Right Wing Nut House

Nothing says crazy quite like the idea that someone is better off receiving services from a person who shares the same skin pigmentation.

Obviously, a black accountant is better off having black clients while a white lawyer is better suited to handle cases brought by other whites, this idiotic thinking goes. It is racial preferences run amuck and has taken what is actually a sound idea and extended it to radically ridiculous lengths to serve the interests of racialists, hate mongers, and pea brained politicians who see political advantage in trying to curry favor with “victims of white oppression” or in playing up racial differences.

Therefore, it’s not surprising that the Obama administration would want to see that “underrepresented” minorities in the health care field would become part of what Linda Chavez calls a “racial spoils system” that will give educational preference to minorities in health care fields because everyone knows that people will be healthier and get better treatment if their doctors share their racial and ethnic background.

In 2002, the Institute of Medicine released a study entitled “Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care” that sparked a flurry of accusations that minority patients, especially African-Americans, receive bad health care because their doctors were biased.

The study said that “some evidence suggests that bias, prejudice and stereotyping on the part of health-care providers may contribute to differences in care.” But as Dr. Sally Satel, a highly respected physician and author, observed at the time, the “evidence” in the study was thin. ” ‘Some,’ ’suggests’ and ‘may,’ ” she wrote, “are all the kinds of words authors use when the data are flimsy and reputations are at stake.”

There is no question that African-Americans, on average, die younger and have poorer health than whites. What is less clear is why that is the case. Socio-economic class and behavior both play an important role. Homicide is the leading cause of death for young black males between the ages of 15-24, for example. Obesity, drug and alcohol use, and other behavioral factors play an important role in determining overall health. But will insisting on preferences for African-American students applying to medical-school admission improve health care for blacks? Not likely.

There is not one scintilla of evidence that black doctors treating black patients will make black people healthier. But when have facts ever stopped the racialists from seeking preferences based not on ability or aptitude, but rather the color of one’s skin? You either have what it takes to be a doctor or you don’t. The same is true for nurses, and anyone’s hands I am forced to entrust with my mortal coil.

I don’t care if my doctor is black, brown, green, or six shades of chartreuse. I don’t care whether the physician is from Delhi, India, Peshawar, Pakistan, Colombo, Sri Lanka, or Dixon, Illinois. When I’m in an emergency room after being involved in a car wreck, I just want to be assured that the attending physician knows my shin bone from my elbow bone, is fully qualified as a result of a medical meritocracy, and isn’t the recipient of preferential medical school policies that promote based on the accident of birth that gave one person more melanin than someone else.

I support affirmative action as it was originally intended. But the idea that all things being equal in educational or employment opportunities, preference should be given if at all possible to those who have been the historic targets of discrimination has fallen by the wayside in favor of out and out quotas by schools and large corporations who fear being sued for discrimination more than they value fairness and merit based policies. And this cockamamie idea that preferential consideration should be given applicants not due to ability but due to skin tone or whether one’s loins are cloven, not cleft, is a rank injustice against all Americans.

A society that recognizes historic differences in equal opportunity but seeks to overcome disadvantages for some by disadvantaging others is not the kind of society envisioned by the Founders nor those who fought so hard to make the Constitution’s words about equality be a source of inspiration and not hypocrisy. Martin Luther King and most of the mainstream civil rights activists at the time believed in an Affirmative Action that recognized merit first, race second. Today’s race baiters and hate mongers have that notion switched around entirely and instead, use Affirmative Action as a club to make a mockery of merit altogether.

The notion that a white doctor can treat me better than a black doctor, and vice versa, is so nonsensical as to be beyond belief. I either have the flu or I don’t. The same goes for just about everything else connected with medical care. Medicine is a science that makes judgments as a result of empirical facts based on testing and experience. The idea that a white doctor would miss a virus, or a bug, or some other condition, or prescribe the wrong medicine, or cause any harm by omission or commission because he/she is not the same color as the patient is idiotic on its face.

Should medical schools actively seek out qualified minority candidates? Abslutely yes. But not everyone has what it takes to be a doctor, and admitting unqualified candidates based on race while other, qualified candidates are refused will not improve the health care system, will not improve the life expectancy of blacks, but will result in fewer doctors.

And in the immortal words of Dirty Harry, “That’s a helluva price to pay for being stylish.”

I have a long article coming out tomorrow in Pajamas Media on the Gates matter that will look at why everyone in that little drama acted the way they did. It is my belief that in some ways, we are programmed to respond in racial situations and that it’s like that because we just can’t bring ourselves to really talk about race in a way that would start to change the dynamics between the races.

Case in point; Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic:

I feel pretty stupid for going hard on this, and stupider for defending what Obama won’t really defend himself. I should have left it at one post. Evidently Obama, Crowley and Gates are talking about getting a beer together. I hope they have a grand old time.

The rest of us are left with a country where, by all appearances, officers are well within their rights to arrest you for sassing them. Which is where we started. I can’t explain why, but this is the sort of thing that makes you reflect on your own precarious citizenship. I mean, the end of all of this scares the hell out of me.

Coates is troubled by the attitude of his fellow citizens:

When we think about the cops, it’s scary, on one level, to conclude that a cop can basically arrest you on a whim. It’s scarier still to think that this is what Americans want, that this country is as we’ve made it. And then finally it’s even scarier to understand that no president can change that. It’s not why he’s there. He is there to pass health-reform–not make us post-racist, or post-police power, or post-whatever. Only the people can do that. And they don’t seem particularly inclined. Here is what the election of Barack Obama says about race–white people, in general, are willing to hire a black guy for the ultimate job. That’s a big step. But it isn’t any more than what it says.

Coates, a very smart, very reasoned liberal who happens to be African American. His attitude toward the police has been influenced, then, by living as a black man in America and all that implies when it comes to his experience in dealing with what historically has been the heavy handed oppression of police directed against African American males.

Is Coates programmed by his experience and by society to respond in this way? I think so - just as Gates, Crowley, and Obama were all programmed to respond the way they did.

