Blanket charges of racism have become the stock-in-trade of the liberal media in reporting on Town-Hall protesters. For converging to petition their representatives about the administration’s profligate policies, independent-minded, patriotic constitutionalists have been savaged by rabid reporters who see signs of the divine in Obama and the devil in his detractors.

One apropos sign at a tea party captured this state of affairs: “It doesn’t matter what my sign says, the press will call it racist.”

In fairness, members of the media are more inclusive in their reprimands about racial exclusion. The general, (alleged) racial backwardness of the American people is a repeated refrain in the popular press. This non-stop, relentless propaganda, enforced by the tyranny of political correctness, helps explain why most Americans─who themselves harbor no racial animus, and, if anything, are remarkably naïve about human differences, cultural or racial─believe racism saturates their society.

It is one thing for a starlet like Janeane Garofalo to defame tea party attendees as “a bunch of teabagging rednecks,” and accuse men and women she knows nothing about of “hating a black man in the White House” and harboring unadulterated racism. It’s quite another for cable-network anchors to parrot the loopy lady’s lines.

Nevertheless, ape they did.

So it was that thought-crime investigator Keith Olbermann broke news on his MSNBC nightly show. With his most solemn, commissar-like countenance, Keith informed his viewers, matter-of-fact, that the intensity of the animosity toward Barack Obama is based on his being a black man.

Instead of arguing their “case” with reference to facts and reason, Keith and Company chose to impugn their disputants based on assumptions about their motives.  Still worse: this balderdash, framed as breaking-news, was bolstered by another logical fallacy: an argument from authority.

The feeble-minded Jimmy Carter had seconded Garofalo the histrion. By Keith’s journalistic standards, this was all the proof he needed to pronounce the libel true, and apply the pejorative liberally.

Olbermann proceeded to “debate” this ad hominem with the effeminate, bug-eyed blogger Markos Moulitsas, and before him with politician-turned-pundit, Lawrence O’Donnell.

The shifty and shameless O’Donnell asserted in all seriousness that because Carter had claimed that conservative and independent tea-party goers were guilty of harboring and acting on racially impure thoughts, this was indeed so. After all, the former president was from the dreaded South! He ought to know!

At the time Obama ascended to the throne his approval ratings ran to 70 percent. Carter, Keith, Chris (Matthews), and Contessa (Brewer) were asking their viewers to believe that between March and September of 2009, the aforementioned Americans had developed a bad case of racism rather than buyer’s remorse.

No wonder, then, that the malign men and women of MSNBC pointedly failed to report conclusive findings to the contrary.

A progressive research group ─ among whose stars is Democratic political consultant and prominent clintonista (now Obamaniac) James Carville ─ discovered that when it comes to their assumptions about older, white, Southern Republicans, the cable quislings had been wrong all along. 

As the Greenberg Quinlan Rosner research group recently, and reluctantly, reported, the Americans whom the liberal media had been righteously denouncing were not racists.

Although the research group had done its darnedest to disparage the conservative base of the Republican Party, its racism spotters were forced to exempt this “mocked minority” from the media’s charges for lack of evidence.

The Group’s Key Findings leap off the pixelated page:

Instead of focusing on [the] intense ideological divisions, the press and elites continue to look for a racial element that drives these voters’ beliefs – but they need to get over it. Conducted on the heels of Joe Wilson’s incendiary comments at the president’s joint session address, we gave these groups of older, white Republican base voters in Georgia full opportunity to bring race into their discussion – but it did not ever become a central element, and indeed, was almost beside the point.

The “rubes” were given a clean bill of racial health by an organ of the rulers. But the fraudulent zealots at the intellectual hinterland that is MSNBC have yet to come clean.

A Kabul–based United Nations’s guesthouse is the latest target to be hit by Afghani insurgents. Eight people, including an American, were killed.

Three days prior, capital-city Kabul was the scene of a helicopter crash that claimed 14 American lives, in what the Associated Press characterized as “the deadliest day for the U.S. mission in Afghanistan in more than four years.” 

A day later, eight more American troops were taken out in two separate insurgent attacks, this time in southern Afghanistan.

So far, the Left’s Prince of Peace has beefed-up Bush-era troop levels to 68,000, and is giving a good deal of thought to further deepening American involvement in the Afghan theater. The recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (now that provided some comedic relief) has managed to also sustain his predecessor’s efforts in Baghdad, where streets are slick with fresh blood.

As Dr. Johnson said, “There is no settling the point of precedency between a louse and a flea.” Neoconservative (Bush) or Progressive (Barack); louse or flea—a pest is still a pest.

It’s hard to tell whether B.O. believes his own the blather. Nevertheless, the president has expressed a talismanic faith that if he solves Afghanistan, he’ll solve terrorism: “This is not a war of choice, this is a war of necessity,” he roared. “Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaida would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defense of our people.”

Bush all over again.

Still earlier in October, 300 Taliban warriors stormed an isolated American-cum-NATO outpost in the same Podunk. They swarmed from out of a village and mosque. Curiously, the Afghani soldiers “fighting” alongside our men suffered few casualties. Americans paid the price.

The Taliban were said to have captured 35 of the policemen Americans are fighting to the death to train. My guess is that the “imprisoned” Pashtun (or perhaps they are Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek, or Turkmen) are breaking bread with their Taliban “captors.”

Naturally, Afghans (who’re mostly Muslim) have more of an affinity for the Taliban than for the Wilsonians who’re attempting to westernize them. Thus, it is not uncommon to hear of an Afghan policeman opening fire on his American “colleagues” during a joint operation. Just the other day, as Times Online tells it, one battalion lost two soldiers—three were wounded—“when an Afghan policeman opened fire on his American colleagues during a joint operation to clear the Taliban from villages around the Nerkh valley.”

The studied ignorance of their leaders can’t inspire much confidence in the army. Thus we learn that “US and Afghan investigators are trying to determine whether the policeman was a covert member of the Taliban or made a mistake. Either way”—Times again—“the attack fuelled the distrust that many NATO soldiers feel towards the Afghan security forces they are training as part of the coalition’s eventual exit strategy”:

‘You don’t trust anybody, especially after an incident like this,’ said Specialist Raquime Mercer, 20, whose close friend died in the attack.”

All told, 55 American soldiers died during the month of October.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of the 100,000-strong US and NATO force in Afghanistan, knows as much about America’s decades-long, dismal history of nation-building in Afghanistan as he does about discipline, the military chain of command and code of conduct. In an attempt to fortify his fiefdom, this politician in fatigues sojourned to London to lobby for more soldiers. There, McChrystal demanded that his wishes become Obama’s commands—and quick, before public support wanes.  

One brave and bright soldier served it straight up. Wrote Jim Sauer, a “retired Marine Corps Sergeant Major and combat veteran with over thirty years of service,” turned blognoscente: 

“The real Afghan warriors still have the spirit of the Mongol Horde in their blood. By contrast, the bulk of the Afghan National Army (ANA) and Afghan National Police (ANP) are not fighters, nor are they ‘true believers.’ They are simply cowards—frauds—corrupt to the core by any standard and apostates to their own faith. They are slovenly, drug-addicted, dimwitted, and totally unreliable at any level… They thrive on their petty powers and refuse to shoulder any burden or responsibility. Does this sound too harsh? Not for the Marines and Soldiers who have been killed by the treachery of ANA and ANP who have purposely led them into ambush.”

It has been said that Afghanistan is where empires go to die. True enough. But it is men in the flesh who pay so very dearly.

If you needed incontrovertible proof that homegrown retardation is far more pressing a problem than homegrown terrorism in modern-day America—six-year-old Falcon Heene’s flight of fancy provided it.

The contagion that gripped the nation began on October the 15th. Anyone turning on the boob tube was treated to a live broadcast of a levitating dome-shaped “homemade flying saucer.”

MSNBC’s David “Shyster” informed his unfortunate viewers, matter-of-fact, that the small son of Richard and Mayumi Heene of Fossil Ridge Road in Fort Collins, Colorado, had climbed into a carriage attached to the helium-filled contraption which had become untethered. Boy and balloon were now scaling heights of 10,000 feet.

Indeed, nowhere was the madness more apparent than on MSNBC.

Like most of the unisex males of the left-liberal media, “girlie-boy” Shuster was flooded with emotions which he did not hesitate to share. Shuster would prefer that you forget—and he is working hard to—but the anchor devoted two full hours to tracking the imaginary “Falcon,” as he soared through the Centennial State’s skies in a rickety grey floatation device.

