Mark Steyn has a few choice words for the democrat party front-runner.

Our lesson today comes from the songwriter Frank Loesser:

“Praise The Lord And Pass The Ammunition.”

Or as Barack Obama and his San Francisco pals would put it: God and guns. Loesser got the phrase from Howell Forgy, a naval chaplain at Pearl Harbor, who walked the decks of the USS New Orleans under Japanese bombardment, exhorting his comrades. When the line came to Loesser’s ears, he turned it into a big hit song of the Second World War:

“Praise the Lord and swing into position

Can’t afford to sit around a-wishin’…” – which some folks sang as “Can’t afford to be a politician.” Indeed. Sen. Obama’s remarks about poor dumb, bitter rural losers “clinging to” guns and God certainly testify to the instinctive snobbery of a big segment of the political class. But we shouldn’t let it go by merely deploring coastal condescension toward the knuckledraggers. No, what Michelle Malkin calls Crackerquiddick (quite rightly – it’s more than just another dreary “-gate”) is not just snobbish nor even merely wrongheaded. It’s an attack on two of the critical advantages the United States holds over most of the rest of the Western world. In the other G7 developed nations, nobody clings to God ‘n’ guns. The guns got taken away, and the Europeans gave up on churchgoing once they embraced Big Government as the new religion.

How’s that working out? Compared with America, France and Germany have been more or less economically stagnant for the past quarter-century, living permanently with unemployment rates significantly higher than in the United States.

Has it made them any less “bitter,” as Obama characterizes those Pennsylvanian crackers? No. …
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Europeans did “vote for their own best interests” – i.e., cradle-to-grave welfare, 35-hour workweeks, six weeks of paid vacation, etc. – and as a result they now face a perfect storm of unsustainable entitlements, economic stagnation and declining human capital that’s left them so demographically beholden to unassimilable levels of immigration that they’re being remorselessly Islamized with every passing day. We should thank God (forgive the expression) that America’s loser gun nuts don’t share the same sophisticated rational calculation of “their best interests” as do Thomas Frank, Obama, too many Democrats and the European political establishment.

As for “gun-totin’,” large numbers of Americans tote guns because they’re assertive, self-reliant citizens, not docile subjects of a permanent governing class. The Second Amendment is philosophically consistent with the First Amendment, for which I’ve become more grateful since the Canadian Islamic Congress decided to sue me for “hate speech” up north. Both amendments embody the American view that liberty is not the gift of the state, and its defense cannot be outsourced exclusively to the government.

I think a healthy society needs both God and guns: It benefits from a belief in some kind of higher purpose to life on Earth, and it requires a self-reliant citizenry. If you lack either of those twin props, you wind up with today’s Europe – a present-tense Eutopia mired in fatalism.

A while back, I was struck by the words of Oscar van den Boogaard, a Dutch gay humanist (which is pretty much the trifecta of Eurocool). Reflecting on the Continent’s accelerating Islamification, he concluded that the jig was up for the Europe he loved, but what could he do? “I am not a warrior, but who is?” he shrugged. “I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it.”

Sorry, it doesn’t work like that. If you don’t understand that there are times when you’ll have to fight for it, you won’t enjoy it for long. …

God and guns. Maybe one day a viable society will find a magic cure-all that can do without both, but Big Government isn’t it. And even complacent liberal Democrats ought to be able to look across the ocean and see that. But, then, Obama did give the speech in San Francisco, a city demographically declining at a rate that qualifies it for EU membership. When it comes to parochial simpletons, you don’t need to go to Kansas.

Socialized health care in Massachusetts produces strained resources. Who would have imagined that? Certainly not the New York Times.

Once they discover that she is Dr. Kate, the supplicants line up to approach at dinner parties and ballet recitals. Surely, they suggest to Dr. Katherine J. Atkinson, a family physician here, she might find a way to move them up her lengthy waiting list for new patients.

Those fortunate enough to make it soon learn they face another long wait: Dr. Atkinson’s next opening for a physical is not until early May — of 2009.

