Clear As Mud
And thereby all is revealed. George Will with a howler that probably belongs in this morning’s GOP campaign roundup but gets its own post thanks to this:
Arthur Balfour, the British statesman, once said that a rival’s clarity was a liability because he had nothing to say. As the presidential nomination contests approach a crescendo, some candidates are making themselves perilously clear, one of them with the help of her helpmate.
Last Tuesday, Bill Clinton, trying to whet Iowans’ appetites for another Clinton presidency, announced/discovered/remembered that he opposed the Iraq war “from the beginning,” thereby revealing disharmony with his spouse, who voted for it. Backward reels the mind, to 1992, when Gov. Clinton explained his opinion of Congress’s 1991 authorization of the Persian Gulf War: “I guess I would have voted with the majority if it was a close vote. But I agree with the arguments the minority made.”
Such muddiness clarifies: Do voters who are weary of the scary clarity of the current president’s certitudes really want to replace them with a recurrence of the hairsplitting evasions that created the adjective “Clintonian”?
About one thing, Hillary Clinton is, remarkably, both clear and opaque: Jefferson is anachronistic. “We can talk all we want about freedom and opportunity, about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but what does all that mean to a mother or father who can’t take a sick child to the doctor?” Well, okay, what does “all that” mean to someone stuck in congested traffic? Or annoyed by the price of cable television? What does Mrs. Clinton mean?
John Edwards’s health-care agenda involves un-Jeffersonian bossiness. “It requires,” he says, “that everybody get preventive care. If you are going to be in the system, you can’t choose not to go to the doctor for 20 years.” In an ad running in Iowa, Edwards brandishes his mailed fist at Congress, to which he vows to say: “If you don’t pass universal health care by July of 2009, in six months, I’m going to use my power as president to take your health care away from you.”
Read on for Will’s thoughts re Huckabee.
Topics: pols
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:01 am on Sunday, December 2, 2007
8 Responses to “Clear As Mud”
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December 2nd, 2007 at 10:19 am
“We can talk all we want about freedom and opportunity, about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but what does all that mean to a mother or father who can’t take a sick child to the doctor?” Well, okay, what does “all that” mean to someone stuck in congested traffic? Or annoyed by the price of cable television? What does Mrs. Clinton mean?
What Mrs. Clinton meansis that the principles enshrined in the Constitution don’t particularly matter if your child has a hacking cough.
And what she means is that you’d be a lot better off putting your energies into her huge government, gigantic taxation agenda than you would be focusing on silly stuff like ideas of freedom, and opportunity, hard work and your own version of a pursuit of happiness
(’cause, you know, government entitlement programs have such a great track record of working so much better than the “private sector” and all)*
Also, what Mrs. Clinton means is that she and big federal government know better for you than you know for yourself and they would like to add a new power to the federal government (one not mentioned in the Constitution).
The redistribution of income through taxation.
John Edwards’s health-care agenda involves un-Jeffersonian bossiness. “It requires,” he says, “that everybody get preventive care. If you are going to be in the system, you can’t choose not to go to the doctor for 20 years.”
Charming.
*sarcasm alert
December 2nd, 2007 at 3:55 pm
The minute Herself the Co-President comes clean and says “I’m a hardline statist of the Soviet school, which means every second of your life, every penny that you earn, and everything you consume will be determined by government, and not by free will as guaranteed by the Constitution” will kill her presidential campaign. Hence, all that triangulation, all that carefully choreographed campaigning, and plenty of media fixin’ by CNN/Google, to make sure her real message is buried and not blurted out.
It’s equivalent to Walter Mondale’s pledge to raise taxes as soon as he entered office during his campaign against Reagan in 1984. He was handed a major defeat of 13 electoral votes to Reagan’s 525.
December 2nd, 2007 at 3:57 pm
“but what does all that mean to a mother or father who can’t take a sick child to the doctor?”
Probably means they live in a place that has gone socialist, and that the government has decided to cut off their health care.
December 2nd, 2007 at 4:14 pm
“If you don’t pass universal health care by July of 2009, in six months, I’m going to use my power as president to take your health care away from you.”