Other TV entertainment outlets masquerading as news media hawked the Falcon pie-in-the-sky as fact. If anything, both the authorities and the media proceeded from the premise that Falcon was in fact flying two miles above them, rather than hiding somewhere on terra firma.

When you’re slothful, stout, and stupid, it’s easier to look to the heavens than search high-and-low below.

With the blind belief reserved for all women who allege date rape (but especially for black strippers who claim to have been gangbanged by white honor students)—the Larimer County Sheriff’s Office Spokes Skirt dogmatically asserted that there was no doubt in her mind that the boy was flying high. Sheriff Jim Alderden backed her. This family (of actors) behaved, as he put it, in a believable manner. Cable channels then ran with the factoid.

By now everyone knows that the boy never took off; that the farce was a planned promotional stunt; that father Richard Heene is uneducated—an amateur actor, a skilled grafter and a self-styled storm chaser who sought extramarital spice on the reality soft porn “WifeSwap.” A Google search, or some old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism, would have revealed something about the man’s dysfunctional biography. 

Yet all it took to convince the gaseous Shuster of the genuine and ingenious nature of his subject was the sight of the sophisticated “vessel,” held together with duct tape and filled with inert gas.  

In the adjectival ejaculate that followed, Shuster included favorable comments about the Heene family’s quirky lifestyle: how interesting they were; how spontaneous, adventurous, and devoted to science and mysticism (a contradiction, if I’m not mistaken). Shameless Schuster even reached for the mad genius cliché to describe a man—Mr. Heene—who turned out to be anything but.

The Christian parents of a home-schooled child gone airborne would never have been fawned upon but held up to scorn. I wager that our besotted boob and his extremely limited co-host, Tamron Hall, would be calling on the department of child abduction (also known as social services).

The following day, Schuster was not ready to hang his empty head in shame. Instead, he proceeded to blame the sheriff for leading him and his clever colleagues astray. For his part, Sheriff Alderden has not resigned. Driven, indubitably, by fury at his own incompetence, Alderden is, however, intent on visiting the full force of the law upon the family.

If Falcon was exhibiting the symptoms of severe stress—vomiting during the press and TV performances his grease ball of a dad had lined up—wait until the vampiric tele-child advocate Wendy Murphy gets her way and the three Heene children are made wards of the state.  

As the day wore on, Schuster and Hall turned to more meaty matters. Still on the topic of balloons, the two offered up hosannas to Meghan McCain, who had plastered a grotesque image of her exposed appendages on Twitter.

McCain, a licentious, self-adoring, dense liberal, kept up the momentum by penning a Daily-Beast paean to her beloved beasties. For her narcissistic efforts, the dull MSNBC duo pronounced Megan McCain a “strong conservative woman.”

The reams of verbiage these two flaccid folks had devoted to the esoteric family that fell from grace were diverted in no time to the mindless McCain.

Geert Wilders is a Dutch parliamentarian, and leader of the Freedom Party (PVV). He, and sixty percent of the Dutch population, “considers mass immigration to be the worst mistake since the Second World War.” An equal percentage of Wilders’ countrymen see Islam as the number one threat to their national identity. Late last year, Wilders spoke in Jerusalem, which he called “the city of David. The city that, together with Rome and Athens, symbolizes our ancient heritage”.
 
Warned Wilders:
 

[I]f we don’t fight the Islamization we will lose everything; our cultural identity, our democracy, our rule of law, our liberties, our freedom. We have the duty to defend the ideas of Rome, Athens and Jerusalem. The ancient heritage of our forefathers is under attack; we have to stand up and defend it.

 
Hellene and Hebrew: A systematic, philosophical defense of the distinctly Western character of America and Europe must incorporate both. Heck, one can’t appreciate the greatest composer of all times, Bach, without acknowledging the contribution of his muse—Christianity—to the glory of his music. The self-anointed left-liberal, American Jewish leadership has managed to cast Jews as a mere faction among a multicultural mob, a position Jews (being leftists) relish. But the proper metaphor for the relationship between Judaism and Christianity is that of proud parent and progeny.
 
A defense of the West against the onslaught of Islam and Third-World immigration, the kind Wilders preaches and practices, is incoherent absent a recognition that this has been Israel’s battle from its inception; that Israel is of the West; that in Israel—foibles and frailties notwithstanding—the West has reclaimed a small spot of sanity in a sea of savagery, where enlightened western law prevails, and where Christians and Jews and their holy places are safe. (Muslims are always secure in western societies, Arab-Israelis too.)
 
The fiery address this heroic European rightist delivered in the Israeli capital got me thinking about the difference between the American and the European Old Right.
 
Wilders is a hardcore man of the latter faction, for whom—in the derisive description of neoconservative Francis Fukuyama—“identity remains rooted in blood, soil and ancient shared memory.” It is this earthy instinct, I venture, that accounts for the understanding the European Right evinces for Israel’s life-and-death struggle.
 
Frenchman Jean-Marie Le Pen of the National Front gives the American media a petit mal. Yet, despite all his idiosyncrasies, he identifies with Israel. Even the late Jörg Haider of the Alliance for the Future of Austria, who “exhibit[ed] every sign of anti-Semitism”—Hugh Fitzgerald’s estimation, not mine—was “not quite so systematically vicious when it [came] to the state of Israel.” Vlaams Belang of Belgium is pro-Israel. Leader Filip Dewinter told a Jewish magazine: “One has to choose sides. Which side are you on in the ‘war on terror,’ the side of western democracy and western civilization, with its Judeo-Christian roots, or the side of radical Islam?”
 
Most libertarian and conservative American traditionalists, also referred to as paleoconservatives and paleolibertarians, depart from their European counterparts. Like exotic political marsupials, local paleos have developed in geographic isolation and, hence, in a self-referential and self-reverential vacuum. While they have generally—and justly—supported western interests in conflicts such as in the former Yugoslavia, Chechnya, and Cyprus, paleos make an exception of Israel. In fact, some are more devoted to the Palestinian cause than most left-liberals.
 
Expected is the mainstream media’s tendency to blame all the ills of the backward and benighted Palestinian Authority on Israel. By the MSM’s account, Israel is the reason jobs are unavailable in that otherwise economically viable anarcho-terrorist territory; why government consists of competing terrorist gangs (rather than only one), and why Palestinian civil society, such as it is, canonizes killers. It’s all Israel’s fault!
 
Unexpected is the corresponding paleo position: When it comes to Israel—and the plight that won’t shut up, i.e., the “Palestinian problem”—paleos, who’re usually poised to storm the ramparts of a decaying media regime, agree with it.
 
To their great credit, paleos worry about the preservation of ancient Christian communities, which is why they did not join the jubilation Bill Clinton’s attack on Serbia elicited. A Christian country, Serbia, as Patrick J. Buchanan has observed, was “an ally in two world wars, and [had] never attacked us.” For the same reason, paleos booed Bush and his bastardized conservatives as they celebrated Kosovo’s declaration of independence. Bush doesn’t care about the fate that awaits Orthodox Christian Serbs there, but paleos do. Yes, neoconservatives are terribly smug about America’s multicultural achievements, and feel stupidly superior to the Europeans, for whom American paleoconservatives have compassion and camaraderie.
 
Paleos are filled with foreboding as they watch Europeans fight the battle that Enoch Powell foresaw. When the barbarians of the banlieusard rioted through France in November of 2005, one neoconservative troika—Mark Steyn, Jonah Goldberg, Frederick Kempe—fingered French racism and snobbery in marginalizing its Maghrebis. France, in this unholy trinity’s assessment, fell short in offering its Third Worlders freebies and fraternité.
 
Naturally, paleoconservatives protested when neoconservatives sacrificed Iraqi Christians to the false idol of democracy. So why would they remain mum about another dwindling, equally old Christian community—the one being ethnically cleansed from the Palestinian Authority? Nor would American paleos ever think to badger the Russian Bear to withdraw from the North Caucasus and let Chechnya exercise full statehood, as the White House and Whitehall are wont to do. Chechnya, after all, is another Sharia-law dominated anarcho-terrorist society. It has been successfully transformed into an Islamist terrorist training ground, complete with court-ordered mutilations and public hangings.
 