The fact that Coates sees the American people as giving the police the green light to harass African Americans is also a programmed response. I would agree that the American people don’t seem inclined to challenge the racial divide in this country but only one who has experienced oppression first hand could lay the blame for that on some nebulous attitude on the part of citizens that arresting people “on a whim” is good and then try and connect that attitude to carrying a concealed firearm. The two issues have nothing to do with each other - unless you’ve seen the dark underbelly of racism first hand and can imagine worse.

From my PJM article:

The facts of the case are a fascinating example of how race divides America. Police, as authority figures, have a notorious history in African American communities — sometimes deserved, sometimes not. It appears from unimpeachable eyewitness accounts that in this case, despite Sgt. Crowley being an expert in how to avoid racial profiling and diversity training, the perception on the part of Professor Gates was that he was being singled out for being black.

Of course, Gates had no idea that Officer Crowley had such a stellar reputation or possessed such tolerant credentials. All he knew was his experience as a black man in America and his assumption that if he had been white, the police would not have asked for his ID.

We’ll never know if that assumption was correct. Just as we’ll never know if the anonymous woman who called the police after seeing Gates try to break into his own home would have done so if she had glimpsed a white man trying to do the same thing. We can assume the best or the worst from all involved and, within the context of our flawed understanding of each other, assure ourselves that we are correct.

The point being, all the actors in this little drama have their perception of the incident colored by what divides us. The actions of everyone were programmed by the rules under which we currently interact as white and black Americans. Gates felt his dignity attacked — an anathema to whites who can’t understand how he could fail to appreciate the police looking after his property. For his part, one might wonder how much more patient Crowley could have or should have been with Gates before arresting him. No doubt he acted professionally. But even with someone as evenhanded as Crowley apparently is, the nagging suspicion that if Gates had been white he would have somehow been treated differently is hard for many to shake. That is the trap that history has set for us and is one from which we refuse to release ourselves.

The president has been forced to backtrack so precipitously for his “stupid cops” comment that he is tripping over his Democratic friends on the Hill who are backtracking on health care reform. He is putting a bandaid on the cut by doing what we do best when confronted with our racial divide in such stark, and open terms; he is finessing the situation by setting up this little Kabuki play with Gates, Crowley, and him sitting down like drinking buddies and tossing down a few beers at the White House.

Left unsaid, as always, will be the real things that divide the races. But that’s the way it has always been in America - even with an African American as president.

White Sox pitcher Mark Buehrle leaps into the arms of catcher Ramon Castro following the last out recorded in the 18th perfect game pitched in Major League history.

Baseball is a game where the confluence of history and tradition clash with the modern age — a pastoral pursuit set down in our cynical, urbanized industrial democracy.

This may explain why baseball as professional sport has fallen from the heights it once occupied in its glory days just a few decades ago. The players have become hobos thanks to free agency while shooting themselves full of additives to the point that Dr. Frankenstein might take a keen interest in their off-field training regimen. Owners, once gentlemen sportsmen who operated baseball like a private club, are now giant corporations or fabulously wealthy men who have handed virtual control of their teams to bean counters and sports agents.

Yes, they’ve all  tried to ruin the game to the best of their ability. Unions, ESPN, cable and satellite TV, advertisers, and the Commissioner’s office where Bud Selig has shamefully presided over an era that will be long remembered for the drug assisted, performance enhanced feats of sluggers Barry Bonds, Mark McGuire, and Sammy Sosa among many others. Pumped up with human growth hormone and muscle building supplements, those players who broke the rules did more than cheat. They betrayed the game itself by artificially giving themselves an advantage not available to players in previous generations.

If there’s one thing about baseball that belongs only to the game itself it is the wonderful world of statistics that allow a fan to roughly measure the performance of a player of today to those of yesteryear. Who was better, Koufax or Randy Johnson? Tom Seaver or Greg Maddux? Would Ruth hit 60 today? This is the real fantasy in baseball and it connects generations to the game unlike any other professional sport.

Today, White Sox pitcher Mark Buehrle added to the rich history and tradition of the game by pitching the 18th perfect game in baseball history, beating Tampa Bay 5-0. That’s 27 men coming to the plate, and 27 men returning to the bench without reaching base.  One hundred years from now, statistics will tell the story. Buehrle threw 116 pitches and recorded 10 fly ball outs, 11 ground outs, and 6 strike outs. He threw 76 strikes and 40 balls in his 9 innings, throwing three balls in a count to only one hitter.

Until the 9th inning, no batted ball caused any of the Sox fielders any trouble. And then leading off the last frame, Tampa Bay right fielder Gabe Kaplan made solid contact with one of Buerhle’s change-ups and sent a line drive deep to left center field. At the crack of the bat, DeWayne Wise, who had entered the game that inning as a defensive replacement for starter Scott Posednik, turned and sprinted for the wall. It looked like a sure hit and perhaps even a home run. But Wise, running full speed, leapt high in the air, stretched out his glove, and the ball somehow found the very top of his mitt. He crashed into the outfield wall padding so hard, the ball fell out of his glove, and while stumbling, trying to regain his balance, he reached out and grabbed the ball with his bare hand,  preserving the perfect game in unbelievably spectacular fashion.

Here’s the video. You may have to run it twice to believe your eyes.

Buehrle is not an overpowering pitcher like Sandy Koufax, Randy Johnson, or some others who have achieved pitching perfection. He is something of a throwback — a blue collar pitcher who makes his living on the corners of home plate while keeping hitters off balance with a collection of slow curves, slower changeups, and a fastball that might break a paper bag at 60 feet. He is one of the few pitchers in today’s game who can pitch a game in less than 2 hours — commonplace years ago but a rarity today.

Beyond that, he is unflappable on the mound. He usually has a mischievous smile on his face when walking to and from the dugout, teasing his teammates, exchanging jokes with umpires. He is worshiped by fans and teammates alike. He is the consummate professional ballplayer.

There was a point a couple of years ago where there was a question whether Buehrle would be resigned to another contract. When word began to circulate that the White Sox were considering letting him go the free agency route, the fans raised such a stink that the team shelled out $57 million over 4 years to keep him. Seeing that he is 11-3 this season, almost single-handedly keeping the Sox in the pennant race, that decision to resign him looks like minor genius at this point.

