THE FOUNDATION

“Honor, justice, and humanity, forbid us tamely to surrender that freedom which we received from our gallant ancestors, and which our innocent posterity have a right to receive from us. We cannot endure the infamy and guilt of resigning succeeding generations to that wretchedness which inevitably awaits them if we basely entail hereditary bondage on them.” –Thomas Jefferson

EDITORIAL EXEGESIS

“Democrats, bloodied over their attempt to force health care ‘reform’ on Americans, are looking more unreasonable and hysterical by the day. This isn’t healthy for the republic. Their increasing anxiety and fear of failure are typified in the words of the leader of their party, who wants Republicans to keep their mouths shut while he ‘fixes’ health care. ‘I don’t want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking,’ the president said Thursday at a political rally in Virginia. ‘I want them to get out of the way so we can clean up the mess.’ So much for the promises of bipartisan lawmaking. So much for open discussion. So much for understanding who really caused the ‘mess’ in the first place. Like Al Gore claiming the debate about global warming is over, the White House simply wants to shut down dialogue over who controls more than one-seventh of the economy. … Truth is, there’s nothing more American than revolting against heavy-handed authority, be it a long train of abuses from a king or the lawmaking of elected officials with strong authoritarian urges. This is a nation founded on independence, and there is a large portion of it that wants to retain that priceless heritage. This seems to confuse some lawmakers. … Voters’ deep anger is justifiable. They have every right to disrupt and shout down public figures who, as the protesters can be heard chanting, work for them. At dispute is not a mere difference of opinion that can and should be discussed in a civil manner, but a fundamental question of who is in charge of peoples’ lives. We are not advocating violence, though coercive government is at its core violent as the state is required to resort to force to ensure that its directives aren’t violated. But we do support our fellow citizens’ right to express their rage at an injustice, particularly if it makes lawmakers uncomfortable. Shouldn’t Americans bristle when their independence is threatened, when a federal official, in this case White House deputy chief of staff Jim Messina, says party leaders ‘will punch back twice as hard’ when voters merely show their displeasure? The freedom the protesters are defending can sometimes be messy and imperfect. A lack of freedom, however, is eternally oppressive. It is an unrelenting prison that poisons the human spirit, even when cloaked in allegedly humane programs such as government-run health care.” –Investors’ Business Daily

UPRIGHT

“The health debate, which now has moved beyond the Beltway and into raucous town halls across the land, is so intense in part because it’s not really about health care at all. On a deeper level, it’s about the role of government in America’s economy. And that is a raw and unresolved topic, only made more so by months of exceptional government intervention amid a deep recession.” –columnist Gerald Seib

“Today’s ruling Democrats propose to fix our extremely high quality (but inefficient and therefore expensive) health care system with 1,000 pages of additional curlicued complexity – employer mandates, individual mandates, insurance company mandates, allocation formulas, political payoffs and myriad other conjured regulations and interventions – with the promise that this massive concoction will lower costs. This is all quite mad. It creates a Rube Goldberg system that simply multiplies the current inefficiencies and arbitrariness, thus producing staggering deficits with less choice and lower-quality care. That’s why the administration can’t sell Obamacare.” –columnist Charles Krauthammer

“Ever since Congress created Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, health politics has followed a simple logic: Expand benefits and talk about controlling costs. That’s the status quo, and Obama faithfully adheres to it. While denouncing skyrocketing health spending, he would increase it by extending government health insurance to millions more Americans.” –columnist Robert Samuelson

“[Barack] Obama seems to think the country owes it to him to accept ObamaCare because he was kind enough to agree to be our president.” –Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto

INSIGHT

“The history of the race, and each individual’s experience, are thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal.” –American author and humorist Mark Twain (1835-1910)

“If falsehood, like truth, had but one face, we would be more on equal terms. For we would consider the contrary of what the liar said to be certain. But the opposite of truth has a hundred thousand faces and an infinite field.” –French writer Michel Eyquem De Montaigne (1533-1592)

“Men hate those to whom they have to lie.” –French author Victor Hugo (1802-1885)