Not unlike the Palestinian Authority, Chechnya has no economy to speak of, other than a thriving trade in weapons, drugs, and stolen goods. Both Russians and Israelis live adjacent to terrorist entities—the Russians to Chechnya; the Israelis to the Palestinian Authority. Russians must put up with the likes of Shamil Basayev (a Chechen terrorist and advocate of an Islamist state in the Northern Caucasus); Israelis have to contend with the Dalai Lamas of Gaza (Hamas).
 
Yet in fawning, radical-left fashion, American paleos excuse almost everything about the savage Palestinian society, while sneering contempt at the adjacent civilized society. When some honesty pierces the fog, and the facts on the Palestinian ground are acknowledged, it is invariably to blame Israel: If not for the colonizing Jewish state, a veritable economic oasis and a culture of life would flourish where a black hole now threatens to collapse upon itself.
 
Never did I imagine that the Bush and Blair administrations could be more consistent than my fellow paleos: The former, at least, hectored both Russians and Israelis about granting statehood to their nihilistic neighbors. Against the same insuperable odds, paleos expect Israel, but not Russia, to trust terrorists and their fan base to stop butchering babies and embrace Jeffersonian democracy and a Bill of Rights.
 
My own position (as a paleolibertarian) is, dare I say, consistently right and rightist: Assailed by savages, Russians, Europeans, and Israelis have my support in the battle for the West.
 
Geert Wilders’ position is eminently consistent. His conclusion: “We come from Rome, Athens and Jerusalem. That makes our civilization special, and certainly worth preserving”.
 
“Consistency,” it has been said, “is the touchstone of truth.” If paleos of the conservative and libertarian stripe are to be consistent in defending what Wilders calls “who we are and where we come from,” they will have to include Israel in their philosophical defense of the West.
 
 
A version of this column first appeared on VDARE.COM
 
NOTE: A “philosophical defense” must not be confused with a blind support for the Israeli government’s policies, or for foreign aid, which this writer has always vehemently opposed.

Be it the “public option” (that’ll eliminate all other options), the co-opting “co-op,” or the make-believe market that is the “insurance exchange”: if implemented, these euphemisms for centrally planned medicine will mean many more bureaucracies manned by plenty of government workers.  

Government workers may not always be genial to the public that pays them, but they are generous to a fault with their own. In the course of providing the stellar service for which the United States Postal Service has become famous, they pay themselves sizeable salaries and bountiful benefits, and retire years before the stiffs who support them can afford to.

For the benefit of the philistine forces that religiously pray for the creation of more such bloated behemoths—Rachel Maddow does so nightly on MSNBC—here are some sobering statistics about the price of the parasitical class. They come courtesy of The Free Enterprise Nation & Business Wire:

• On average, the federal civilian wage in 2008 was $79,197, almost 50 percent greater than that of the average private sector employee’s wages of $49,935.
•  Pay growth in the public sector has been much higher than growth in the private sector over the years, too. Between 2000 and 2008, wages for federal civilian workers climbed by 53.7 percent, while wages in the private sector went up 28.5 percent over the same time period.
•  The average state and local government employee earns 29 percent more than the average private sector employee.
•  When wages and benefits are combined, federal civilian workers averaged $119,982 in 2008, twice the average compensation of $59,909 for private sector workers. This places the value of benefits for federal civilian workers at an average of $40,000 a year, four times the value of benefits that the average private sector employee receives.
•  The majority of state workers have pension plans that allow them to retire 10 to 25 years earlier than members of the productive sector, and that provide benefits many times the retirement payout that Social Security would provide.

While gathering the data, The Free Enterprise Nation sampled (in the statistical sense) life in the Oink Sector:

• A driver’s education teacher in Illinois gets a $170,000 annual salary and $120,000 annual pension.
• In New York, some city workers amass more than $100,000 in overtime during their last year before retirement to create a monthly pension higher than their salary.
• 420 of Illinois’s physical education teachers, 332 English teachers and 94 driver’s education teachers make more than $100,000 a year, with salaries for each position topping out at more than $160,000 a year.
• A citizen of Houston, Texas, pondering the curious, concomitant rise in crime and taxes, would find that the number of police officers serving the community has remained the same for six years running, despite a 40 percent budget increase to cover higher salaries, pension and healthcare benefits.
• A small business receiving an IOU in California might be surprised to learn that in 2008, 40 percent of Vallejo’s 613 employees had salaries greater than $100,000 a year, the same year the city filed for bankruptcy.
• In Fort Worth, Texas, one police chief recently retired at age 55 with a guaranteed annual pension of $188,692. His successor retired at age 52 with an annual pension of $113,614. Another unremarkable State of California retiree gets an annual pension of $500,000. He was outsmarted by two University of Connecticut professors who are currently collecting six-figure pensions while simultaneously collecting similar salaries.

In another state, Free Enterprise Nation researchers discover that teachers retired at over 100,000 a year after 30 years of employment, with a guaranteed three-percent increase per annum. “Only 12 percent of retirees from the private sector have defined benefit pensions to supplement their Social Security.” The average annual pension of a private-enterprise employee is $13,083. These serfs of the state are not eligible for full Social Security benefits until their late 60s.

Early this year, still in the midst of an economic depression,  the federal government awarded a 2.9 percent raise to every federal worker and a 5.9 percent raise to every retiree.

The average worker in the U.S. pays $10,000 in income taxes; enough to keep one  federal worker in style for one month! There are upward of 20 million of these pampered pigs, hogging 87,000 different institutions in government and public education, where the payrolls are always lard-laden in comparison to private-economy paysheets.

The number of government workers is increasing and is projected to continue on this trajectory.

As invasive as the Kudzu vine, government added over half a million workers in the second quarter of 2009, as the private sector shed more than a million. Servant of the State Ms. Maddow will have to bear with Barack’s baby steps. Yes, Bush set an ambitious pace for the growth of government, but before she knows it—and well before his term is over—Obama will have bumped up the current federal workforce substantially. 

Over and above these mind-numbing numbers, it’s crucial to comprehend the underlying principles that permit in one sphere (the public sector) what they prohibit in the other (the private sector).

In the private sector a worker is paid for his productivity. If he were overpaid—in other words, remunerated more than he produces—the proprietor would go belly up. No business means no jobs.

Set aside the question of whether productivity—output per unit of labor—is the appropriate gauge in an enterprise—government—that confiscates and distributes wealth, but produces nothing.

Understand this: Backed by the power of the State, the sponger sector has unlimited access to income not its own—it has the power to tax, borrow, and mint money out of thin air. With such usurped authority, why would public debt that runs to the trillions deter the ongoing orgy?

By the standards of honest, if unorthodox, accounting, government workers, moreover, don’t pay taxes, but are paid out of taxes. In other words, they pay taxes out of money confiscated from taxpayers, who, in turn, pay taxes twice: on their own income and on the income of members of the bureaucracy.

At the very least, this should disqualify state workers from voting.

In any event, if you are a private-sector sucker plumping for a panoply of new government programs, consider the following: The more of them there are, the fewer of you there will be. Think zero-sum, or parasite vs. host. The first is sucking the lifeblood of the second. The larger the parasite gets, the weaker the host will grow.

Joe Wilson knows of what he speaks. South Carolina’s Republican Representative is what one of my readers has dubbed deliciously a “subject matter expert” on providing federal health benefits to illegal aliens.

Wilson voted “Yea” for the Bush “Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003.” Not only did this drug benefit add trillions to the Medicare shortfall, it translated into a bonanza for illegal immigrants.

Tucked away in Section 1011, titled the “Federal Reimbursement Of Emergency Health Services Furnished To Undocumented Aliens,” is the following specification:

[T]he Secretary shall pay the amount … determined under paragraph (2) directly to eligible providers located in the State for the provision of eligible services to aliens described in paragraph (5) … aliens described in this paragraph are any of the following: (A) Undocumented aliens. (B) Aliens who have been paroled into the United States at a United States port of entry for the purpose of receiving eligible services. (C) Mexican citizens permitted to enter the United States for not more than 72 hours under the authority of a biometric machine readable border crossing identification card …

Thus when Wilson indecorously, but correctly, called Obama out for lying about the ins-and-outs of HR 3200, ”America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009,” he was speaking as one of 204 Republicans to have endorsed Bush’s 2003 medical monstrosity. Clearly, Wilson and his colleagues know a thing or two about hiding goodies bilked from taxpayers in the 1011th Section of a hefty bill.