A perfect game is 2 parts luck and one part skill. You can have the best stuff of your career and a batter can swing, breaking his bat while the ball falls 10 feet over the infield for a cheap hit. Happens all the time as do seeing eye ground balls that squirt through the gap between infielders. There are 8 ways you can reach first base safely and in order to pitch a perfect game, the chucker has to avoid all of them for 9 innings. No wonder they are so rare.

It is days like this that make being a baseball fan such a joy. And the fact that it was one of the true nice guys of the game who achieved this immortality only makes it sweeter.

Obama’s press conference was not aimed at the recalcitrant members of his own party who are balking at passing health care reform. For some reason, he can’t quite bring himself to do much in the way of traditional arm twisting and private lecturing that has been the hallmark of successful presidents in the past.

Instead, his message was aimed at the American people who are beginning to doubt the president can deliver what he promised and are becoming leery of the plan as it is emerging from Congress.

Jane Sassen of Business Week:

While insisting that his own proposal to cut the amount of tax deductions wealthy taxpayers could write off for their charitable contributions would be better, the President said such a measure would “meet my principle” that the costs should not be borne “by families already having a tough time.”

Of course, providing answers to tough funding questions wasn’t the aim of the press conference, as least from the White House point of view. The goal was to make a convincing case to keep public support for the plans from eroding. And at that, he may well have succeeded. The prime time hour may not have done much to move the needle in Congress, where the nitty-gritty proposals are being hashed out. But the President probably helped tamp down some of the increasing doubts that the American public has expressed recently about health care reforms as details have emerged. And that, after all, was his real job for the night.

Meanwhile, the senate’s #2 Democrat Dick Durbin says that the reform bill will not be taken up before the August recess as Taylor Rushing of The Hill reports:

“We’re going to take a little longer to get it right,” Durbin told The Hill when asked about the oft-stated goal of a vote on or before Aug. 7, when a monthlong Senate recess begins. “Initially we had hoped for a full vote by then, but I don’t think it’s going to be possible.”

Delaying the vote until after Labor Day would all but erase hopes of getting a bill to President Obama by mid-October, since the House and Senate versions would have to be reconciled in conference negotiations - assuming they pass their chambers.Durbin said the bill was still largely on track, however, denying that momentum has stalled.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “This is a complex challenge, and we’re taking a reasonable approach with it. It would be better if some Republicans joined us instead of just criticizing.”

Just wait until Democratic congressmen and senators start talking to their constituents about this bill while they are home during the recess. They will no doubt get an earful. Also, several independent groups are planning massive ad campaigns during the recess targeting Blue Dog Democrats as well as those in districts that were carried by George Bush or John McCain.

The question has been raised by the bill’s supporters that even bad reform is better than no reform at all. Such would be the case if there weren’t other options, other ideas out there - none of which got any hearing whatsoever by the progressives in both the House and the Senate who were handed the ball by the president and have created this monstrosity on their own.

It is simple minded to dismiss these options as “more of the same” tax cuts and the like from the GOP. The  GOP alternative that some liberals were surprised in that it was fairly comprehensive, would not have raised taxes on anybody, rich or poor, and in the end, probably have induced more people who are currently uninsured to get coverage. There were many problems with the bill - the tax credit for families to buy insurance was ridiculously low, for example - but it addressed almost all of the same problems the Democrat’s bill does including coverage for pre-existing conditions, Medicare reform, portable insurance, and a host of other elements the Democrats want us to pay a trillion dollars for.

The Wall Street Journal had the bare bones outline:

The nexus of their plan is redirecting the $300 billion annual tax subsidy for employment-based health insurance to individuals in the form of refundable, advanceable tax credits. Families would get $5,700 a year and individuals $2,300 to buy insurance and invest in Health Savings Accounts.

Low-income Americans would get a supplemental debit card of up to $5,000 to help them purchase insurance and pay out-of-pocket costs. They would have an incentive to spend wisely since up to one-fourth of any unspent money in the accounts could be rolled over to the next year. The combination of the refundable tax credit and debit card gives lower-income Americans a way out of the Medicaid ghetto so they can have the dignity of private insurance.

The great majority of Americans with job-based health insurance would see little more than a bookkeeping change with the Patients’ Choice plan. But implicit in the policy is the acknowledgment that our system of tying health insurance to the workplace is not working for upwards of 45 million uninsured Americans.

As I said, the bill is far from perfect and some of it makes assumptions as unreasonable as are in the Democratic bill. And the GOP bill isn’t the only alternative game in town. There are dozens of proposals - equally untried as anything in the Democratic bill I might add - floating around that have never been examined, studied, or debated by Congress because Obama wants his reform RIGHT NOW - despite the fact that a careful vetting of ideas in the Democratic bill or any alternative has not been done.

Why can’t my liberal friends see that this is no way to reform 1/6 of the economy? This massive, untested, unproven, Gorgon of a bill is being rushed through with nobody reading it, no one measuring the consequences, and no one weighing the effect on ordinary people’s lives. And it being rushed through not because if we delay 6 months or a year, anything bad will happen. It is being rushed for the sole and exclusive purpose of giving the president of the United States a legislative victory. Politics trumps sanity in this case. And if you want the bill now, you are part of a Kabuki play that almost certainly is going to cost more, cause more problems, and perhaps even make things worse than if we slowed down and looked at the health care problem rationally.

But there are many good ideas that haven’t even been examined because the liberals have a monumental distaste for the free market. Government cannot order costs to be lowered any more than King Canute could order the tide to recede. Market based incentives, both logically and intuitively, would work better, more efficiently, and more cheaply than the simple lowering of Medicare payments to doctors and hospitals the liberals have in mind, not to mention the “intelligent” rationing of services we are told that will result from passage of this bill.

Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi was bragging to reporters that she has the votes right now to pass a health reform bill in the House. That’s a lie, as two Democratic congressmen confirmed tp Deidre Walsh of CNN :

Nancy Pelosi’s statement Wednesday that Democrats have the votes to pass health care in the House. “I think the Speaker was well intended because she was hearing optimistic things, but I don’t believe there are the votes on the floor as of right now,” he said Wednesday.

