Conservative columnist and cable-news racist Pat Buchanan is out with a new column calling President Obama the “first hustler” because insurers have dropped some health plans that did not comply with the new health care reform law, meaning that some people have had to change their health insurance plans.
In defending his case, Buchanan invokes none other than George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor perhaps most famous for physically blocking two black students from entering the University of Alabama. Wallace had his own reasons for disliking the federal government, which he said (while running for president) was composed of “pointy-headed bureaucrats who can’t park a bicycle straight” – a sentiment that Buchanan gleefully repeats.
Buchanan then goes on to declare that the Affordable Care Act will finish the work done by such travesties as “free schooling [and] Social Security” to bring capitalism to “the end of the line.”
“Nothing is lost save honor.”
So said Jim Fisk after he and Jay Gould survived yet another scrape in their corrupt and storied careers in the Gilded Age.
Fisk’s dismissal of honor came to mind while watching Barack Obama in Boston smugly explain how his vow — “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it!” — was now inoperative.
All along, it had been a bait-and-switch by the first hustler.
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Here was the president’s signature program — what Social Security was to FDR, Medicare to LBJ — and one month into launch, it is grist for the mills of Saturday Night Live and Comedy Central.
Observing the rollout, one begins to appreciate what George Wallace meant when he talked of Washington being a city of “pointy-headed bureaucrats who can’t park a bicycle straight.”
And though the Obamacare website will one day be repaired, and people may begin to sign up, the land mines in Obamacare are by no means all exploded. We will be walking right through them.
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The welfare state that began with Bismarck is reaching the end of the line, just as the private sector that generates the wealth to sustain that state is now, almost everywhere, buckling under its weight. The deficits stretch to the horizon. The debts rise inexorably.
Across the West, neo-socialism is out, the new austerity in.
And of all the great advances proclaimed by progressives over a century and a half, from free schooling to Social Security, Obamacare looks like it will eventually be ranked among the last — and the least.