As a rule, it is safe to assume that the federal government, Democratic or Republican, has illegals covered. By federal fiat, state schools and hospitals must bear the costs of teaching and treating people who’ve broken into the country. As these federally granted mandates have not been revoked, why would Obamacare flout provisions that are already the law of the land, de jure and de facto ?

Much has been made of Section 246 of HR 3200, titled, “No Federal Payment For Undocumented Aliens.” With their monk-like devotion to Obama, “246” was all the evidence the media needed to pronounce Wilson a liar. But absent a screening process to exclude aliens—HR 3200 does not deploy the “Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements” program ─ “246” is no more than a “don’t ask, don’t tell” inside joke. 

Straightforward, non-obfuscating language is a luxury our incontinent legislators can ill afford, given the level of lying they must sustain. Take Section 152 of H.R.3200, titled tellingly “Prohibiting Discrimination In Health Care.” It states,

(a) In General- Except as otherwise explicitly permitted by this Act and by subsequent regulations consistent with this Act, all health care and related services (including insurance coverage and public health activities) covered by this Act shall be provided without regard to personal characteristics extraneous to the provision of high quality health care or related services.

(b) Implementation- To implement the requirement set forth in subsection (a), the Secretary of Health and Human Services shall …  promulgate such regulations as are necessary or appropriate to insure that all health care and related services … covered by this Act are provided (whether directly or through contractual, licensing, or other arrangements) without regard to personal characteristics extraneous to the provision of high quality health care or related services.

The category “illegal alien” could be counted within this broad injunction against the consideration of extraneous personal characteristics in limiting or denying care.

Can you picture the ACLU lawyers—or any other mandarin who works the system—applying the Section’s convoluted locution to illegals? Sure you can! Thousands of functionaries and mafiosi across the country will sink to ACORN-like levels of fraud and falsehood with the introduction of this president’s plan.

So hard is it to pinpoint, in H.R.3200, plain words promising to punish acts that extend the American Welfare State to the world—that assorted Guides for the Perplexed have emerged to assist.

One analysis, written by the Congressional Research Service, is “Treatment of Noncitizens in H.R. 3200.” Its authors state that, “H.R. 3200 does not contain any restrictions on noncitizens participating in the Exchange—whether the noncitizens are legally or illegally present, or in the United States temporarily or permanently.”

Subsidies based on income will also be granted to “trafficking victims, crime victims, fiancées of U.S. citizens, and those who have had applications for legal permanent residence (LPR) status pending for three years.” Besides, and as Tom Tancredo has pointed out, once amnesty is past—as it will—the discussion will be moot.

So when, on September 9, 2009, the representative from South Carolina interrupted the president’s address to America’s deliberative chambers by shouting “You lie!”—he was not lying.

Wilson lied for Bush, but he did not extend that courtesy to Obama.

Given the perpetual parade of “intellectuals” who are not intelligent in our media ─ Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, PBS and the “parrot press” ─ I don’t expect many Americans to be familiar with political philosopher Paul E. Gottfried. Nevertheless, Paul (he’s a friend) is one of the most important intellectuals in the United States. 

Historian Eugene Genovese calls Paul incorruptible, “an American intellectual of superior talent.” Author and historian John Lukacs praises Professor Gottfried as “a very profound thinker.” And L. Brent Bozell III salutes his “amazing intellectual courage” ─ courage in the face of the malign, philistine forces of the liberal and neoconservative mainstream. 

Over the years, I’ve interviewed Professor Gottfried pursuant to the publication of his many books. These include “Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right,” “Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Towards a Secular Theocracy,” and “After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State.” 

Professor Gottfried’s latest book is “Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers.” Considering the roiling populist revolt against Obama’s healthcare plan, I was eager to pick up on Paul’s anti-populism. For unlike his pal Patrick J. Buchanan, Professor Gottfried is not a populist ─ he believes scheming elites play only a marginal role in the American people’s affinity for state programs.

ILANA: One of my favorite observations in “Encounters” is the one about “the Archie Bunkers” of America having gone the way of the dinosaur. That generation, you write, “Has been replaced by a multitude of vastly more radicalized versions of Meathead, Archie’s fashionable liberal son-in-law who by now could be an editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal.” Explain with reference to the alleged “traditionalism” of heartland Middle America.

Paul Gottfried: I’m not much impressed with the “traditionalism” of the American heartland or (to use that ridiculous neologism “red states”). That heartland, in which I’ve spent much of my life, has supplied the teeming footsoldiers for McCain, Karl Rove, the inexpressibly stupid “W,” and loudmouths like Sean Hannity. It is the American heartland that now identifies patriotism with launching wars of choice in the name of spreading “our democracy.” Its inhabitants, moreover, suffer from the vulgar eating habits and lack of cultural literacy that their critics often impute to them. However perverse in their political judgments these critics may be, they are right about the ignorance and gullibility of heartland Americans.

ILANA: In a recent column, “Populist Right Rising,” Pat Buchanan said this about “Encounters”:

“In his new memoir, “Encounters,” conservative scholar Dr. Paul Gottfried writes of a 1993 gathering, hosted by this writer, where libertarian legend Murray Rothbard, columnist Sam Francis and that founding father of post-war conservatism, Dr. Russell Kirk, went at it over the role of the populist right in the conservative movement.”

Tell us something about that spat and its significance to the current protests.

Paul Gottfried: The most evident spat at the time of our meeting in 1993 was not over who was a populist. The argument, if there was one, centered on whether we wished to define ourselves as “conservatives” or “rightists.” By the early 1990s, I had decided that the term “conservative” meant standing for the leftist managerial status quo, while trying to decorate that status quo with traditionalist rhetoric. Indeed, by the early 1990s the neoconservatives had taken over the conservative movement, lock, stock, and barrel, and they had reduced conservatism to talk about democracy and human rights. By the 1990s, the Burkean rhetoric (and certainly traditionalist substance) that Russell Kirk had fought to give American conservatism had all but vanished from the movement. One reason for this displacement, which did not surprise me, was the rise of neocon power on the establishment right.

ILANA:  Speaking of Edmund Burke, in “Encounters,” you mention Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France” as providing a “compelling presentation of historically-based conservatism.” Russell Kirk, also one of your friends, said about “Reflections” that it “burns with all the wrath and anguish of a prophet who saw the traditions of Christendom and the fabric of civil society dissolving before his eyes.”

Why is it that one rarely hears about Burke in American public discourse? Yet our countrymen know and love Thomas Paine, who sympathized with the Jacobins and spat venom at Burke for his devastating critique of the blood-drenched, illiberal, irreligious French Revolution.

Paul Gottfried: Although, as one might imagine, I prefer Burke as an historical figure and social theorist to the peripatetic troublemaker Paine, Burke’s adversary has had the stronger influence on these shores. Paine, not Burke, was the inspiration of the Reagan presidency and a much beloved figure for American libertarians such as Murray Rothbard. There is a bad fit between Burke and American political reality. America was founded as an eighteenth-century liberal republic, and not as a reconstruction of the kind of British aristocratic-monarchical society that Burke defended in his “Reflections.” It is one thing to praise Burke as a social-ethical thinker of high quality, which he undoubtedly was. It is another thing to imagine that he was a moving spirit behind the American founding or that the American founding generation was imbued with Burke’s defense of the British monarchy in its confrontation with the French Revolution.

ILANA: You have a Swiftian response, in “Encounters,” to that perennial question, “Do the people have the government they deserve?” “The government,” you write, “is far better than the one that the masses actually merit.” Wicked wit aside, what is your assessment of the role, if any, of the populist Right (and the “people”) in derailing the steamroller of statism?

Paul Gottfried: I think the populist Right in the US vastly overestimates the virtues of the “people,” which it identifies with whatever it likes, as opposed to what the people overwhelmingly vote for. Listening to populists, one gets the impression that it was not “the people” who voted for Obama and whom big-government Republicans, leaning leftward, have been able to manipulate. The “people” only exist for their rightist admirers when they please those who are praising them. Otherwise, we are not dealing with the “people” but with Martians or interlopers. Needless to say, I am not a populist because I understand the total compatibility of the “people” with the leftist managerial regime that now rules us.

MORE FROM the peerless Paul Gottfried in “Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers,” which is also available at ISI Books.”