Hill said he and other Blue Dogs were meeting again Wednesday night with Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman. Hill said they’re “making progress,” but still have significant issues to resolve. Nancy Ann DeParle from the White House was involved in an earlier meeting with Blue Dogs, he said.

Michigan Rep. Bart Stupak, who is trying to change the bill to make it clear it would not use taxpayer money for abortions, also disagreed with the Speaker.

“It would be easier to fit a camel through the eye of a needle than to pass this bill,” said Stupak.

Stupak said Democratic leaders can’t lose 40 votes if they want to pass the bill and predicted “she [Pelosi] would lose more than 40 on the right to life issue alone. There’s just no way.”

Stupak said he doesn’t want to block the bill, but wants leaders to agree to add language on the abortion issue before it comes to the House floor.

Pelosi has a revolt on both her right and left, with the progressive caucus getting angrier with each concession made to the moderates.

In the end, the bill might die a death by a thousand cuts as the final effort may contain so many objectionable elements to so many Democrats that it won’t have a prayer of passing.

The lack of leadership on this bill by the president has been astounding. While he has occasionally met with members at the White House, his efforts have fallen far short of whipping his reluctant party into line. He makes speeches. He holds town halls, He goes before his friends in the press.

But the nitty gritty political work he is leaving to Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and at least 5 committee chairmen. While no one has ever doubted the president’s skills as a campaigner, it is apparent he doesn’t know how to lead. He can’t distinguish a difference between campaigning and governing.

And there is a real possibility, no longer remote, that he will fail to bring any health care bill to a vote this year.

It is sometimes easy when you live in the virtual world of the internet to look at people like the Birthers or Truthers and dismiss them out of hand as a small minority of lunatics who are best left alone to wallow in their paranoid kookiness.

Such might be good advice for dealing with those who believe we never landed on the moon, or who think that we have dead aliens on ice at Area 51. But, as I warned my fellow conservatives in this post about the Founding Freeper’s call for “revolution” and removal of all elected representatives from the president on down, we ignore some of these groups, including the Birthers, at the peril of having conservatism severely damaged by having their ideas associated with the mainstream right.

Yes, there numbers may be small relative to the whole. But they are actively committed to spreading their lunacy far and wide and are gaining converts and cash as I write this.

The question then becomes do we try and isolate, chastise, and ultimately drive out the paranoid purveyors of utterly fantastical notions of Obama’s origins while they are still a small enough group that a concerted effort could succeed? Or do we wait and see how big they get before acting, thus risking a backlash against the right from the voter?

To prevent many diseases from harming our health, we inoculate ourselves so that an illness will not develop. I propose something similar in dealing with the Birthers. For my part, anyone who leaves a comment on this site, on any post, that advances any birther “theory” will be banned from accessing my writings.

Some might think this a bad idea in that I will forgo “debate” or perhaps not allow a Birther to be convinced otherwise. That’s nonsense. My experience with Birthers has been that they don’t want to hear any contrary evidence, that they have closed their mind so completely to the truth that arguing with a brick wall would be easy by comparison.

Besides, for most Birthers, it’s not about discovering the truth. It is about delegitimizing the president. For months they demanded to see the president’s birth certificate. When the state of Hawaii released a “Certificate of Live Birth,” we heard from the Birthers that it wasn’t good enough, or it was a fake. “All we want is to see the president’s birth certificate,” they innocently ask. And they take the president’s reluctance to do so - indeed, his fight in the courts to prevent the release of it - as “evidence” that there is something amiss.

I don’t blame Obama for fighting it. It is an insult to the presidency, to begin with. And the fact that no other president or presidential candidate in history has been asked to “prove” they are citizens is a personal insult to Obama.

I have little doubt that racism plays a role in this for some, but for most, it is a continuation of a streak of radical paranoia that has afflicted a subset of modern conservatism in the post-World War II era. The anti-Masons, the bugaboos associated with the Tri-Lateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, Breton Woods, the Jews, the Catholics — it is a long, inglorious list of people and organizations around which has grown paranoid conspiracies of the most outrageous sort.

I’ve quoted Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” several times on this site. The opening paragraph of that essay applies to our current situation:

American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.

Hofstadter misread the Goldwater movement entirely, but so did most liberals at the time who failed to appreciate what energies had been released as a result of the Arizona senator’s candidacy. To ascribe Goldwater’s success to the paranoids was an extreme oversimplification but typical of the blindness demonstrated by the left to what was happening to conservatism below the surface. (I wonder what Hofstadter would have made of the unhinged, paranoid and radical nature of opposition to Bush by many lefty bloggers over the previous 8 years?)

The point is that Hofstadter’s description of the Birthers (and others who believe everything from Obama being a communist to his desire to “destroy” America) is spot on. “Heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” are the hallmarks of the Birthers, and even if Obama were to release his birth certificate, they would find it a fake or demand something equally idiotic as “proof” of his citizenship.

You cannot debate them without legitimizing their arguments. They are not rational so logic and reason have no effect on their thinking. Like the 9/11 Truthers who are a cross cultural, equal opportunity fraternity of both left and right nutcases, they must be denounced in as strong language that we can muster. They must be belittled, humiliated, laughed at, raged against, and verbally hammered unmercifully until they are beaten back into the shadows and dark places from which their fantasies emerged.

And now, Rush Limbaugh has joined the Birthers in asking to see the president’s “long form” birth certificate. The “news” site World News Daily - one of the biggest boosters of the Birther movement - reports on Limbaugh’s conversion:

On his show today, Limbaugh told listeners, “As you know, I’m in the midst of another harassing audit from New York State and New York City for the last three years. We’re up to 16 different ways I have to prove to New York City and state tax authorities where I have been every day – not just work week – but every day, for the past three years.”

He continued, “Barack Obama has yet to have to prove that he’s a citizen. All he has to do is show a birth certificate. He has yet to have to prove he’s a citizen. I have to show them 14 different ways where the h— I am every day of the year for three years.”

Do my fellow righties still think this is just a fringe group of paranoids? Whenever I criticize Limbaugh on this site, I get an army of conservatives telling me he is the heart and soul of the conservative movement. If so, what does that say to the rest of us who utterly reject the Birther nonsense? Are we out of step with the mainstream? Or has Limbaugh proved once again that he is a clown, an oaf, and a shallow panderer to the fears and anger of his listeners?

