If Americans had any doubt how the liberal elite (Democrats in Congress, the press, the entertainment industry) felt about them before this month’s congressional recess, surely they must understand it now.

Hard-working, taxpaying Americans have been relatively complacent until recently, understandably occupied by their jobs, their finances, their families, and their personal responsibilities, and with a largely unspoken but abiding faith in the enduring principles of American government, the fidelity of their elected representatives to those principles, and the vigilance of the press in defending both.

Oops. The past few months have been eye-openers, haven’t they?

As awareness of Obama’s true intentions have grown, so have Americans’ concerns. Disgusted with the profligate spending of the Bush administration and an earlier Republican-controlled Congress, many Americans believed Obama and the Democrats when they promised fiscal accountability. (This was, to steal Samuel Johnson’s line, the triumph of hope over experience, but that’s another matter.) Skyrocketing deficits, double-digit unemployment, and nationalized private industry were not what most Americans signed up for.

Slowly but surely, Americans have begun to make their feelings known. And as they have, they have discovered what the Left really means when it waxes rhapsodic about freedom of speech, dissent as patriotism, and civil liberties: only for those who agree with us; not for you¸you dimwitted, knuckle-dragging, greedy, gun-toting, child-bearing, God-fearing idiots.

When Congress passed a $787 billion “stealfromus” package without reading it, when buyer’s remorse began to set in, and when the “tea parties” sprung up, the tenor of the Left’s accusations changed. Now, taking a page from Obama’s intellectual “mentor” Saul Alinsky, the press, the entertainment industry, and Democrats in Congress stepped up their tactics and attempted to marginalize and ignore public sentiment, mocking the protesters repeatedly as “teabaggers,” (a vulgar slang term for a particular type of oral sex), laughing at them during prime-time newscasts, and giving airtime to inflammatory personalities like Keith Olbermann and Janeane Garofalo who called Americans “racist rednecks” and “bigots.”

As if this were not bad enough, the Department of Homeland Security leaked a memo in which Americans having served in the military, favoring limited government, opposed to abortion, supporting restrictions on illegal immigration, or Second Amendment rights were characterized as potential “home grown terrorists.”

All of this was supposed to shut Americans up. But it didn’t. When Obama announced his call for nationalized health care, this perhaps more than any other initiative he has espoused thus far, has persuaded people of the ominous threat his power grab represents. April’s dainty tea parties have morphed into August’s contentious town halls, as support for Obama’s policies has plummeted, and Americans across the country have confronted their congressional representatives with their objections to Obamacare and its inevitable faceless bureaucracy, deficit spending, rationing, and declining care.

And how have the liberal elites responded to their countrymen’s concerns, their exercise of their First Amendment rights of free speech, assembly, and petitioning the government? By calling them Nazis; accusing them of bringing swastikas to town halls, characterizing American taxpayers as “angry mobs;” dismissing their grassroots protests as fake, “Astroturf,” drummed up and funded by multinational corporations; by cancelling town halls, insulting constituents who want to know why Congress passes laws without reading them. Uh-huh, sure. When ACORN and other Lefty activist groups pay and bus in homeless people, union members, and others to disrupt and intimidate, that’s “democracy.” When taxpayers, parents, and senior citizens show up on their own and protest how the government plans to spend their money, they’re a threat.

Hey there, average American - NOW do you understand how much they hate you and everything you stand for? The lengths they will go to to discredit and marginalize you, and take from you everything you have worked a lifetime to secure for yourself and your family? They want you to shut up. They want you to go away. They want to humiliate you into backing down while they take over your country, dismantle your constitutional protections, seize your assets, tax you into submission, and insert themselves and their appointed bureaucrats between you and your doctor.

Are you going to lay down and let them get away with it?