DEZINFORMATSIA

When right-wing extremists attack: “If you thought the health care debate was heated in Washington, outside the Beltway it’s gotten downright hostile. From Tampa, Florida, to Austin, Texas, to Romulus, Michigan, town hall meetings over health care have turned chaotic; death threats against members of Congress, taunting and shouting, even fistfights. Democrats claim it’s all political theater organized by reform opponents.” –NBC’s David Gregory

Nothing like hyperbole: “The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they’ve given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They’ve become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems.” –Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein

Race bait: “I think 45 to 65 percent of the people who appear at these groups are people who will never be comfortable with the idea of a black president.” –Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial page editor Cynthia Tucker

“[W]hat concerns me is when in some of those town hall meetings including the one that we saw in Missouri recently where there were jokes made about lynching, etc., you start to wonder whether in fact the word socialist is becoming a code word, whether or not ‘socialist’ is becoming the new N-word.” –MSNBC’s Carlos Watson

Stupid white people: “Angry old white folks are storming into town halls all across the country spewing lies about health care reform. Let me set the record straight early on: These folks [are] dumber than Joe the Plumber.” –MSNBC’s Ed Schultz

Democrats are usually so innocent: “The nation’s drugmakers stand ready to spend $150 million to help President Barack Obama overhaul health care this fall…. The White House and allies in Congress are well aware of the effort by Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, a somewhat surprising political alliance, given the industry’s recent history of siding with Republicans and the Democrats’ disdain for special interests.” –Associated Press writer David Espo (Democrats are the Party of special interests – unions, trial lawyers, homosexual activists, environmentalists, etc., ad nauseum.)

Newspulper Headlines:

ObamaCare in Action?: “Thousands of Clunkers Line Up to Be Poisoned and Killed” –Detroit News

Aren’t There Cheaper Ways to Hurt a Region?: “Obama Ventures Back to Hurting Region – With Money” –Associated Press

Who Ya Gonna Call? Ghostbusters!: “Specter Holds Lebanon Town Meeting” –WGAL-TV Web site (Lancaster, PA)

Talk About Packing the Court!: “Sotomayor Sworn In as 111th Justice” –National Law Journal

What Kind of Sicko Hates Ice Cream?: “3 Charged With Hate Crime in Ice Cream Truck Attack” –Houston Chronicle

Everything Seemingly Is Spinning Out of Control: “Senator Franken, at Center Stage, Presides Over Sotomayor Vote” –FoxNews.com

News You Can Use: “Whisky: A Cure for Swine Flu, and So Much More” –Daily Telegraph (London)

Bottom Stories of the Day: “Obama May Abandon Bipartisanship on Health-Care Plan” –Bloomberg

(Thanks to The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto)

THE DEMO-GOGUES

Nothing to fear but … nothing?: “For all the scare tactics out there, what is truly scary is if we do nothing. … Where we disagree, let’s disagree over things that are real, not these wild misrepresentations that don’t bear any resemblance to anything that’s actually being proposed.” –President Barack Obama

The BIG Lie: “I have not said that I was a single-payer supporter…” –President Pinnochio, who, as we noted last week, was caught on tape more than once advocating single-payer health care

On “un-American” activities: “These [town hall meeting] disruptions are occurring because opponents are afraid not just of differing views – but of the facts themselves. Drowning out opposing views is simply un-American. Drowning out the facts is how we failed at this task for decades.” –House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer in a USA Today op-ed, projecting their own faults on the protestors

More race bait: “Well, the last time I had to confront something like this was when I voted for the civil rights bill and my opponent voted against it. At that time, we had a lot of Ku Klux Klan folks and white supremacists and folks in white sheets and other things running around causing trouble.” –Rep. John Dingell (D-MI)

What a positive guy: “In spite of the loud, shrill voices trying to interrupt town hall meetings and just throwing a monkey wrench into everything, we’re going to continue to be positive and work hard.” –Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV)