Mark Ambinder offers this in his post, “Should the GOP Take the Birther Threat Seriously?”

That’s the thesis of the First Readers of NBC News, after viewing this astonishing clip from a town hall meeting that Rep. Mike Castle held in Delaware for his constituents. What’s most notable, to me, at least, is not how scared Castle looked or how passionately the woman argued for Barack Obama’s foreign birth. It was the reaction of the audience, a good portion of which erupted into cheers and youbetchas.

[...]

To the extent that one can conclusively prove such things in our postmodern age, this claim has been extremely thoroughly debunked. The birther movement may be premised on a fictional belief, but it is savvy: birthers now wear the term “birther” as badge of honor, as if they were a persecuted minority — which, come to think of it, is one mechanism for solidarity in the face of evidence to the contrary.

[...]

This is, at once, a fringe movement and something greater. It’s fringe because no important Republicans believe it, and most are offended by it. It’s greater because some fairly prominent local lawmakers are beginning to sign birther petitions.

At least nine members of Congress have cosponsored a birther bill that would require prospective presidents to affirm their U.S. citizenship. What we don’t know is how widespread the belief is among Republicans — and even if the belief is confined to a narrow minority, whether the belief will spread as Republicans begin to pay closer attention to electoral politics in 2010 and 2012.

Now that Rush has picked up the Birther standard, expect other Pop-Cons like Hannity, Beck, Coulter, and more to start pushing it. If they do, they are playing with fire. Pandering to paranoids has the historically nasty habit of having their delusions stick to you like glue. Charles Lindbergh found that out to his detriment when he embraced the “America First Committee” before World War II. When the war broke out, he was ignored by Roosevelt and his fame took a permanent hit.

I am open to any and all ideas on how to marginalize these kooks before conservatism itself becomes a victim of the Birthers unbalanced lunacy. We can no longer turn the other way when confronted with Birther blather. Since they won’t listen to reason , shame and humiliation would seem to me to be the best way to closet them with the other nutcases of American politics.

UPDATE

I was right to compare Birtherism with a disease. It seems to be spreading.

First Limbaugh, now Liz Cheney who refused to denounce the Birthers on Larry King:

After King showed video of the crazy birther who disrupted a meeting with poor GOP Rep. Mike Castle, demanding he acknowledge Obama was born in Kenya (that’s one birther claim); and after Carville denounced them as a “poor, pathetic” fringe group, King gave Cheney a chance to distance herself from them. But Cheney demurred, telling King the Birther movement exists because “People are uncomfortable with a president who is reluctant to defend the nation overseas.”

The rarely shocked Carville seemed briefly speechless, and even King, not known to be the most combative interviewer, tried a second time to get an honest reaction from Cheney — which I read as expecting her to separate herself from the crazies. But Cheney repeated her talking point about Obama inadequately defending the nation overseas. Unbelievable. Carville called her on it, accurately: “She refuses to say, ‘This is ludicrous,’ because she actually wants to encourage these people to believe this.”

Absolutely nuts.

You won’t want to miss tonight’s Rick Moran Show, one of the most popular conservative talk shows on Blog Talk Radio.

Tonight, I welcome Rich Baehr of the American Thinker and Jennifer Rubin of Commentary Magazine to look at the spate of polls out this week showing a decline across the board in the president’s numbers.

The show will air from 7:00 - 8:00 PM Central time. You can access the live stream here. A podcast will be available for streaming or download shortly after the end of the broadcast.

Click on the stream below and join in on what one wag called a “Wayne’s World for adults.”

The Chat Room will open around 15 minutes before the show opens,

Also, if you’d like to call in and put your two cents in, you can dial (718) 664-9764.

My latest column at American Issues Project is up where I write about health care rationing.

A sample:

If one were to calculate the value of all the minerals and chemicals found in the human body, we’d be worth about $4.50 (add $3.50 for the 18 square feet of skin that holds it all together).

A paltry sum, to be sure. But there’s another way to calculate the worth of a human being. If one were to total up the value of all of our organs and other salable elements - what they’d fetch on the open market - our bodies would be worth considerably more. Our bone marrow alone would fetch $23 million. Our DNA would be worth a cool $9.7 million.

Our organs are pretty valuable too. Need a little extra cash? Selling your lung would net you a fast $116,000. Losing your heart would gain you $57,000.

Add it all up and you’d be quite a catch as a prospective mate. There’s $45 million in you just waiting to be mined, bottled, and sold, which is a nice number but probably won’t give you much comfort if you actually try to cash in while you’re still alive.

Then there’s another way to determine how much a human being is worth, coming soon to a hospital near you — the government way. Not surprisingly, the way the government will figure how much someone is worth is not by figuring the value of your limbs, or organs, or what Uncle Sam could get if they mined the potassium out of your carcass. They won’t calculate how much you have contributed to society in the past or how much you might contribute in the future.

And you can bet they won’t try to calculate how much you’re worth to you spouse, your kids, your family, your friends, or your community.

The government will determine how much a human being is worth by calculating how much of a drain on health care resources they will be.

Oh, but don’t worry. It will all be couched in nice, soothing language like “quality adjusted life years” or “comparative effectiveness research.” Anything but what it is; the government deciding which of us gets life saving or life extending treatment and which of us fails the tests.

Read this Eric Erickson article at Red State. These people are dead serious. I’m not sure about the cite from the bill being an accurate representation of what it is meant to be, but it matters little when creepy crawlers like Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, and “Utilitarian” philosopher Peter Singer are all inferring that their idea of rationing is determining if someone’s life is “worth it” when deciding whether to give life saving treatment.

There are monetary considerations (rationing) already used by insurance companies to determine some care options. But I’d rather have some green eyeshade guy working in the private sector worried about me or my family suing the crap out of his company making that choice rather than a “bureaucrat with a slide rule.”

As always, please read the whole thing.

It doesn’t seem like 40 years have passed since I sat in the cold living room of our family’s vacation house in northern Michigan watching Neil Armstrong take his step into eternal glory. Memory has a way of telescoping time, making distant events seem immediate and that’s how it is with me and Armstrong’s famous stroll on the surface of the moon.

