showing his bipartisanship during last week's health care summit.
Obama has repeatedly promised an open, honest and bipartisan process on health care reform, but from the beginning, he has quarterbacked a highly partisan, closed-door and dishonest campaign.
In his opening remarks at the "summit," he said he wanted to make sure the participants didn't just trade "talking points" or engage in "political theater." He said, "If we've got an open mind, if we're listening to each other, if we're not engaging in sort of the tit for tat trying to score political points during the next several hours ... we might be able to make some progress."
He then proceeded to a) open the curtains for his own political theater, with one anecdotal Democratic sob story after another about the horrors of American health care; b) deliver his own talking points throughout the day, including his obligatory "tit for tat" following almost every Republican speaker; and c) demonstrate his own partisanship through (i) patronizing dismissals of the Republicans' substantive contributions as "talking points"; (ii) volleying partisan barbs at Republicans; (iii) mischaracterizing his positions and those of the Republicans; and (iv) accusing Republicans of not showing a good-faith willingness to make any movement in his direction when he made no effort to compromise with them.
To invoke my own anecdotal experience here, I have worked with people like Obama before, those who sanctimoniously demand collegiality and compromise while exhibiting no willingness to compromise themselves and then -- wholly blind to their own dogmatism -- castigate you for not "meeting them halfway" (meaning: wholly embracing their proposals).
Continue reading "Health Care Summit Charade -- A Clinic in Obama Partisanship"
Posted by David Limbaugh at 05:27 PM | Printer Friendly
February 25, 2010
Liberal Paranoia About Christian Conservatives
The left's paranoia about the intersection of Christianity and the public square continues unabated. It's amazing how much they fear something that represents such a little threat to them.
In his column in the British newspaper The Guardian, Northeastern University associate journalism professor Dan Kennedy rails against Republicans' "intolerance" of secularism and accuses them of representing a threat to the First Amendment.
In their penchant for projection, leftists accuse conservatives and Republicans of intolerance, when in fact, their own intolerance dominates the issues of freedom of speech and religion. Liberals accuse conservatives of being theocrats, when they are the ones trying to chill religious freedom and expression.
One would expect that Kennedy, having made these charges, would provide some proof in his column that Republicans have abridged or advocated abridging someone's First Amendment rights -- such as using the authority of government to infringe on citizens' freedom of speech, press, religion, assembly or petition or somehow violating the establishment clause.
I searched in vain for the payoff. He provided no examples, no scintilla of proof that Republicans are even skirting up against an activity that could fairly be considered threatening to Americans' First Amendment guarantees.
Continue reading "Liberal Paranoia About Christian Conservatives"
Posted by David Limbaugh at 05:33 PM | Printer Friendly
February 22, 2010
Obama Doesn't Even Fake Bipartisanship Well
How long will it take for every last American to realize President Barack Obama is not about bipartisanship, reconciliation (other than as a process to cram his health care bill through Congress) and uniting Americans? As his latest gyrations on health care demonstrate, he will not be deterred in his quest to saddle Americans with socialized medicine, even if it greatly increases the likelihood he won't be re-elected.
Here we have Obama, frenetically busy with at least three of his hands, pushing different buttons and sending mixed signals. I guess being a self-perceived messiah means you don't have to worry about being flagrantly inconsistent, even on the same day or in the context of one speech.
He's invited Republicans to a bipartisan summit on health care, intending to create the illusion that he's interested in conservative ideas on the subject.
But at the same time -- he can't even pretend long enough to let this ruse play out -- he is threatening Republicans that if they filibuster current congressional health care proposals, he will urge Congress to pass Obamacare by bastardizing the reconciliation process.
But wait, just like a Ginsu knife infomercial, there's more. Obama has also unveiled the outlines of his own new health care proposal, but it is hardly a model of bipartisanship.
Continue reading "Obama Doesn't Even Fake Bipartisanship Well"
Posted by David Limbaugh at 06:54 PM | Printer Friendly
February 18, 2010
When the Facts Don't Help Pound the Table
When you're president of the United States and your primary claim to fame is your economic prowess but your economic record fails by all objective measures, what do you do? You call on your skills as a virtuoso propagandist.
With the perceived catastrophic economic crisis of 2008-09, President Barack Obama captured the presidency at the perfect time in America's modern history for him to unleash his grandiose socialist policies -- policies so ambitious that the American people would never have tolerated them under any other circumstances.
With the nation in near panic over the impending doom of the economy, Obama presented his now-infamous "stimulus plan" to artificially create government demand by spending more than $800 billion of borrowed money to "jump-start the economy."
Being a die-hard Keynesian, Obama probably believed his program would create jobs. But given his attitude about the wealthy being undeserving of their good fortune, he probably wasn't risking too much in the event it didn't work. The funds would redistribute wealth to those less fortunate and whom society, in Obama's view, has cheated. It would also force allocations of money to "green" enterprises that would never be pursued if left to the sanity of private-sector consumer demand, further expand the public sector in general and provide ample slush money to reward unions and other supporters to shore up his re-election efforts.
According to Keynesian theory, as I understand it, it doesn't matter much where the government spends other people's money -- just as long as it spends it. Once the money is injected into the economy (never mind that an equal amount is taken out of the economy from the private sector), a multiplier effect unfolds to stimulate economic growth and jobs.
Continue reading "When the Facts Don't Help Pound the Table"
Posted by David Limbaugh at 05:02 PM | Printer Friendly