In pockets of the United States, rural and urban, a confluence of market and medical forces has been widening the gap between the supply of primary care physicians and the demand for their services. Modest pay, medical school debt, an aging population and the prevalence of chronic disease have each played a role.

Now in Massachusetts, in an unintended consequence of universal coverage, the imbalance is being exacerbated by the state’s new law requiring residents to have health insurance.

Since last year, when the landmark law took effect, about 340,000 of Massachusetts’ estimated 600,000 uninsured have gained coverage. Many are now searching for doctors and scheduling appointments for long-deferred care.

Here in western Massachusetts, Dr. Atkinson’s bustling 3,000-patient practice, which was closed to new patients for several years, has taken on 50 newcomers since she hired a part-time nurse practitioner in November. About a third were newly insured, Dr. Atkinson said. Just north of here in Athol, the doctors at North Quabbin Family Physicians are now seeing four to six new patients a day, up from one or two a year ago.

Dr. Patricia A. Sereno, state president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, said an influx of the newly insured to her practice in Malden, just north of Boston, had stretched her daily caseload to as many as 22 to 25 patients, from 18 to 20 a year ago. To fit them in, Dr. Sereno limits the number of 45-minute physicals she schedules each day, thereby doubling the wait for an exam to three months.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could get the government to force those rich investment bankers and hedge fund managers to pay for your health care? Unfortunately, as the late Ayn Rand pointed out, that inevitably means then that you have to pay for health care for every unemployed wino and heroin addict yourself, and you get to stand behind them in line the next time you’re sick.

Mona Charen searches for the real Obama, concealed behind the pink cloud of rhetoric about “Hope” and “Change,” by actually reading his book.

Barack Obama’s words are often attractive but oddly concealing. His speeches are all balm and mood. It’s all very well to seek, as Obama claims, to transcend old categories, to reject the “old politics.” But then what? This graceful rhetorician leaves you wondering: Who is he really? What does he want for himself and for his country?

In search of answers that go deeper than the Congressional Record, I read his first book, “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.” Once you get past the happy surprise of finding a politician who can actually write, the book contains some disquieting elements. …

Left-wing ideas are not so much articulated in this memoir as presumed. Obama has claimed that his experience living abroad gives him a valuable perspective for a chief executive. Yet his reflections on the effect Western capitalism has had on Jakarta and Chicago’s south side sound like warmed over Herbert Marcuse. “How could we go about stitching a culture back together after it was torn? How long might it take in this land of dollars? … The very existence of the factories, the timber interests, the plastics manufacturer, will have rendered their [Indonesian] culture obsolete; the values of hard work and individual initiative turn out to have depended on a system of belief that’s been scrambled by migration and urbanization and imported TV reruns.”

Obama’s self-portrait in this book is that of a searching, nonjudgmental young man attempting to find his rightful place after a confusing start in life. But he is attracted by the harshly ideological Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose church he joins. Wright peddles racial grievance religion. Following 9/11, he said, “[W]hite America got a wake-up call … White America and the Western world came to realize that people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just ‘disappeared’ as the Great White West kept on its merry way of ignoring black concerns.”

Obama says he doesn’t agree with Wright about everything. Fine. And maybe he doesn’t agree with his wife when she (twice) said that she’d never been proud of her country until its people began to support her husband. But then, what did he mean when he said on March 4 that making a little girl proud to say she is an American is the “change we are calling for”?

One suspects that beneath the soothing talk, there is bitterness in the man that we’d best learn more about before voting.

Obama is the product of two unions between an alienated leftist white American woman and a pair of dark-skinned foreigners. Her liaisons with Obama’s father and stepfather were explicit attempts at rejecting her own identity, family, economic system, and country in favor of the fraught-with-symbolism Other. Obama was consequently brought up in a thoroughly leftist and anti-American domestic culture and social matrix.

His autobiographical writings indicate that he went farther than his mother, disapproving of her interracial unions, and choosing instead to embrace a personal black identity and nationalism, which undoubtedly includes the Kwanzaa-style Western interpretation of the African identity as different from Europe by virtue of inclusion of collectivist and socialist ideals and values.