We had been making the trip to Glen Lake for 6 summers in 1969. The huge, ramshackle old house we rented had a roof that leaked, a kitchen with 1920’s appliances, and no heat. With temps that could plunge into the 40’s at night in the middle of July, we made excellent use of a huge fireplace in the living room and an ancient oil burning heater. But everything about this house was big and the heater and fireplace combination only managed to make about half the living room a comfortable place to sit without a heavy sweater.

No matter. The fire was a treat for us greenhorns from suburbia. And since there was no phone and no TV the first 5 summers we made the 8 hour trip from the northwest suburbs of Chicago to Leelanau County, it really made us feel like we were “roughing it” in the north woods.

I can’t write about the moon landing without writing about Glen Lake. It was a magical place for us because so much of what we did and experienced was beyond the ken of our every day suburban lives. It was a place to test how grown up you could be - a huge attraction for pre teen boys. We learned how to sail, how to play bridge with the adults, drink coffee, smoke cigarettes (unbeknownst to my parents), make out with girls, and explore the pine forests of northern Michigan, pretending that our woodcraft was adequate to the challenge. It wasn’t but we got lucky and never had to pay for our stupidity.

We were already budding bibliophiles thanks to my father’s own love of books that drove him to build a library in our finished basement. But with no TV at Glen Lake, we devoured every book in sight. Over the years, books read by our older siblings were read by us the following year or two and in turn, read by our younger siblings down the line. We had one dog-eared copy of The Three Musketeers that was falling out of its spine, it was passed down to so many of us. (Did I mention there were 10 of us children?)

But the staple of every year’s vacation was reading the pulp fiction that we bought from the rack at Bauman’s Trading Post about two miles from our house. Bauman’s was a place for the ages. They featured a real soda fountain with malts, shakes, floats, cones - everything a growing boy needed to spoil his appetite for dinner. And in the back of the store, was beach reading material of the day; Jacqueline Suzanne, Arthur Hailey, and other potboilers for the grown ups.

And for the kids (and the young at heart) a marvelous collection of classic science fiction, horror, and adventure, including just about everything ever written by Edgar Rice Burroughs. It was here I fell in love with Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, the Pellucidar and Venus series, as well as Asimov, Clarke, Bradbury (The Martian Chronicles still thrills me to this day), Pohl, Sturgeon, and later, Frank Herbert’s Dune.

But that summer of 1969 was a little different. Joining us on our traditional 4 week trek beginning the Saturday after Independence Day was an extremely small TV set. It might have been 9″ or 12″ - I don’t recall. What I do remember is that you couldn’t get any station during the day.

Glen Lake is aptly named. It is surrounded by huge bluffs, and the TV’s small antennae wasn’t up to the task of bringing us a picture while the sun was up. This meant that we missed the actual landing on TV since that event occurred during the day. Fortunately, we were able to pick up a radio station that carried a live feed from Cape Kennedy from one of the networks and listened as Aldrin guided the LEM down to the surface of the moon.

My 81 year old grandfather, aunt, and uncle had made the trip from Chicago to visit us that year and that night, all of us gathered around the ridiculously small screen to watch man take his first steps on the moon. It struck all of us, I think, to see my grandfather witnessing an event that must have seemed almost like magic to him. He grew up in the era of horse and buggy, was a teenager when the Wright brothers flew, was a young man when Henry Ford began to mass produce cars, was in his 40’s when Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic, and a grandfather when the first jet airplane entered commercial service. We never did ask him what he was thinking as he watched what in his youth was thought impossible.

The TV picture was barely passable which made the crude, blurry images coming from the moon indecipherable for me. I saw a barely moving image that I now know was Armstrong but didn’t really see the pictures of Armstrong making that first step until I saw a replay of the event some time later. What was truly amazing was that about 15 minutes after Armstrong began his stroll on the lunar surface, I fell asleep. I guess I couldn’t see much anyway so why bother?

Except I had been looking forward to that broadcast since I was 7 years old. Almost since the time I could read, I was fascinated with space. One of the first books I can remember reading was an illustrated compilation of the planets and the sun. In a time before any probes had been sent to the planets, I knew that Venus was hot, Mars was cold, Saturn was beautiful, and that you couldn’t stand on the surface of Jupiter because the gravity would make you feel like you weighed 800 pounds (that part is a little hazy).

It was natural, then, that I would fall in love with NASA and the space program. I watched every Mercury liftoff, usually with my mother, who was much more afraid for the astronauts than I was. The Gemini and Apollo missions prior to the moon shot also held my close interest. By then, I could read anything printed in newspapers and magazines on the space program and gobbled up anything that came to my attention.

By the time 1969 rolled around, I was primed and ready. I probably could have written on the mission for almost any newspaper in that I knew as much about as it as most reporters covering it. I knew that the Saturn V booster weighed 6.5 million pounds and could lift 260,000 pounds into orbit. I knew it stood 363 feet in height and could generate nearly 7 million pounds of thrust at takeoff. I knew that it took 8 seconds for the rocket to build up enough thrust to lift the Apollo capsule off the launch pad.

The Saturn V remains one of the largest machines ever built by man and certainly the most powerful. With the capsule and crew module, it had more than a million parts - many of them redundant components in case of failure.

As I reflect back on it, my love of space exploration eventually led to amateur enthusiasms in other scientific fields from anthropology to zoology and everything in between. But as much as I am fascinated by the physical world on this planet and beyond, I never rose above the kind of general interest in scientific matters that has limited my knowledge to this day. Part of it is my atrocious math skills. Another problem is that I have a fairly undisciplined mind - a problem that does not lend itself to real scientific inquiry.

But that hasn’t stopped me from learning all I can about the universe and ultimately, given some thought to our place in it.

We are truly on an island in the cosmos - a safe haven that is, as far as we know, the only place where life has been nurtured and thrived (statistical probability of life elsewhere tell another story and most scientists believe before too long we will discover life fairly close by). It is extraordinarily humbling to contemplate just how big our universe truly is. The fact that the Hubble Space Telescope can image galaxies 14 billion light years from earth is incomprehensible. It’s not just the distance, of course, but the time that we glimpse with these images.