Yeah, it’s been done before, like by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia or by the Bolsheviks in the Ukraine. Those that don’t do as the government directs don’t get no food or medicine.
Think I’ll take a pass on government controlled health care.
December 2nd, 2007 at 5:26 pm
Government controlled health care, liberal style…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study
December 2nd, 2007 at 7:54 pm
What she means is that your life, and the liberty to live it, is to be sacrificed to the whim of the government. All in the name of the “good,” the good being defined as sacrifice.
Don’t kid yourself that any of this has anything to do with health care, any more than the cigarette ban had anything to do with health issues. If they can force you to get a yearly check-up, they can force you to eat whatever they deem constitutes a “healthy” diet. They can decide what medicines you take. They can decree that you to live in a healthy home environment that doesn’t exceed 65 degrees in the winter. Forget air conditioning. That is a luxury and an unnecessary energy expense–besides, it causes climate change. There is little to nothing that they cannot force upon us in the name of “health.”
Aside from that, of course, there is the fact that no man or woman worth a damn would willingly become a slave of the state, which is exactly what doctors, nurses, and other health care workers will become. How can anyone be surprised that these people spit on freedom in the name of need when they have been spitting on the freedom of doctors in the name of need for decades–with barely a peep being raised in their defense, even by many in the medical profession.
They’ve spent years making sure that everyone has a claim on everyone else because tax money pays the bills of this or that. Sounded like a good idea, didn’t it. People need help and we are all generous enough to want to help those in need. Most of us send money to help those who find themselves in dire straits through no fault of their own. Handing the problems over to the government institutionalizes our generosity, and gives people a vested interest in defining need up; where food and shelter were once recognized as fundamental needs, we now have those who tell us that everyone “needs” a computer. Now they want to make sure that we are all in need. It brings to mind that picture of Eva Peron sitting like a potentate handing out favors to all who stand humbly in line in front of her while listing rehearsing their needs and showing their sores, begging instead of being allowed to earn and keep what they earn.
Understand this: both the freedom of speech and basic property rights are under attack from the government. It may not be as blatant as what happened in Zimbabwe, or what is happening in Venezuela, but the constitutional questions have already been answered by the Supreme Court, which have undercut our guarantees to the point that we have nothing to stand between us and the petty tyrants but our defiance.
McCain-Feingold set a precedent allowing the government to control political speech. We have a couple of generations educated in government schools who now think nothing of censoring their thoughts so that they are not accused of whatever has been deemed “inappropriate” speech in the last five minutes.
Eminent Domain, and even more egregious, environmental laws have made owning property a right to nothing more than paying taxes, but no longer gives an “owner” the right to use or dispose of his property.
Without these two rights, there are no rights–not to the pursuit of happiness, to liberty, and certainly not to your life.
December 2nd, 2007 at 10:29 pm
“We can talk all we want about freedom and opportunity, about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but what does all that mean to a mother or father who can’t take a sick child to the doctor?”
The oldest story in the world:
Gen 25:29-34 ..
When Esau returned from the field, he was faint, and he said to Jacob, please feed me that red pottage you are making, for I am faint. …
Jacob said, first sell me thy birthright.
Esau replied, I am about to die, and what good will the birthright be to me then?
Jacob said, Swear to me first. … And Esau swore an oath to Jacob, and sold his birthright to Jacob.
And Jacob gave Esau bread and pottage of lentils. And he did eat and drink, and rose up, and went his way. So Esau despised his birthright.
==========================
Question for the student: How did that deal workout for Esau?
Would you sell your birthright for a mess of pottage?
December 3rd, 2007 at 3:58 pm
“We can talk all we want about freedom and opportunity, about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but what does all that mean to a mother or father who can’t take a sick child to the doctor?”
When concerning FISA or other efforts to protect our nation against Islamist jihad, liberals love the quote decrying trading off liberty for security, saying the person doing so will end up with neither. But is that not exactly what is impliedly saying here–that we should forget about our civil liberties so the goverment, guided by her beneficence, can take care of us?