Dr. Sanity has an excellent article discussing in detail the game both democrat candidates are playing.

You have to admit, it’s a bit strange that all these multimillionaires who have greatly benefited from the freedom and opportunity offered by this country are competing with each other to see who can yell the loudest that the American dream is lost?

What’s going on here is not just a case of pessimism about what America stands for; it is a deliberate, calculated attempt to manipulate and appeal to one of the worse aspects of human nature–primitive envy–and stoke the fires of resentment and entitlement.

The message from the Democatic presidential candidates is almost exactly identical and it is the same message their party has been promoting (except, of course, when THEY are in the White House) since the 60’s: Things are BAD! Poverty is INCREASING! DOOM DOOM DOOM! You foolish people out there only think you are content!

Don’t you know that there are people in this very country who are richer than you are? There are even (gasp!) people who are smarter, more talented, and happier than you could possibly ever be!

Is this fair? Is this something that we have to put up with in our politically correct, culturally diverse, and oh so egalitarian society? You don’t have to be satisfied with life, liberty and only the pursuit of happiness– WE CAN GUARANTEE HAPPINESS FOR YOU!

You only think this is a land of opportunity…but vote for ME and you will see how much MORE you will have!

And now we have Barack the Messiah, who manages to cloak this same old tired egalitarian message in his lovely rhetorical babblings about “hope”, and “change”, and “yes we can”–as if he were actually appealing to the best, instead of the worst within each of us.

It all reminds me of the scene in the movie “Key Largo” where Frank McCloud confronts the criminal thug, Johnny Rocco:

Frank McCloud: He knows what he wants. Don’t you, Rocco?
Johnny Rocco: Sure.
James Temple: What’s that?
Frank McCloud: Tell him, Rocco.
Johnny Rocco: Well, I want uh …
Frank McCloud: He wants more, don’t you, Rocco?
Johnny Rocco: Yeah. That’s it. More. That’s right! I want more!
James Temple: Will you ever get enough?
Frank McCloud: Will you, Rocco?
Johnny Rocco: Well, I never have. No, I guess I won’t.

We have become a country of thuggish Johnny Roccos.

The Democratic Party is there for all you unhappy people who want MORE–but who don’t want to work for it. They will tell you that you are entitled to it; that it is your right and that they will get it for you! Yes they can!

Read the whole thing.

A New York Times story discusses the fundamental problem with universal health care supplied by the state.

Created 60 years ago as a cornerstone of the British welfare state, the National Health Service is devoted to the principle of free medical care for everyone. But recently it has been wrestling with a problem its founders never anticipated: how to handle patients with complex illnesses who want to pay for parts of their treatment while receiving the rest free from the health service.

Although the government is reluctant to discuss the issue, hopscotching back and forth between private and public care has long been standard here for those who can afford it. But a few recent cases have exposed fundamental contradictions between policy and practice in the system, and tested its founding philosophy to its very limits.

One such case was Debbie Hirst’s. Her breast cancer had metastasized, and the health service would not provide her with Avastin, a drug that is widely used in the United States and Europe to keep such cancers at bay. So, with her oncologist’s support, she decided last year to try to pay the $120,000 cost herself, while continuing with the rest of her publicly financed treatment.

By December, she had raised $20,000 and was preparing to sell her house to raise more. But then the government, which had tacitly allowed such arrangements before, put its foot down. Mrs. Hirst heard the news from her doctor.

“He looked at me and said: ‘I’m so sorry, Debbie. I’ve had my wrists slapped from the people upstairs, and I can no longer offer you that service,’ ” Mrs. Hirst said in an interview.

“I said, ‘Where does that leave me?’ He said, ‘If you pay for Avastin, you’ll have to pay for everything’ ” — in other words, for all her cancer treatment, far more than she could afford.

Officials said that allowing Mrs. Hirst and others like her to pay for extra drugs to supplement government care would violate the philosophy of the health service by giving richer patients an unfair advantage over poorer ones.

Patients “cannot, in one episode of treatment, be treated on the N.H.S. and then allowed, as part of the same episode and the same treatment, to pay money for more drugs,” the health secretary, Alan Johnson, told Parliament.