The other day, at my local branch of the United States Postal Service, a devoted USPS customer told me in high decibels to go back whence I came. Although I speak and write English at a level this yahoo could not aspire to, I do the former sans an American accent. In the chauvinistic, provincial mind of my post-office foe, my accent condemned me. Even more of a liability was my apparently un-American, unpatriotic audacity. I stood up to a USPS bureaucrat, who has, for the past seven years, faithfully fulfilled her role as a bully. 

Incidentally, the Asian service clerk in question had not managed to master Pidgin English, but somehow I doubt that the brassy American postal patriot would have dared to order her out of the country.

For well over a decade, I have been sending snail mail from North America to South Africa, where friends and family still reside (and where my accent originates). Having used the Canadian, South African and European equivalent services, I can safely say that there is no viler or more inhospitable dump than the United States Postal Service. The latter is far and away inferior to the aforementioned rival monopolies. Enviously I eye the items my mother posts from the Netherlands. Whereas mine are festooned with at least two labels per package; hers are form-free, care free, shipped with ease.  

A seven-year saga has prepared me well: I arrived with the requisite labels filled out and handy. This time, the express package was destined for the in-laws—a belated birthday gift, as well as a timely one. The package was boldly addressed. It has to be so—for the clearer and bolder the lettering, the more likely the thing is to arrive at its South-African destination. That country moves to its own rhythm. But I should not be forced to explain, or apologize for, the manner in which I address my envelope. After all, I was paying a hefty sum for the privilege.

Politely, I asked the sour, dour postal worker to avoid plastering the express-mail label over the bold, clearly written address. Sullenly she turned away and reached for a new label and envelope, and then hissed a reply. Translated from pidgin: If I wanted to stop her from blanketing this crucial bit of information—repeated in Lilliputian letters on the express label—I would have to fill in yet another form, place my envelope in a new envelope and readdress it.

How this exercise in futility was supposed to alleviate anything other than this woman’s sadistic urges is a mystery. In any event, I refused to oblige or budge, and informed our Employee of the Month that I was not going to fill in more labels and forms. Nor was I going to entertain repackaging and readdressing my well-wrapped, clearly addressed item.

On an earlier visit to the same coven, I had encountered a slightly more obliging African-American clerk. (It’s hard not to notice that my USPS branch is dedicated to correcting past “injustices” by utterly excluding any “oppressors” from its workforce.) I mentioned the “seven-year saga” suffered at the hands of his female colleagues. He refused to believe me, and then and there, made me promise I would call on him if ever the “ladies” lapsed.

I did. Whereupon my supposed “savior” proceeded to do his subversive best to do me further disservice.

Patronizingly, he told me my tormentor was only protecting me. The need for clear, large lettering on an envelope destined for South Africa was no concern of his or hers. (This last “argument” made him smirk a bit. I believe he thought it showcased his superior reasoning skills.) His verdict? The “work station” belonged to sour-Asian-lady-who-speaks-in-tongues. There was nothing rude-African-American-guy could do to assist. It was preordained: The destination address was to be concealed!

This was precisely the kind of dialogue Joe Bauers, the protagonist in Mike Judge’s superb satire “Idiocracy,” had conducted with the “‘tarded” doctor character:

Doctor (Justin Long): Hey, how’s it hangin’, ese?  Well, don’t wanna sound like a dick or nothin’, but, uh, it says on your chart that you’re f—-ed up. Uh, you talk like a fag, and your sh-t’s all retarded. What I do is just like, like, you know ... like, you know what I mean? Like—(chuckles)
Joe: No, I’m serious here.
Doctor: Don’t worry, scrot. Now, there are plenty of ‘tards out there living really kick-ass lives. My first wife was ‘tarded.” She’s a pilot now.
Joe: I need for you to be serious for a second here, okay? I need help.
Doctor: There’s that fag talk we talked about.

Back at President Camacho’s post office, I stood my ground. Eventually, the adjacent clerk gestured to me: “I will help you, as soon as I’m through with a client,” she whispered softly. Because of their insistence on scrapbooking over my address, I had been arguing with her “‘tarded” colleagues for over 20 minutes. In no time, the young clerk stuck the express label alongside the boldfaced address, without obscuring it, stamped the envelope, took my money, and sent me on my way.

The hold-up was no more than a sadistic display of power, honed in a state monopoly, where captive “customers” are pinned down like butterflies by “service providers.” The discretion left to these petty tyrants is wide—fear of being fired minimal, if non-existent.

Would this farce have transpired had I been able to grab my package and, at the first sign of insanity, flee next door to a competitor? Imagine competition that had dismissed a disgraced pidgin-speaking-Asian-lady; whose projected losses for 2009 and 2010 did NOT run upwards of $7 billion; which had NOT incurred over $70 billion in unfunded liabilities, and was NOT funding the parasitical existence of 800,000 postal workers by borrowing from the Federal Financing Bank (read: the taxpayer). 

Just you wait until a “worker” of this caliber, subject to the same disincentives, is in charge of determining whether to schedule your emergency CAT Scan (or maybe not). You don’t wish to set that cat among the poor pigeons. Such workers will be the very beasts rising out of the sea of statism unleashed by a government-controlled healthcare system.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office considers the USPS “costly and high risk.” The GAO has posed the following telltale questions vis-à-vis the USPS—musings that give an idea as to the chain of unaccountability the mailing public endures:

• “Should USPS be held more directly accountable for its performance and, if so, to what extent, to whom, and with what mechanisms?” [Read: Right now, no USPS employee pays for the pain he or she causes.]
• “What oversight is needed to protect the public interest, including the interest of customers with few or no alternatives to the mail?” [Read: Currently your “interests” are nothing but curiosities to USPS monopolists.]
• “What recourse should customers and competitors have to lodge complaints?” [Read: This implies that now there are practically none. You can, however, file a “compliment” to a postal worker.]

As I departed, I was accosted by the feral female PO devotee who heaped scorn on me: “They [USPS] do what they do for a reason. This is how we do it in America. If you don’t like it, go back to where you came.”

Let’s suppose a business employed ten workers in June. Along came Barack Obama and huffed and puffed and blew six jobs away. Four employees now run a pared-down operation. The next round of retrenchments will invariably entail fewer than six people. The president, or any other wolf in sheep’s clothing, may declare that our proprietor has shed fewer jobs in the month of July. But he may not frame a mathematical inevitability as a sign of economic recovery.

Fewer jobs lost probably means that there are fewer jobs to lose. 

Nevertheless, this is exactly how the president spun the static employment market─and, to be fair, aided by statisticians at the Bureau of Labor, past presidents have likewise finessed unemployment.

Thus, the slowing rate of job losses has become the measure du jour of economic recovery. Employers laid off fewer workers in July—247,000 as opposed to 443,000 in June, which led the Associated Press to conclude that, “The jobless rate dipped for the first time in 15 months to 9.4 percent in July, from 9.5 percent the previous month.”

But even the AP has been unable to conceal that the real unemployment rate is 16.3 percent. The discrepancy between the official and the awful numbers has arisen because the former count, conveniently, “only those who have looked for work in the last four weeks.” “Hundreds of thousands of people, some discouraged by their failed job searches, left the labor force. The labor force includes only those who are either employed or are looking for work.”

Not in the habit of pandering to power, the Center for Immigration Studies explains that the broader measure of employment, referred to by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as U-6, includes the unemployed and people who would like to work, but who have not looked for a job recently, as well as those involuntarily working part-time. According to the U-6 measure, close to twenty two million Americans are without work. 

Alas, the economic “experts” have a lot riding on the recovery ass. To that end, they are in the habit of conjuring constructs that help their political masters to mask economic reality.

Yet another unbeatable bit of political fraud is the fig leaf of a “jobless recovery.”

A jobless economic recovery is the equivalent of a housewarming for the homeless. 

This sophistic figure of speech serves to coat with a patina of scholarly respectability the systemic effects of employment-killing government policies.

Typically, establishment economists will waffle about “structural changes — permanent shifts in the distribution of workers throughout the economy”— causing job losses. At the same time, these stooges will genuflect to GDP growth—a highly manipulable indicator─as proof that the jobless are fussing needlessly, and should eat cake, if bread is unaffordable

The gross domestic product, however, is a consumption-driven statistic: It measures precisely the kind of economic Brownian motion of which much less is required if a genuine recovery is to take place.

“This statistic is constructed in accordance with the view that what drives an economy is not the production of wealth but rather its consumption,” observes economist Frank Shostak of the Mises Institute.  “What matters here is demand for final goods and services. Since consumer outlays are the largest part of overall demand, it is commonly held that consumer demand sets in motion economic growth.”