Dittoheads run America: “[Republicans are] taking their cues from talk-show hosts, Internet rumor mongers, and insurance rackets. I just think, as I’ve said before, it’s not often that you try to blow yourself up, but that’s obviously what they’re trying to do with all this vexatious stuff they’re doing with these meetings, the birthers. It’s a party being run by a talk-show host.” –Harry Reid

“I’m the best, if I do say so myself”: “Today we’re pointed in the right direction. … While we’ve rescued our economy from catastrophe, we’ve also begun to build a new foundation for growth.” –Barack Obama, readily taking all the credit for less bad economic and employment news

Pork train’s second run: “My view is if we don’t have the recovery that we’re looking for in the next year and a half, [another stimulus] is something I would certainly look at, and you probably want it to be on a significant magnitude if you need it.” –Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY)

VILLAGE IDIOTS

Lies beget more lies: “I mean, you know, eh – and people are saying crazy things right now [about ObamaCare]. … They took pieces of sound bites from different periods of time. They put a Chyron – that’s the words on the screen – that said, ‘wants to eliminate private insurance,’ to go along with these sound bites that they cobbled together, and our point is that he’s saying exactly the opposite [now]. … He didn’t have a different position when he was a senator. … What he talked about early on was, look, if he could start all over again, maybe it would be fine to have a single-payer system but we’re not going to start all over again. … There’s a lot of misinformation and there, as I said in the video, a lot of disinformation, that’s information that’s meant to mislead you.” –BO spokesmouth and former MSM “journalist” Linda Douglass

Backwards Nazi comparisons: “Taking a page right out of a Nazi playbook, organizers bus in professional protestors and arm them with instructions on how to take over meetings, shut down discussion, shout over any pro-health care reform speakers, and then post video of the resulting chaos on YouTube. It’s mob rule, pure and simple.” –radio talk-show host Bill Press

Or maybe it’s the SEIU playbook: “We must fight back against lies and fear-mongering to drown out the opposition – and send the message that health care reform must happen this year.” –Web site of the Service Employees International Union

More debt, pronto: “It is critically important that Congress act [to increase the federal debt limit] before the limit is reached so that citizens and investors here and around the world can remain confident that the United States will always meet its obligations.” –Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner (So increasing our debt will increase confidence about our ability to meet obligations?)

Sycophantic drooling: “The release of the two journalists by the North Koreans … was the result of a tour-de-force, trifecta combination of the three most talented and truly great political leaders of our times – Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton; her husband, former President Bill Clinton; and President Barack Obama. Without the special talents and the synergistic magic of the three of them working together….” –former Clintonista Lanny Davis

SHORT CUTS

“DISSENT IS THE HIGHEST FORM OF PATRIOTI… No, wait, that bumper sticker expired January 20th. Under the stimulus bill, there’s a new $1.3 trillion bills-for-bumpers program whereby, if you peel off old slogans now recognized as environmentally harmful (‘QUESTION AUTHORITY’), you can trade them in for a new ‘CELEBRATE CONFORMITY’ sticker, complete with a holographic image of President Obama that never takes his eyes off you.” –columnist Mark Steyn

“If the Republicans in Washington are smart, and I’m not saying they are, they’d do well to get out of Nancy Pelosi’s way. She may be just about the best politician the GOP has these days. Every time Madam Speaker goes on camera, you can almost hear Democrats’ approval ratings drop.” –Arkansas Democrat-Gazette editor Paul Greenberg

“Sports Medicine Institute said Friday cheerleading is the most dangerous sport in America. You can break your neck. CBS and NBC and ABC reporters were covering President Obama Wednesday when the NBC News reporter fell off the top of the triangle.” –comedian Argus Hamilton

Note – sarcastic humor: “In any event, it’s true that people who believe in health care choices and free markets are zombies. For one thing, they are entirely too well-dressed to contemplate serious issues independently – and thank you, Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, for pointing that out. A man without Birkenstocks, after all, is a man without a soul. Organizing and protesting, as any sensible and compassionate citizen already understands, is exclusively the bailiwick of ideologically diverse and freethinking groups, such as unions. And really, the most galling aspect of this entire spurious uprising is the rumor that protestors are actually organized. Can you imagine?” –columnist David Harsanyi