“That way lies the end of the founding principles of the N.H.S.,” Mr. Johnson said.

Government simply will never be able to afford to deliver state-of-the-art health care to everyone, but it also won’t feel that it can afford to let you pay for your own. That wouldn’t be equal. So, go home and die! the government is going to wind up telling people. You can’t have the health care that you can afford to pay for yourself, because everybody else can’t have it.

Somehow I don’t think Hillary or Obama are going to mention that little detail.

Socialized health care British-style transfers costs from individuals to the government, and sooner-or-later government starts wondering if it ought to be paying for some people’s sinful ways or for people who are already too old.

The Telegraph:

Doctors are calling for NHS treatment to be withheld from patients who are too old or who lead unhealthy lives.

Smokers, heavy drinkers, the obese and the elderly should be barred from receiving some operations, according to doctors, with most saying the health service cannot afford to provide free care to everyone.

Roger Kimball responds to Hillary’s promise that “if she became president, the federal government would take a more active role in the economy to address what she called the excesses of the market and of the Bush administration.”

As Hayek observed, the socialist, the sentimentalist, cannot understand why, if people have been able to “generate some system of rules coordinating their efforts,” they cannot also consciously “design an even better and more gratifying system.” Central to Hayek’s teaching is the unyielding fact that human ingenuity is limited, that the elasticity of freedom requires the agency of forces beyond our supervision, that, finally, the ambitions of socialism are an expression of rationalistic hubris. A spontaneous order generated by market forces may be as beneficial to humanity as you like; it may have greatly extended life and produced wealth so staggering that, only a few generations ago, it was unimaginable. Still, it is not perfect. The poor are still with us. Not every social problem has been solved. In the end, though, the really galling thing about the spontaneous order that free markets produce is not its imperfection but its spontaneity: the fact that it is a creation not our own. It transcends the conscious direction of human will and is therefore an affront to human pride.

The urgency with which Hayek condemns socialism is a function of the importance of the stakes involved. As he puts it in his last book The Fatal Conceit , the “dispute between the market order and socialism is no less than a matter of survival” because “to follow socialist morality would destroy much of present humankind and impoverish much of the rest.” We get a foretaste of what Hayek means whenever the forces of socialism triumph. There follows, as the night the day, an increase in poverty and a diminution of individual freedom.

The curious thing is that this fact has had so little effect on the attitudes of intellectuals and the politicians who appeal to them. No merely empirical development, it seems—let it be repeated innumerable times—can spoil the pleasures of socialist sentimentality. This unworldliness is tied to another common trait of intellectuals: their contempt for money and the world of commerce. The socialist intellectual eschews the “profit motive” and recommends increased government control of the economy. He feels, Hayek notes, that “to employ a hundred people is … exploitation but to command the same number [is] honorable.”

Not that intellectuals, as a class, do not like possessing money as much as the rest of us. But they look upon the whole machinery of commerce as something separate from, something indescribably less worthy than, their innermost hearts’ desires. Of course, there is a sense in which this is true. But many intellectuals fail to appreciate two things. First, the extent to which money, as Hayek put it, is “one of the great instruments of freedom ever invented,” opening “an astounding range of choice to the poor man—a range greater than that which not many generations ago was open to the wealthy.”

Second, intellectuals tend to ignore the extent to which the organization of commerce affects the organization of our aspirations. As Hilaire Belloc put it in The Servile State, “The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself.” The really frightening question wholesale economic planning raises is not whether we are free to pursue our most important ends but who determines what those “most important ends” are to be. “Whoever,” Hayek notes, “has sole control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served, which values are to be rated higher and which lower—in short, what men should believe and strive for.”

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to The Barrister.

Neal Boortz has some choice words for the left.

Sorry, I’m not in the mood for all of this Happy New Year nonsense. This is getting to be about as phony as the 4th of July. (Freedom … right. Like the people of this country are still in love with the idea of liberty.) This is 2008. This is an election year. We’re choosing a new House of Representatives, about one-third of the Senate and a president. This is not the type of New Year you launch with the traditional expressions of optimism. We’re in trouble. An election is coming in 11 months and millions of parasites, led by single females, are getting ready to accelerate the destruction of the concepts of individuality, private property rights, self-reliance, and this very country by putting a hideous, power-hungry, big-government socialist into the White House.