A slow-down in the shedding of jobs, or “a jobless recovery”─these semantic exercises in obscurantism conceal that the conditions for an economic bounce-back are nowhere apparent.

Having just received Barack’s blessing for a second term, Fed supremo Ben. Bernanke has yet to raise interest rates as he ought to. Americans have not begun saving in earnest. Prices are not being allowed to fall to reflect reality, and permit people to purchase the same amount of goods with less available funds. Legislative intervention is delaying the liquidation of bad debt and worthless, illiquid assets at prices set by the market, not manufactured by government. We’re still a broke and bankrupt consumer economy, increasingly penetrated and enervated by a tentacular bureaucracy. 

Absent the conditions for an economic rebounding, sustainable jobs─and no job generated or granted by the government qualified─will not materialize.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak arrived in Washington this week to press flesh with the president. In an interview, Mubarak told PBS television that Barack Obama’s speech had shown him that “America is not against Islam.”

The address Mubarak was referring to was delivered by a grandiose Obama in Egypt’s capital, early in June. There, the president prostrated himself before the Muslim world, offering up prolix praise for the religion of peace—a tradition that his predecessor established. 

Frankly, I got the impression that Mubarak himself was a little wary of Islam—this is the Egyptian’s first sojourn to Washington since 2004, after breaking up with Bush. “W” would not stop bugging Mubarak to democratize Egypt. Fortunately, Mubarak was not about to help catapult the Wahhabist Muslim Brotherhood to power, which would be the likely outcome of a democratic election in Egypt.

But I digress.

In that memorable speech, the president also lauded the compendious knowledge spread far and wide by the Al-Azhar and Cairo Universities. Nary a reference was made to “Islam’s bloody borders,” as Samuel P. Huntington put it in The Clash of Civilizations? Or, for that matter, to Al-Azhar’s bloody borders. According to Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch, officiating as Grand Sheikh for this much-exalted institute of Islamic learning is a chap by the name of Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi. In the tradition of Islamic Enlightenment, Tantawi has given his approval—on strict Islamic grounds, mind you—to suicide bombing.

After mentioning the value and universality of human rights, our self-styled “student of history,” as the president had dubbed himself on the occasion (he also made a point of repeating his middle name a lot), went on to declare, “America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles.”

The choice to draw parallels between a country and a faith was a curious one. Was Obama intimating that Islam, like America, was a political system? In that case, we are agreed about the project of Islam.

Still—and for all Obama’s heavy hinting to the contrary—Islam has no “human rights.” The ideas of individual rights and the dignity of man are distinctly Western, an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. And while dialogue is dignified; dhimmitude is not, even if it achieves a desired, if temporary, effect.

While in Egypt, our president did not expatiate over Iraq, which he continues to occupy. To compensate, he peppered his oration with the standard canards about colonialism and the Arab world.

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The received wisdom that the Arabs were (and remain) hapless and helpless victims of the West is false, of course. In Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789-1923, Efraim and Inari Karsh marshal prodigious scholarship to dispel the shopworn shibboleths Obama regurgitated in Cairo. The two show that “Twentieth-century Middle Eastern history is essentially the culmination of long-standing indigenous trends, passions, and patterns of behavior rather than an externally imposed dictate.”

Although he didn’t take the liberty of apologizing on behalf of ever-errant white America for the slave trade during another pilgrimage—this time to Ghana—Obama did tell Anderson Cooper (the “journalist” noted for introducing the country to the practice of tea bagging) that “slavery is a terrible part of the United States’ history and should be taught in a way that connects that past cruelty to current events, such as the genocide in Darfur.”

For the Atlantic slave trade, contemporary Americans and Britons grovel at every opportunity. But as historian Jeremy Black points out in his sprawling survey, The Slave Trade, Europeans were also responsible for bringing about the demise of this despicable practice in Africa.

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I wonder: Does Africa’s own Little Lord Fauntleroy seek to rub-in the theme of the white man’s burden, a theme WASPs welcome like wimps? Or is Obama open to educating America about the robust slave trade conducted by Arabs across the Sahara Desert? Or across the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea to markets in the Middle East. What about the vibrant, indigenous slave trade carried on well into the nineteenth century in the interior of West Africa?

The president might begin changing his own preconceived ideas of events past and present in Africa by reading the words of Brother Keith B. Richburg. Richburg, who is seldom seen on the idiot’s lantern, and whose words are not widely disseminated across the racial tyranny that is America, wrote the following in Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa(1997):

I feel for [Africa’s] suffering, I empathize with her pain, and now, from afar, I still recoil in horror whenever I see yet another television picture of another tribal slaughter, another refugee crisis. But most of all I think: Thank God my ancestors got out, because, now, I am not one of them. In short, thank God that I am an American.

Given the veritable mirage of lies he conjured in Cairo, blaming the decadence of Arab countries on nefarious Western imperialist intervention in the 19th and 20th centuries—B. Hussein’s historical horizons vis-à-vis the Middle East could also do with some broadening.

A good start would be to stop relying on “Lawrence of Arabia’s” homoerotic, ahistoric memoir for the facts.

It was wicked when assorted neoconservative organs and tools presented antiwar activists such as Cindy Sheehan as something other than what they were. And it is still execrable now that the left-liberal news filters are tarring anti-Obamacare town hall protesters as something other than what they are.

Sheehan’s cause was just. She spoke stirringly against Bush’s crimes in Iraq. Yet again and again she was dismissed by the neoconservatives as a George-Soros sponsored stooge (the details of that particular conspiracy evade me).

The outcry against state takeover of medicine is in the best of traditions too. Yet the malpracticing media are discounting the fractious town-hall participants as proxies for corporate and political interests. And worse.

The job of the press is to report events, not blanket the facts with conjecture and interpretations that end up being absorbed into the narrative and serve to fuse fact with fancy. Moreover, it matters not with which organizations groups of demonstrators, left or right, seek solidarity. What matters is the case they present. The rest is ad hominem, which is where discourse in the US stands.
Cronkite died the other day; news coverage croaked a long time ago.

Meanwhile, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow stumbled on a “scoop” in the form of some online “memos,” and was intoning like a solemn commissar about corporate agents and their foot soldiers, all conspiring against state-mediated munificence.

As she expounded ominously on imagined conspiracies that were really unremarkable events and associations, I was reminded of Glenn Beck’s delusional diagrams of multiplying giant ACORNS. (Beck before a blackboard, in turn, conjures Russell Crow as John Forbes Nash in A Beautiful Mind, minus the mind.)

Unlike comrade Keith (Olbermann), at least Maddow obeyed the journalistic imperative to interview one of the malevolent men mentioned in The Memos. And how delightful this corporatist turned out to be: “Do the oil companies fund us? No, Rachel, but I’d like to take the opportunity to urge them to support our impetus for free medicine.”

Americans with a bias for small government and big society! What next?

Sometime during the week, the Svengali shifted into campaign mode. B.O. took the time to mix it up at a town hall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, during which he promised those invited into the charmed circle that it was not to the converted that he was preaching, but to a randomly selected group.

Outside, the country was roiling—still is. Inside Barack’s Bubble the debate was flatlining like Nancy Pelosi’s brainwaves.

Speaking of whom, that frozen face and unsupple mind teamed up with Ring Leader Steny Hoyer (House majority leader) to label and libel 50 percent of Americans as “un-American,” in a USA Today op-ed, titled, “‘Un-American’ attacks can’t derail health care debate.”

Compounding their misleading conflation of the political will with the will of the people (“Health coverage for all was on the national agenda as early as 1912… Americans have been waiting for nearly a century for quality, affordable health care”), the dastardly duo dishonestly failed to mention a minor detail: the protests mirrored the polls.

According to the latest USA Today/Gallup survey , “More Americans disapprove (50 percent) than approve (44 percent) of the way U.S. President Barack Obama is handling healthcare policy.”

Finally, at the time of writing, a breakthrough. Oh, the medicine of mercy.

The tone on MSNBC took a turn. Anchors David “Shyster” and Tamron Hall inferred that the turbulent town hallers were a little simple, rather than “un-American.”

T. Hall, who could never be called simple (her online fans vouch for the quality of her cleavage), believes “these people”─clearly aliens to a member of the “multicultural noise machine”─don’t know that Medicare and Medicaid are government-run; and they don’t get that insurance (a word she pronounces incorrectly with the emphasis on the first syllable) is a third-party entity.

