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There was a captain with whom I served in the Army who might be the dumbest human being I have ever met. Moreover, he was positively the most egotistical man I have ever met. The combination would have surely gotten people killed had the Russians and East Germans ever crossed the border. He lacked respect for non-commissioned officers. He could not read a map. He regularly sucked all the motivation from my soldiers. It was a constant battle to respect the two bars on his collar. It was a constant battle to maintain my soldier’s respect our commander. It was made worse by his lack of respect for his chain of command.
At the end of the day however, I always waded through his crap with the respect his office deserved. I ALWAYS addressed him as sir.
Tonight on live national television in the hallowed halls of Congress someone called the President of the United States a LIER. Those halls have seen wars from without and wars from within. In those halls, good men and women who we elected have discussed the bill of rights, war, civil war, slavery, women’s suffrage, terrorism and impeachment. Those men and women were just as diametrically opposed as they were tonight yet, people didn’t call each other liars. They especially did not call the President of the United States a liar to his face.
I have disagreed with Presidents. I have been violently opposed to the policies of many Presidents. A certain recent President who defamed the house we let him borrow made me both livid and sad at the same time. After all, the White House was never designed to be the President’s sex palace. I never called him a liar.
Maybe I am being over sensitive but, I believe a Congressman who believes it is ok to call the President of the United States a liar under these circumstances has no capacity for compromise or moderation. I believe his constituents should be embarrassed. I think all Republicans should demand an apology in writing tomorrow.
Shy of that demand for an apology and a rethink by conservatives of how the public trust should affect their behavior, I am sad for our country tonight. I wonder if the Congressman and those who support him are capable of the civility required to run this country. I wonder what other things the same rationalization which allowed the Congressman to call the President a liar, will allow he and his supporters to do.
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Editor’s Note:
I apologize for the recent lack of posts. I am in the process of finishing up a novel and will be back to my old big mouth self in a few months.
As Republicans decide if they will run Rush Limbaugh for President, there are some who believe the winger rhetoric is destructive. There are others who believe the thrashing in the last two elections was not their absolutist attitudes but the presentation of conservative principles. They think conservative ideas are better.
One of the ideas presented at the annual Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) convention last week was a conservative solution to healthcare. They actually stopped saying “government run” long enough to explain their stance. They feel the problem is access to insurance. They tell us health insurance should not stop at the state border. They want to allow insurance companies to cross state lines to allow larger groups. They believe plumbers, engineers and others will form groups not available to them within state lines.
Conservatives may want to rethink this idea because it may have some decidedly unconservative consequences.
One of the consequences will be taking local and state control away insurance regulation. As state barriers are removed, state insurance commissions will no longer have jurisdiction. Local regulation and governance has been one of the cornerstones of conservative thought. Conservatives usually tell us people are governed better locally and not by Washington. This idea also ignores one of the biggest traumas in recent American life.
Americans still have blood in their mouth from the last free market fat lip. Many Americans blame the current recession on unregulated financial markets. With that in mind, do conservatives really believe Americans will allow an industry they distrust already to be unregulated? Who do conservatives believe will enforce health insurance portability? Another decidedly unconservative consequence of this idea might be a new national regulation directly from Washington. That sounds like government run healthcare to me.
In their haste to bring alternative ideas, conservatives have not done their homework. Again, they have gone out of their way to have a free market like solution. At the end of the day, the ramifications of their proposals are not even true to conservative ideals.
Wouldn’t it be better to give Americans an opportunity to buy national healthcare insurance from the government and leave private insurance alone? Maybe conservatives are afraid private insurance can’t compete. Who knows? We might just find current insurance providers really don’t need increases in premiums at three times the rate of inflation.