I think I’ve made a bit of a mistake over the past few months. Trying to be a bit to nice to the people I think are destroying this country. I’ve been trying to cut them some slack .. be a little understanding. You know, the compassion thing. Well, something must have clicked during the last two weeks off. No more free passes. Identify the leeches. Call them out. They’re destroying the greatest system of governance this world has ever known, and they should not be allowed to go unchallenged.

If you squandered every opportunity for an education to end up an unemployable semi-literate loser, that’s your problem, not mine. If you’ve destroyed your health with cigarettes and fast food … then by what right do you demand that people who lived their lives more responsibly than you cover the cost of your medical care. You cry about your “right” to health care. You dare to claim a right to the services of another human being to correct problems you created for yourself? Further, if it is more important for you to spend your money on a cell phone, flat-screen televisions, the best new car, meals at expensive restaurants and fancy vacations than it is to spend your money on a health insurance policy .. then you should be on your own. Don’t beg the government to steal from someone else so that you don’t have to change your lifestyle.

Reuters reports on the International epidemic of laughter resulting from the embarrassment of one of the Chavez regime’s revolutionaries observed to be a luxury consumer while in the midst of a rant against Capitalism.

Venezuelan Interior Minister Pedro Carreño was momentarily at a loss for words when a journalist interrupted his speech and asked if it was not contradictory to criticize capitalism while wearing Gucci shoes and a tie made by Parisian luxury goods maker Louis Vuitton.

“I don’t, uh … I … of course,” stammered Carreño on Tuesday before regaining his composure. “It’s not contradictory because I would like Venezuela to produce all this so I could buy stuff produced here instead of 95 percent of what we consume being imported.”

0:30 video

Also in the New York Times, Paul Krugman responds to George W. Bush’s veto of a middle-class entitlement first step to socialized health care by taking out the world’s smallest violin and playing the world’s saddest song.

Here’s what Reagan said in his famous 1964 speech “A Time for Choosing,” which made him a national political figure: “We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry each night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet.”

Today’s leading conservatives are Reagan’s heirs.

Reagan was perfectly right back then. The cost of food is derisory in the United States, and even welfare provides more than enough income to preclude “going to bed hungry.”

And George W. Bush was perfectly right to veto that manipulatively-titled bill today. And, yes, conservatives are Ronald Reagan’s heirs and proud of it.

Maybe not, too, observes Mark Steyn.

Our theme for today comes from George W Bush: “Freedom is the desire of every human heart.”

When the president uses the phrase, he’s invariably applying it to various benighted parts of the Muslim world. There would seem to be quite a bit of evidence to suggest that freedom is not the principal desire of every human heart in, say, Gaza or Waziristan. But why start there? If you look in, say, Brussels or London or New Orleans, do you come away with the overwhelming impression that “freedom is the desire of every human heart”? A year ago, I wrote that “the story of the Western world since 1945 is that, invited to choose between freedom and government ‘security,’ large numbers of people vote to dump freedom – the freedom to make your own decisions about health care, education, property rights, seat belts and a ton of other stuff.”

Last week freedom took another hit. Hillary Rodham Clinton unveiled her new health care plan. Unlike her old health care plan, which took longer to read than most cancers take to kill you, this one’s instant and painless – just a spoonful of government sugar to help the medicine go down. From now on, everyone in America will have to have health insurance.

Hooray!

And, if you don’t, it will be illegal for you to hold a job.

Er, hang on, where’s that in the Constitution? It’s perfectly fine to employ legions of the undocumented from Mexico, but if you employ a fit 26-year-old American with no health insurance either you or he or both of you will be breaking the law?

That’s a major surrender of freedom from the citizen to the state. “So what?” says the caring crowd. “We’ve got to do something about those 40 million uninsured!

Fred Thompson on HillaryCare.

1:24 video