If there’s one thing liberals/progressives can’t handle it is being held to their own standards. They support higher taxes but shelter their wealth in trusts and tax havens, which already is earned and no longer taxable as income, so they can avoid the death tax. They claim “the rich” aren’t paying their “fair share” and decry “loopholes” but then avail themselves of every deduction their accountants can find. They will not live the way they seek to impose on others unless and until it is imposed on others, and then only maybe.
In the case of Obamacare, Members of Congress of both parties did not want to give up their superior health insurance for the system they imposed on the rest of us. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, saw this for the hypocrisy it is and proposed an amendment to the bill that forced members and their staff to do just that. It made the final cut in the bill because to oppose it would be to admit before passage the system progressives sought to force on Americans was inferior to what existed.
Now that it’s the law, well, that’s a different story. Congress, with significant pressure from President Obama, forced the Office of Personnel Management to “reinterpret” the law to allow significant subsidies (our money) to be paid to them and their staff to cover the cost of premiums. If you’re in a similar income bracket and situation in the private sector you can’t get the deal they gave themselves.
That’s just one of many little “quirks” in the Obamacare saga. President Obama has waived unworkable pieces, unpopular pieces (for “the right people,” not you) and simply ignored others. Deadlines written into the law are optional when the president wants them to be but set in stone when Republicans and the American people do.
That’s why Friday the House of Representatives passed a continuing resolution that would fund every part of government except Obamacare. Only the Democrat-controlled Senate will never pass it and the president has said he’d veto it if they did.
The vote Friday was every bit as symbolic as anything else proposed by those hoping to repeal or postpone this mess, though it was nice to see Republican Leadership in the House “grow a pair” for once. But it’s temporary.
This battle should have been fought from the beginning, and continuously. It wasn’t.
From the beginning, Republican leadership in the House has been playing checkers while Democrats and the White House have been playing chess. If they’d been smart (and principled, which has been the biggest problem) they would have gone the other route.
Once the president started to delay, change and ignore parts of his own law, Republicans should have gone straight to court to force Democrats to implement the law as written or repeal it. They wanted it, they wrote it and they passed it – they should be made to live with it.
They can’t live with it, of course, because it’s a horribly written law that was designed to fail. Only it wasn’t designed to fail early, it was designed to fail eventually.
Obamacare was always a step on the road to a full single-payer health system. A step that, by design, was meant to get people used to the concept of the government providing health insurance, but administered by the private sector. After a few years it would fail because of the small box in which those private companies were forced to exist is suffocating. When the system became unsustainable, progressives would step in with “Well, we tried the private sector and it didn’t work. Now the government has to take over.” That wouldn’t be true, of course, but when has that ever stopped them?
But the law was such a bad piece of legislation from conception to execution that the wheels have begun to fall off before it even starts. This presents a problem for Democrats because the private sector can’t be blamed if the problems exist before the private sector has any part in it. So you get these Band-Aids, these splints on a broken leg in desperation to get what parts they can over the finish line in the hope the ultimate failure can be directed where they need it to be.
Had Republicans demanded the law be followed as written, that inevitable collapse could not have been blamed on the private sector. But that would have required strategic thinking, which the other side does but we do not.
That’s why I suggest we hold liberals to their own standards, in all cases and in all things.
When Rush Limbaugh made his Sandra Fluke joke the left mobilized and to this day remain in combat mode. They harass him and his sponsors constantly. Rush apologized, but that wasn’t good enough. When Republican candidates no one had ever heard of made stupid comments about rape, every Republican was made to answer for them. Democrats had three prominent perverts in the news in San Diego and New York in the last month, people who did abhorrent things – not just say them – and it took weeks for any Democrat to be asked to simply distance themselves from them.
Even on a smaller scale, the left attacks anyone on the right for any perceived slight. Media Matters, the progressive lie factory that programs MSNBC, trolls blogs and unleashes its Soros-paid flying monkeys on anyone who commits the only sin that exists to a progressive – disagreeing with them.