Dear T. Non sequitur Hall:

From the fact that Veterans Health, Medicare and Medicaid are government-run, it doesn’t follow that transferring more of the medical industry into the same gulag is constitutional, insignificant, negligible, or unworthy of fighting.

From the fact that there are one too many mediating entities between doctor and patient, it does not follow that another─subject to all the wrong incentives─ought to be inserted.
There was one other thing that led our sleuth in a C Cup to “inform” her viewers that the mutinous multitudes were muddled beyond belief: Town hall attendees seemed to be harping on the proper role of government, and not on the minutiae of the messiah’s medical plan.

Lo! Making a philosophical point instead of a utilitarian one ─ now that is dimwitted.

Let me further dim the debate:

Demonstrators for a government takeover of medicine have a right to discuss their demands, but no right to enact these demands.

As Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute put it, “Rights, as our founding fathers conceived them, are not claims to economic goods, but freedoms of action. There can be no such thing as a ‘right’ to products or services created by the effort of others, and this most definitely includes medical products and services.”

Protesters for a public plan have the right to seek out a doctor and pay him for his services; they have no claim to the products of his labor─and no right to enlist the State to compel third parties to pay for those products. 

This should help Tamron Hall (and her ilk), whose gaping vacuity is ameliorated only by an unbuttoned blouse.  

If the U.S. wasn’t already insolvent, I’d say that Obama was bankrupting the country, and sending the health care we have to hell in a handcart, for the ostensible benefit of less than ten percent of the population. But the U.S. is already in the red, courtesy of the current president and his predecessor.

According to the Census Bureau report, “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2007″ (p. 20), in 2007, the number of children under 18 years old without health insurance was 8.1 million. Uninsured, non-Hispanic Whites stood at 20.5 million. At 7.4 million, the number of uninsured Blacks was not statistically different from 2006.The number of uninsured Hispanics came to 14.8 million.

The reported numbers─between 46 and 50 million─are inflated. If CBS News says so, you can believe it. The figures factor in illegal aliens and many who already avail themselves of programs for the poor. Children, for instance. Obama has only just expanded the entitlement plan known as the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP.

For the correct number of uninsured subtract the SCHIP-covered kids and another 20 million illegal aliens still in the country. (Although fewer Mexicans are entering the U.S., illegal aliens are not repatriating to Mexico, despite the economic depression, reports the Washington Independent.) 

Large-scale wealth destruction in the purported service of the few─does that sound familiar? Last year, a bumbling Bush bailed out and nationalized large sections of the financial sector because of a few million bad mortgages. For the benefit of these bad debtors, B.O. has since beefed-up Bush’s initial offering with a $75 billion foreclosure relief plan. Although sources cited by FOX Business estimate “that up to 6 million homes could be lost to foreclosure in the current economic crisis,” so far approximately four million loans have gone under, out of a total of 44.4 million mortgages countrywide.  

Heavily concentrated in California and Florida─thirty percent of mortgages in the Golden State and the Sunshine State are in “a negative equity position,” or underwater─the beneficiaries of affirmative-action loans currently being foreclosed upon are hardly numerous. Next are Texas, Georgia, and Michigan. That’s it. The rest of the country is paying its bills—and theirs, by the looks of it. Because of the State-mandated spoils system for minorities, and thanks to the mediation of the governing lunatics, the entire country is being shoved like lemmings into the economic abyss.

Blue-Dog Democrats have accepted the plan to total healthcare for the few uninsured. The cynically titled “American Affordable Health Choices Act Of 2009,” disgorged by the lower chamber, will lumbers through the upper chamber─specifically the Senate’s Finance Committee─and will be approved subject to tiny tweaks.

The “compromise” over this unaffordable, choice-denying medical monstrosity will entail fewer coercive measures and minor cost-saving cuts (or rationing)─$900 billion instead of 1 trillion over 10 years. The name of The Thing will be changed. “Co-ops,” however, will offer a good deal of co-optation and not many options. Those who’re smitten by B.O.’s Svengali-style hypnotism will welcome the news that he and the secretary of Health and Human Services will be running their cozy “co-op.”

The aggregated wisdom of men acting freely in the market place accounts for the cornucopia Americans take for granted. This abundance does not preclude affordable health insurance. For six dollars a day, the baying Boobus can purchase pretty comprehensive coverage, no deductibles or screening for pre-existing conditions. The average immoral dolt, however, prefers to spend the meager sum on a six-pack and hope that others will be coerced into covering his care.

The uninsured will multiply, not for any other reason than that unemployment is rising (the borders are still flung wide open and no attrition among illegal immigrants is in sight). Lose your job, and you lose your health-care coverage. The Census Bureau survey on health insurance coverage for 2008, to be released in September of this year, will, no doubt, confirm the unyielding trend. Yet instead of creating the conditions for jobs in the private economy, Obama has chosen, Chicago style, to kneecap job creators.

How so? The lavish healthcare expansion, notes the New York Times, would be paid for in part “by raising $544 billion over the next decade with a graduated income surtax on the wealthiest Americans: families with adjusted gross incomes exceeding $350,000 and individuals making more than $280,000.”

Who exactly are those earning half a million to a million depreciated dollars? Rare are the employees who garner such wages in the corporate world, outside of Wall Street. The rich entrepreneur─the middle-class, small business owner─that’s who Obama is looking to filch without flinching.

Yet, the constitutionality of singling out a distinct segment of society─the productive─for punishment is never so much as raised. The only consideration that seems to counts is, “How many Americans want it?”

It so happens that attainder laws are unconstitutional (Article 1, Sections 9 and 10). Our high-minded messiah has no authority or right to punish this (innocent) group of people without the benefit of due process. 

And indeed, this immoral drive will miscarry. Penalizing the productive will cause them to go into hiding like a tortoise in its shell.

How CanadaCare Almost Killed My Kid!

“Code Blue Intensive Care Unit,” “Code Blue Intensive Care Unit”:

When the Code-Blue alarm sounded over the hospital’s loudspeaker system, my husband and I knew it sounded for our daughter. It was 11:00 at night. The hallways of the British Columbia hospital were dark. Only one emergency operating theater was in use. She was in it. The skeletal staff came running. Resuscitation carts were rushed toward the theater.

My own heart nearly stopped, because she is my heart.

To follow Dr. David Gratzer’s plainspoken definition (the good doctor is a Canada-care whistle blower), Code Blue is “the term used when a patient’s heart stops and hospital staff must leap into action to save him.” My then 12-year-old had stopped breathing on the operating table and was being revived.  

Earlier that day she had broken her arm sliding down an embankment with friends. She arrived home, coat draped awkwardly over her disfigured limb, and stood in the doorway sheepishly. Sheepish because she feared I’d be angry. You see, she had fibbed about her whereabouts and was supposed to be studying. 

Sheepish, but heroic, as we would soon discover. 

“Oh those bones, oh those bones,” goes the old song. My familiarity with the structure of the human arm until then extended to, “The finger bone is connected to the hand bone, and the hand bone is connected to the arm bone, and the arm bone is connected to the shoulder bone, Oh mercy how they scare!”

A subsequent X-ray of Nicky’s arm many hours on would reveal that nothing much was connected any longer. Hers was not just any old fracture. The humerus and the ulna were completely severed. The free-floating bones were pushing out against the skin. Yet the child never so much as whimpered. 

We rushed her to the hospital where we imagined she’d get care right away. Recent immigrants to Canada, this was our first encounter with the single-payer health-care system. Back in the “old country,” South Africa, we had benefited from a thriving, profitable, private sector in medicine, where relatively unrestricted entry into the profession, and the prospects of a lucrative, prestigious career, attracted the country’s crème de la crème, and ensured a steady stream of graduates from excellent medical schools. (These once venerated institutions have since succumbed to the malignant effects of affirmative action that privileges the majority population. Consequently, South Africa’s medical schools are no longer internationally recognized.)

The old-fashioned family physician had pride of place in this market and still made house calls. Emergency calls were answered by an “on call” partner in a practice, and not an answering machine. If you had no insurance, you’d contract directly with your medic, and pay him off, little by little, if necessary.

Commensurate with job satisfaction, voluntarism was high among the doctors I patronized. Once a month, my daughter’s pediatrician, bless him, would venture into the “bush,” to treat underprivileged children, gratis. Another specialist repaired cleft palates, also for free.