Barack Obama himself should be relatively harmless - a well-educated, nice-looking man with a flair for delivering telepromptered speeches and a handful of ideas. Bad ideas, true. Antiquated, regressive, disproven and discredited ideas, certainly. Ideas whose fatal flaws stack up like the countless millions of human corpses sacrificed in their pursuit over 100-plus years of contemporary history, admittedly. But all explicable in a man still searching for approval from the African Marxist father who abandoned him; a man whose mother shipped him off to be raised by his grandparents while she pursued social justice ideals in a far-flung third world nation; a man who spent his boyhood being indoctrinated by Marxist societal rejects, and his adult life sitting in a church whose pastor preached racial hatred.

By all rights, Obama should be an obscure ideologue in a tweed jacket with elbow patches, preaching to a small handful of starry-eyed co-eds on a picturesque liberal arts campus somewhere in an upscale mountain town. Instead, Obama is sitting in the eye of a perfect storm of oppressive power: he occupies the office of the presidency, assisted by a Democrat-dominated Congress with complete disdain for their constituents’ values and ideals, and fawned upon by a slavishly adoring press which views its role as that of canonizing America’s first half-black President with photoshopped halos, hailing his every word as social, political and economic gospel, sanctifying his destructive policies, lying and covering up for him, and demonizing those who oppose Obamanomics as idiots, terrorists, bigots, racists and – worst of all – heretics.

At certain times in history, events seem to inexplicably conspire to bring about disaster. Watching Obama’s administration unfold is like watching a documentary about the Titanic, World War I, the Russian Revolution of 1917, Hitler’s rise to power, or the Great Depression. Knowing already what is to come, the viewer is nevertheless transported into retrospective incredulity: How could all these things happen at the same time? How could no one see what was coming? Where were the voices of warning? Did no one know any history? Couldn’t this have been averted? Why did the people allow themselves to be led like sheep to the slaughter?

What we have been hearing during Congress’ August recess (and well before) are the voices of our would-be overlords, attempting to herd and reign in and lash Americans into the chutes they have designed for us. But this is not inevitable. The only weapons they have now are humiliation, insults, and opprobrium. We the People, however, have far more powerful weapons in our arsenal: voices expressed in dissent, our own financial resources, and our votes. If the media will not serve as an outlet for our legitimate protests, then we will squeeze them financially as we could any other corporation, by refusing to support them or the companies that advertise on their networks. If Congress will not listen to us, then we vote them out next year. And if Obama insists upon foisting his Marxist transformation of this country over the will of the American public, then we must marginalize him by saddling him with a new Congress that obstructs his every collectivist move, until he himself can be replaced in 2012.

The self-appointed societal elites think they can shut us up by ignoring or insulting us. But the American public, in keeping with the history of our nation, must refuse to be cowed by those who would mock us into submission. If we cannot withstand name-calling, insults, and false accusations, we will find ourselves shackled by far worse.

Awwww, say it ain't so.  "Jobs that matter"?  Hurl.  I, for one, am sick to death of the sanctimonious tone of these agitators.

I've always enjoyed shopping at Whole Foods (when I travel; we don't have one where I live), and I enthusiastically advocate a more holistic approach to better health through preventative measures, especially more healthful eating.  Unfortunately, many of the stores and other holistic organizations whose health messages I endorse also advocate collectivist public policies I do not, which is a bit of a dilemma.

So I was encouraged to see John Mackey, the CEO of Whole Foods, endorse measures to reform our health care system other than a government takeover.

Read his excellent editorial here.

American cancer care the best in the world.

This is what I have taken to saying when asked what my thoughts are on the differences between a "conservative" and a "liberal":

A conservative is someone who sees Person A on the roof of a building and yells, "Don't jump!"  A liberal is someone who criticizes the conservative as narrowminded, encourages Person A to jump off the roof, and then runs down and pushes Person B underneath him to cushion his fall.

Here is an interesting take on liberalism versus conservatism.

Great article here about Obama's (by now) boring and anti-intellectual speeches.  Geez.  Thank God.  Here I thought I was the only one rolling my eyes every time the Left's Dear Leader says, "Make no mistake..." or "false choice" or something about the tired ol' arguments from the past.

Past, present, or future, it is the truth that Obama has a problem with.