Progressives will attack and taunt people after they leave the public stage, even after they die (just Google Andrew Breitbart). They have no concern for decency they will dance on the grave of any “sinner” every chance they get.
We should return the favor.
Have you heard of Allan Brauer? He’s a man who is among about a half-dozen trolls who’ve completed the trifecta of disgusting that will get me to block someone on Twitter. That trifecta, any one of which will get me to block someone, consists of racism, sexism and homophobia.
Brauer, a gay progressive whose only goal online seems to be to get people to respond in-kind, routinely spews bile and makes threats and disgusting comments of all sorts because he thinks he’s better, more enlightened than those who disagree with him. He engages in what’s common among many, mostly anonymous Twitter trolls who have more holes in his belt than IQ points – taking their anger out on the world 140 characters at a time. Only Allan isn’t anonymous and seems to be of normal intelligence, which makes simply being a jackass the best option to explain his actions.
He also was, at least until Friday when he resigned, the communications chair for the Democratic Party of Sacramento, Calif. That is until he couldn’t control himself and had to respond to Sen. Ted Cruz’s senior communications adviser Amanda Carpenter (formerly of Townhall) with a tweet reading, “May your children all die from debilitating, painful and incurable diseases.”
This was just the first of a string of tweets attacking any and everyone who sinned against the thought police. (I won’t link to them individually because I don’t want to give him the attention that seems to arouse him, but here’s a good summary.) He eventually apologized, but given his history it’s doubtful anything will change.
I write this because were conservatives to treat Allan Brauer the way progressives treat their political opponents, every time he engaged in any political discourse this (and his other comments) would be trotted out like a scarlet letter to discredit him. Moreover, the media would demand to know how a man with a history of such violent comments could be placed in a position of authority in a major political party. But they won’t.
He works for a company called “Writing It For You,” that posted and deleted a defense of Brauer’s right to spew the bile he did under the title “Dealing With Irrational People.” (Guess who the irrational people were? HINT: Not Allan.)
“Writing It For You” does exactly what it sounds like – writes (papers, articles, anything, for people who can’t get their words out of their heads. They seem to share Allan’s politics, if not his tactics. Were conservatives playing by the rules progressives operate under, they’d write thousands of pieces on this so they’d show up in the searches Brauer’s prospective clients perform on his work. And they’d write them continually, the way the left attacked Andrew Breitbart on the day he died and still attacks him today.
But we probably won’t.
Allan Brauer is small potatoes, a wannabe who lost his position because he couldn’t control his hate for people who disagree with him and wished death on children. He’s not unique, he’s just public. And it was public when the Democrats of Sacramento brought him on board, it just wasn’t widely known because who cares about some communications chair in some random city?
Progressives would have.
I’d bet you dollars to donuts that progressives do background searches on anyone associated with a group opposing their beliefs. I’d also guess the Democrat Party of Sacramento knew what Allan was like (it’s certainly not hidden, he’s put it out there for the world to see), but they didn’t care. In fact, they agreed. But he finally crossed the line in a way that got unwanted attention and had to go. The sentiment most likely remains.
I’d like to see conservatives play the game progressives play, the game Allan engages in. One where when someone searches for him long after he passes, stories of his vile, hateful public tweets are first results returned. May the words he sent out into the world be a scarlet letter that follows him the rest of his days. And the same goes for every progressive hypocrite who routinely makes racist, sexist, homophobic, hate-filled remarks, or cheats on their spouse, engages in corruption or refuses to live up to the standards they impose on others.
Distasteful as is seems, this is the world progressives have created in politics today. The high-road has a nice view and a strategic advantage in a traditional battle, but we’re in a guerilla war. Conservatives have to decide if we want to win or have the satisfaction of righteousness while liberty is stripped away.
What does this guy have to do with Obamacare? Well, like the tagline for the great HBO series The Wire said, “It’s all connected.” Holding progressives to their own standards, their own rules, is the best way to win. Be it some lone hatemonger in California or a whole party and the law they bribed through Congress, maybe we should hang their actions over them like a cloud every single day so there is no doubt who they are and what they want. These are their rules, not mine.