Looking at this picture is like looking through the portal of a time machine where we see galaxies that were already old nearly 10 billion years before our sun formed.

A hundred billion galaxies each with a couple of hundred billion stars should make you feel very small and very alone. But it doesn’t, does it? Perhaps we are incapable of grasping such immense emptiness - our minds possessing a fail safe device that stops us from going mad at the prospect of realizing just how little our lives matter when held up to the enormity of it all.

For people of faith, the emptiness is filled by the presence of an all knowing, all seeing deity. I am actually glad for those who enjoy that kind of certainty but for many of us - even believers who take a slightly different view of God and the cosmos - it is inadequate to the task of answering the fundamental questions of human existence; who are we and why are we here.

Is it enough to say that we are who we are because of evolution and the interaction of chemicals and electricity? Is it enough to say that the reason we are here is because this is where the random fluctuation of atoms from an exploding star that pushed a cloud of hydrogen gas into a ball to form the sun and the planets just happened to drop us?

Is there more to it than that?

When contemplating the relative eternity of the universe, such answers are inadequate indeed - even for an atheist. Is this all there is of existence? Are we, creatures formed of star stuff, condemned to wander the pathways of our mind seeking answers to the unanswerable? Is there nothing of the universe in us that we may, one day, be able to tap and glimpse ultimate truth?

The moon landing was an expression of that hunger to know, to understand, to seek out knowledge for the sheer joy of knowing. Eventually - if we can find a way to survive - we will step off this rocky mount and hurl ourselves into the void looking for some of the answers to those questions. We still may not find them. But we will surely discover something just as valuable; that trying to satisfy our insatiable need to learn new things will expand our consciousness and open new frontiers, the shape and scope of which we cannot even imagine today.

Some Freeper named Jim Robinson has an off the deep end post up at Free Republic that illustrates in a nutshell why no one is taking conservatism very seriously these days.

You have to read the whole thing to grasp the underlying hysteria, the exaggeration, the misperceptions, and the paranoia, but a few choice passages should suffice.

It is entitled “If we could get millions of Americans to march on Washington, what would we do?”

It cannot be denied that the central government has become destructive of our unalienable rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness and our rights to live free. The government is no longer responsive to we the People. They have stretched and shredded the constitution to the point that they have illegally seized for themselves virtually unlimited powers over the citizens and act as if we have no rights and no powers of our own. They are acting without our consent.

First, I could have lifted the exact same verbiage from any of 50 lefty blogs while Bush was in office. It was stupid then and it’s stupid now. Positing the idea that we are unfree or living under some kind of authoritarian regime is so far beyond the pale of rationality one wonders if this guy sits in the dark, cradling his gun, waiting for the secret police to bust down his door.

Gross exaggeration, hyperbolic, hysterical, paranoid, full of nonsensical statements that fly in the face of reality - and that’s just the second paragraph.

Our Founders established that when our government becomes destructive of our rights then it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

We have reached the point where the government’s long train of abuses and usurpations has achieved absolute Despotism, therefore it is our right, it is our duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for our future security.

Therefore, We the People of America choose to exercise our right to throw off and alter the abusive government by peacefully recalling and removing from office the President of the United States, the Vice President of the United States and all U.S. Senators and U.S. Representatives effective immediately.

Oooh goody! A revolution. Can I play too?

An interim provisional Chief Executive and congressional representatives will be established as follows:

The Secretary of State shall immediately assume the office of interim Chief Executive. The Chief Executive shall appoint and the interim Senate shall confirm an interim Vice President.

An immediate election shall be held within each state legislature to appoint two interim senators to represent each sovereign state.

A special election shall be held by all states within 30 days to elect interim members of the House of Representatives.

Elections for regular government offices shall be conducted in November, 2010 as previously scheduled, except that elections will be held for all elective offices, including President, Vice President and all U.S. Representatives. U.S. Senators will be elected per class schedule by the various state legislatures.

I suppose Obama, Biden, the cabinet, 100 senators and 435 Congressmen are just going to take one look at that million crazies this guy wants to bring to Washington and turn over the government to…who? Who is going to appoint this “Provisional Chief Executive?” No doubt Mr. Robinson who, as the leader of this revolt of patriots, will also be responsible for “convincing” our elected leaders to leave town.

No matter. Just what kind of government does this new Founding Fool want to establish?

The Constitution of the United States must be kept intact and must be adhered to and strictly followed by all government entities as originally intended.

As it was originally intended? Well, that solves the Obama problem. Mr. Robinson can sell him into slavery.

We must restore and reestablish the sovereignty of the people and the states and restore the constitutional balances between the central government, the various states and we the people. The constitution severely restricts government powers and guarantees unalienable freedom and Liberty to the people.

For an ignoramus, he actually got pretty close - to a third grade understanding of the Constitution. Perhaps defining “freedom and Liberty” might be a start so that we can figure out what’s “unalienable” in those vague concepts, as well as telling us how to “restore and reestablish” states rights and the “sovereignty” of the individual (which hasn’t gone anywhere as far as I can tell). But of course, that would require a mind not entranced with its own lunacy.

Then come the specifics: Repeal the 16th and 17th amendments, abolish the IRS (hooray!), transfer federal land, buildings, and military bases to control of the states, kill social security, get rid of abortion rights, the Fed,…

Well, you get the picture. He concludes with this ringing call for revolution:

Need lots of help with this document, folks. Please chime in. Would love to see a committee formed of members of every state to complete and finalize it. Then we should form and send delegates to a special national congress to work out the kinks and plan its presentation and execution.

This concept is an entirely peaceful altering of our despotic government per our unalienable right and duty. No where do I call for violence. The only force I call for is the force of numbers. We need millions of our citizens to sign on to this petition and execute its provisions. Will require millions to march on D.C. to block the government’s ability to do business as usual. This is our right and duty as Americans.

Yes, every American has a right to make an utter, complete ass of himself. That right is protected by the Constitution as surely as the right to sit in the dark with a gun waiting for Obama’s goose stepping brownshirts to arrest patriots like Mr. Robinson is guaranteed by that document.