These superb practitioners had done stints in Britain’s government-run National Health Service. Obama would call them racists, but, as they told it, the NHS was staffed mainly by graduates of Pakistan’s medical schools. Oxford and Cambridge-bound students were less likely to be enticed by the prospects of capped physician fees and squalid working conditions.

My daughter was born in a private, spiffy, state-of-the-art South African clinic, entirely within the financial reach of a middle-class young family. Now she was writhing in excruciating pain, on a hard bench, in full view of her unforgiving “caregivers,” in the dilapidated corridors of a state-run Canadian hospital.

In retrospect, the admissions process was devoid of any medical prioritizing. A woman who complained of a migraine was being interviewed at length ahead of us. She took her time, as did her interviewer. A few sullen sorts were being checked out for mild sniffles, as we waited.

And waited.

It was abundantly clear that the service, perceived as free by the freeloading public, was being overused. Yet separating urgent from trivial cases did not seem to form part of the protocol. This was compounded by the cruel indifference of the gatekeepers─the receptionists and emergency nurses.

So we sat and we sat. Every now and then I’d rise to plead for a palliative for my agonized child and her detached limb. Cold stares and stern admonitions were all I got. Two hours into the wait, my daughter finally began sobbing quietly. Still, the staff stared. When we were eventually summoned, a bureaucrat began filling in a lengthy questionnaire. I realized where she was going with her probes. Before the medical abuse would cease, child abuse had to be ruled out. The woman was investigating us for breaking our daughter’s arm! 

Next in store was a protracted stretch on a gurney, unattended. Another eternity passed before the mangled arm was X-rayed with great difficulty. A tired looking young surgeon explained the severity of the fracture. This was not a case for a cast. Nicky would require surgery sometime that night. When, he could not say. An inept nurse began poking the child’s arm for a vein. I swooned at the sight of the punctured, bleeding little appendage. My husband kept vigil as I recovered outdoors. After another nurse was called in, a morphine IV was finally inserted. It stayed in until she was operated on. Hours later.

A cursory investigation into why Nicky coded that night was conducted. The findings were, conveniently, inconclusive. The custodians of Canada care had tried to convince me that my daughter had reacted to a compound in the chemical cocktail that was the anesthetic.

A decade on, the same precious person required wisdom teeth extraction, this time in the United States. She had forgotten how close she had once come to dying, but the thought of another such procedure terrified her mother.

Nicky’s American oral and maxillofacial surgeon, however, had no qualms whatsoever about putting her under in his well-appointed rooms. (Yes, we paid him ourselves: ever heard of saving for a procedure instead of going on holiday?) For after hearing all the facts of the case, he was in a position to explain what had happened ten years back.

It took a free American practitioner, in private practice, to deconstruct for me what had transpired on that fateful day.

The subpar care Nicky had received entailed the ongoing administration of morphine. Morphine, especially in a young child, depresses the respiratory system. Administered following hours on a powerful opiate, the general anesthetic acted cumulatively to stop her breathing.

Why is this episode typical of a day in the life of a patient interned in a state-run healthcare system?

As one wag warned: “Power will intoxicate the best hearts, as wine the strongest heads. No man is wise enough, nor good enough to be trusted with unlimited power.” [Except for Obama, naturally.]

The license to exercise near-unlimited power goes hand-in-glove with an indifferent, cruel, and invasive bureaucracy. In the U.S., an overly litigious society has led to the practice of defensive medicine. But in the “public option’s” sphere of influence, responsibility is collectivized. The culprits of a Code Blue or the odd slip of the scalpel have no out-of-pocket payments to fear. Had I sued the hospital, the comatose Canadian taxpayer would have been forced to pony up for the malpracticing parties. 

In defense of the medics who ministered to Nicky let me say this: Most were good. All were hopelessly locked into a professional gulag in which wages are tied to a negotiated deal with labor, rather than─as is the case in a competitive market─to the individual physician’s performance.

For his considerable skill, the surgeon who pinned Nicky’s shattered bones together is rewarded with an increased workload but no extra pay. Medical men and women like him must watch as mediocre practitioners are elevated beyond their capabilities, and as underperforming hospitals are “fixed” with infusions of funds. For such are the perverse, inverse incentives in all government departments─failure is rewarded with more resources. Coupled with capped fees and overflowing waiting rooms, these medical conscripts must contend with antiquated equipment and obsolete drugs.

Doctors are all corralled into this one and only “company.” There is no other option, private or public. Should their instinct for freedom get the better of them, they must defect to America

And soon that option will die too.

Although Obama has appointed more czars in six months than Russia’s Romanov Dynasty had occasion to anoint over three centuries, he is still missing a Vegetable Czar. If he acts quickly, Barack might be able to recruit a cheap VC with experience from The European Onion (formerly the EU).

The EO has been regulating fresh produce for quite some time. Duly, the Brussels Sprouts that run the Continent had barred “curly cucumbers, crooked carrots and mottled mushrooms–any odd-looking fruit and vegetables”─from Europe’s markets and supermarkets

But things are about to change. As the BBC News reported in a burst of good cheer, “July 1 marks the return to our shelves of the curved cucumber and the knobbly carrot.” Indeed, Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel has finally disavowed the rules that were introduced to ensure common standards among EU vegetables, “but are regarded by critics as examples of Euro-madness.”

Said the patron saint of “wonky” vegetables: “We don’t need to regulate this sort of thing at EU level. It is far better to leave it to market operators. The changes also mean that consumers will be able to choose from the widest range of products possible. It makes no sense to throw perfectly good products away, just because they are the ‘wrong’ size and shape,” bloviated Boel.

We wish our European fellow Fabians all the best as they enter the wild, unregulated agora of gnarly greens.

Speaking of equal opportunity oppression, this is bound to tickle you pink. Almost everyone is familiar with “A-Rod,” AKA Alexander Emmanuel Rodriguez, the New York Yankees Star, who enjoys (allegedly) using steroids and starlets, as well as a 10-year, $275 million salary paid by the Yankees.

Fewer people know who A-Jad is.

A-Jad is short for Ahmadinejad. (First name: Mahmoud. Residence: Iran. Occupation: dictator.) I believe this very funny moniker for Mahmoud was first used by “The American Thinker,” an Internet publication. (You didn’t think the New York Times provided entertaining copy!)

Only in America, and I mean it in a good way.

Neoconservatives liken A-Jad to Hitler. Granted, A-Jad is not a very good sport. However, all I see is a colossal clown for whom “A-Jad” is the perfect nickname. Take a look:

I’m not sure whether A-Jad amuses the serious-minded Chinese, but Timothy Geithner sure gives them the giggles.

It happened in June. The U.S. Treasury Secretary was at Peking University giving a pep talk about the lamentable state of the American economy. “The world’s most important bond salesman,” as the Wall Street Journal dubbed him, had embarked on a mission to allay the fears of the biggest foreign buyer of U.S. Treasury bonds. This via Reuters: “U.S. data shows that [China] held $768 billion in Treasuries as of March, but some analysts believe China’s total U.S. dollar-denominated investments could be twice as high.”

Chinese youngsters are clearly skeptical about American solvency and about the wisdom of their government stockpiling the foreign reserves of an unsteady economy.

Geithner to the rescue: “Chinese assets are very safe,” he gobbled in response to a question from the audience at Peking U.

Whereupon the students burst out laughing.

The laughter must have grown louder when Geithner followed up the act with a disclosure about his administration’s cunning plot to lower the cost of American health care by “adding another few trillion dollars in new health entitlements” (WSJ). As I write, Geithner’s boss is cautioning those who would oppose his “cost-cutting measures,” euphemized by the malpracticing media as “health care reform.”

Last month, the president held court on ABC News, which had staged a Health-Care Obamarama in his honor. Obama─who, to paraphrase poetry critic William Logan, never runs out of things to say, only things worth saying ─ promised that his medical system would be a well-oiled machine much like the Mayo Clinic is. There, “experts have figured out the most effective treatments and eliminated waste and unnecessary procedures,” preached the president.

Unlike Mephisto’s Medicare, the key to Mayo─and many such private not-for-profits─is not the all-knowing, demigod experts. Mayo clinic operates as smoothly as it does because it is a private clinic, where market forces and a mission combine to motivate dedicated entrepreneurs and professionals to minimize losses and maximize profits, so as to plow these back into an organization in which all are invested.

What’s the government’s mission? To keep Americans in the missionary position?