I am at a conference of business law professors - a thoroughly delightful group of people, by the way - and I had someone ask me a question at the session where I presented my paper on Entrepreneurial Policy Design: "How can you defend the health care status quo" my guest asked [this question drives me nuts, as I wasn't talking about health care, and had I been, I would not have defended the status quo] "...when we can see from 'competitive analysis' [a term I had used] that all of the other industrialized nations have single-payer health care spend less, and have long life expectancies?"

Well, first of all, they don't spend "less," but more about that another time. 

When it comes to life expectancy, apparently, our Brit and Canuck friends only live longer than we do if they don't get sick in the first place.  See Deroy Murdock's excellent piece on the subject in the National Review Online here. 

Facts are stubborn things, as John Adams once said.  So are statistics.

And for what it's worth, I responded to my questioner by saying that not only was I not defending the status quo, I believe our current system of health insurance [not care] to be a "failing business model."  I explained that the costs were spiraling out of control, and that these are not sustainable.  "What I am saying," I explained, "is that we need a better model for designing our public policy; one more in keeping with the the kind of financial analyses and assessments that entrepreneurs must provide to prospective investors."

Everything people hate about private insurance - the bureaucracy, the faceless decision-makers, the denial of care - would be present in Obamacare, and worse - because there would be no switching jobs, no switching policies, no alternatives, no appeals.

Worse (at least from a systemic, if not an individual standpoint) would be the fact that nothing in the Obamacare plan does anything to address the most serious issue: skyrocketing costs.  In fact, Obama's plan would send costs into the stratosphere.

"You cannot salvage a failing business model  by making it bigger," I said.  "It doesn't work in the private sectore, and it doesn't work in the public sector, either.  We threw $50 billion at GM, and they went into bankruptcy anyway.  Why?  Because they had - and perhaps still have - a business model that is unsustainable.  Taking the current health care system 'universal' only means that when the system does collapse - as it must - then it will take the entire United States government with it."

that tells it like it is.  Thanks to TH blogger Greg Hengler for this one:

And when human beings DO act on government incentives, the bill is how many times higher than it budgets for?  The "cash for clunkers" program burned through $950 million in 4 days.  So they'll throw another $2 billion at it.

And you think this won't happen with "free" health care?

Check out this article from my local paper.  Although the dealerships are happy about the surge of interest in car-buying, the administration of the program is another matter:

Jim Turner, president of O'Brien Auto Park, said he didn't start participating in CARS until this past Monday. He suspended O'Brien's participation Friday.

Turner said the program generated "a lot of interest," but he was scathing in his description of how the program was administered. He said 1,600 dealerships signed up to participate, but that the government phone bank set up to answer questions only had 11 people.

"You couldn't even get through," he said. "It's a catastrophe."

Rick Shields [of Shields Auto Park] echoed some of those claims, saying that the dealership portion of the www.cars.gov Web site, where dealers are supposed to submit reimbursement claims, was slow and frequently locked up and kicked dealers off the site.

"As many vehicles as we've sold, we've yet to get one claim through," he said. "Hopefully, they won't leave the dealers holding the bag."

Hopefully.

Especially when they can comment far more intelligently than politicians on the state of American health care compared to other countries?  (Yes, I know - that is damning docs with faint praise.)  See this report. 

It's been said many times, and merits saying again: care delayed is care denied.  And in the case of some ailments (like cancer), delay can mean death.

Why shouldn't we be able to help those who don't have insurance, while preserving the health care (if not the cost) system that has worked so well for over 250 million Americans?

Mark Steyn has a great analysis here. It is not just about "controlling costs."  Steyn is brilliant - one of the few conservative writers who can absolutely hit every nail on the head, and make you laugh at the same time. 

Why will so-called "universal" health care go broke? 

Because when the government promises "free" anything, demand increases.  Until the demand cannot be met.  And the program has to be cancelled, as is the case here, apparently.  (Of course, in the case of "universal" health care, it is the people who need the care who will be "cancelled."  It's called "rationing.")