The problem with all of this isn’t that the guy is a loon whose understanding of what America is all about is that of a 6 year old. The problem is in the comments to this post, as well as comments I’ve seen on just about every big conservative blog out there that support and mimic these extraordinarily idiotic and laughably exaggerated claims of what the government has been doing since Obama took office and how these actions affect our personal liberty.

There will always be a certain portion of both the right and left who are basically nuts. The hysterically exaggerated dangers of a Bush putsch were written about endlessly by the left for 8 years. Now it’s time for righty crazies to crawl out from under the rocks and dark places where they’ve been hiding to make conservatism look like an ideal home for kooks, paranoids, and other unbalanced denizens who inhabit a creepy reality of their own making that bears little resemblance to the real world.

Conservatives will laugh this kind of thing off as an aberration. But I am telling my fellow righties that we ignore this crap to the detriment of the rest of us who oppose the administration’s actions. With pop-cons like Hannity, Beck, Coulter, and other conservative celebrities mouthing some of this nonsense (while implying even worse) on a daily basis, more and more of the base are turning into unhinged, screaming maniacs who believe America is being “destroyed” by Obama and the liberals.

This screed is symptomatic of the sickness of thought and reason that afflicts many conservatives today - more than we are prepared to acknowledge and far more than one would normally expect from a philosophy that supposedly prides itself on prudence, rationality, and probity.

You can dismiss Robinson and his unhinged followers. But they aren’t going away and their influence can only grow if we ignore them.

UPDATE

Ooooh my bad. Jim Robinson isn’t just any ordinary schmuck. He is founder of Freeperland.

If I were to seriously analyze Robinson’s thoughts in that post, I would say that anyone who advocated the kinds of changes he does would make Obama look like a piker in the “change” department. Robinson’s ideas are beyond radical — they are ill-informed, impossible, and reactionary.

How reactionary? Robinson posits a government that does not return us to our constitutional roots but rather to a pre-constitutional system not unlike the Articles of Confederation. Anyone who can’t see that in all of his state’s rights bullshit doesn’t know much about history.

Someone should wake Mr. Robinson up and inform him that we are a continental, 21st century industrialized nation of 300 million people and not an 18th century agrarian coastal republic of 7 million.

Not that it would make much difference to Robinson. We have to revolt to ban abortion and toss out social security and the IRS.

This gorgon of a bill isn’t dead - not by a long shot. But it has been stalled by the inability of Democrats to come together and pass it.

Blue dogs are beginning to talk with Republicans about overhauling the entire bill. Liberals think it isn’t going far enough and will vote against any bill that doesn’t have a public option. Fiscally responsible members are terrified of adding to the deficit. And even the president has acknowledged that his deadline of getting it done before the August recess may be impossible.

I might add that there is precious little from the White House except speechmaking. This president apparently doesn’t know how to govern. He has handed responsibility for getting this bill passed to Pelosi and Reid while he stands on the sidelines kibitzing.

Bottom line: No one is in charge. Committee chairmen have their own ideas about what should be in the bill while Blue Dogs and liberals are rejecting their formulations and want to substitute massively.

Here’s Jennifer Rubin this morning in PJ Media:

“Back to the drawing board,” announced Democratic House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer on health care reform.  Indeed, it seems that in one short week, the single most important item on the president’s agenda is in need of some critical care.

[...]

The president rushed to the microphone on Friday afternoon to assure the country the patient was fine, just undergoing some expected surgery and far from terminal. Absent was any mention of his August deadline, however. He appeared miffed at “Washington” and the “24-hour news cycle.” He took no questions, likely because he had few answers to the hard queries. (Why is his own party in revolt? Why would he raise taxes on small businesses? Why don’t people like the idea of a “public option” as much as they did a few months ago?) Despite Obama’s lecture and show of bravado (”this is going to happen”), all signs pointed to the demise of the House Democrats’ trillion dollar, soak-the-rich public option scheme. And it is far from clear what replacement plan might be offered.

Revolts are breaking out all over the place and both Reid and Pelosi are incapable of putting out the fires. Again, it should be stressed that Democrats may be  waking up to the fact that they have a pretty damned ineffective president - one who doesn’t lead and is beginning to sound like something of a whiner.

Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie writing in the Washington Post , actually use the “C” word to describe Obama:

From a lousy cap-and-trade bill awaiting death in the Senate to a health-care reform agenda already weak in the knees to the failure of the stimulus to deliver promised jobs and economic activity, what once looked like a hope-tastic juggernaut is showing all the horsepower of a Chevy Cobalt. “Give it to me!” the president egged on a Michigan audience last week, pledging to “solve problems” and not “gripe” about the economic hand he was dealt.

Despite such bravura, Obama must be furtively reviewing the history of recent Democratic administrations for some kind of road map out of his post-100-days ditch.

So far, he seems to be skipping the chapter on Bill Clinton and his generally free-market economic policies and instead flipping back to the themes and comportment of Jimmy Carter. Like the 39th president, Obama has inherited an awful economy, dizzying budget deficits and a geopolitical situation as promising as Kim Jong Il’s health. Like Carter, Obama is smart, moralistic and enamored of alternative energy schemes that were nonstarters back when America’s best-known peanut farmer was installing solar panels at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Like Carter, Obama faces as much effective opposition from his own party’s left wing as he does from an ardent but diminished GOP.

Carter never had a clue about how to govern in Washington and neither does Obama - something many of us warned about before the election. Anyone with an ounce of sense knew his grandiose promises about changing the way Washington does business were as empty as Harry Reid’s head. It wasn’t just his inexperience. It was his rhetoric being incapable of matching reality that was most telling.

And now, Obama has apparently dropped the idea of passing a health care bill before the August recess. What will emerge after Labor Day may be nothing like what is being talked about today - scaled back, no public option, a bigger small business exemption, and no real reform of Medicare. Instead, look for expanding Medicaid and S-Chip at the state level to cover the uninsured and perhaps some fiddling with Medicare payments.

In that form, it has a chance of passing with GOP help. But unless Obama can pull off a miracle, his big plans for health care reform are going to become as extinct as the dinosaurs.