Liberals are on their high horses about a single audience member at CNN’s Republican debate whom they believe wanted a hypothetical man without health insurance in a hypothetical coma to die – hypothetically.

(Democrats want people in comas to die only when they are not hypothetical but real, like Terri Schiavo.)

I concur with the audience member who shouted “Yes!” This has nothing to do with any actual people in comas – the people Democrats want to kill – it’s just a big “screw you” to the moderator.

Following up on Brian Williams’ showboating questions at last week’s Republican debate about the execution of the innocent and starving children with distended stomachs, this week, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer launched his question about an imaginary comatose man without health insurance.

As Rep. Ron Paul began to discuss the pitfalls of collectivism, Blitzer kept interrupting him, concluding with, “But Congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die?”

That’s when an audience member yelled out “Yes!” – allowing liberals to luxuriate in self-righteousness, the likes of which we have not seen since the Jersey Girls demanded a Homeland Security Department be created because their husbands died.

Normal people are sick of liberals’ emotional stories that play to soccer moms, but always seem to pave the way for disastrous social policies that benefit only left-wing special-interest groups.

Whenever liberals start loftily insisting on our obligation to our fellow man with these tear-jerkers, you know some heinous public policy is coming. As soon as the dust settles, you won’t see any innocent victims being helped, only trial lawyers, government employees and other Democratic constituencies.

Obama campaigned for his national health care bill with a sad story about a campaign supporter who died of breast cancer soon after his election because – he said – she couldn’t afford health insurance, so she didn’t get a breast cancer scan in time to stop the disease.

He somberly told embarrassed audiences: “She insisted she is going to be buried in an Obama T-shirt.” (As it looks like we all will, unless we get a new president next year.)

Apart from the fact that free breast cancer screening was available right in his supporter’s hometown of St. Louis, she undoubtedly would have been able to afford excellent health insurance … except the government outlawed affordable health insurance.

Thanks to accumulated government mandates on insurance companies at that time, imposed by both the state and federal government, Obama’s Missouri supporter was allowed to buy health insurance only provided it covered: chiropractors, speech therapists, hearing therapists, psychologists, dentists, optometrists, podiatrists (Missouri), as well as mental health benefits, unlimited hospital stays for newborns and mothers, and reconstructive surgery after mastectomy (federal).

When starting her own business and struggling to make ends meet, the Obama supporter might have been better served by a cheaper policy that covered only, say, actual medical problems.

But the government didn’t permit her that option. Obama’s poster-child for government-run health insurance was a victim of government-micromanaged health insurance.

It would be as if the government prohibited us from buying cars unless they were Lexus SUVs, fully loaded with every possible option.

Then, when most Americans couldn’t afford to buy a car, the Democrats could demand we pass “ObamaCar.” Wolf could have asked: “A healthy 30-year-old young man decides, ‘I’m not going to spend $100,000 or $200,000 for a car because, you know, I don’t need it.’ But something terrible happens, all of a sudden he needs it. Who’s going to pay if he needs a car to escape a hurricane, for example? Who pays for that?”

Why are the only two options always a behemoth government program or the guy dies?

The subject is a baby kitten, but the real beneficiaries are the people with great government jobs, fantastic pensions, long vacations, and self-paced and self-evaluated working environments.

As for Brian Williams’ grandstandy question to Gov. Rick Perry about Texas’ execution rate (“Have you struggled to sleep at night with the idea that any one of those might have been innocent?”): There is no credible evidence that a single innocent person has been executed in this country since at least 1950.

There is, however, a lot of evidence that innocent people have been killed when murderers were not executed.

Indeed, one of the most infamous cases of a former death row inmate being released and then killing again comes from Texas. Kenneth McDuff had been given three death sentences for kidnapping and murdering three teenagers, repeatedly raping one.

But he was sprung from prison after the Supreme Court invalidated the death penalty in 1972 and then Texas began releasing inmates to relieve prison overcrowding. McDuff went on to kill more than a dozen people, provably eight more. He was finally executed by Gov. George Bush in 1998, two decades after his post-death row rape and murder spree began.

Someone ought to calculate the carnage liberals foisted on this country beginning in the late-‘60s with their “compassionate” approach to rapists and serial killers like McDuff – consequences that liberals were fully immunized from in their safe, ivory tower neighborhoods. Let’s ask Michael Dukakis to run the numbers.

Regarding Williams’ baby seal question about starving children in Texas with distended stomachs: No one is starving in this country. The only bloated stomach problem affecting America’s poor is a medical condition known as “obesity.”

According to the General Accounting Office, in 2008, the federal government had 18 separate food programs that spent $62.5 billion each year to feed the poor. And that was before the Food Stamp President assumed office.

I would venture to guess that the only children in America who have ever suffered from kwashiorkor, the condition that causes distended bellies, were victims of child abuse – at the hands of the sort of monsters Williams is so opposed to executing.

People aren’t buying the left’s emotional appeals about imaginary victims anymore. The audience member’s “Yes!” was a way of laughing in the moderators’ faces for trying to pull that crap.

COPYRIGHT 2011 ANN COULTER
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