Health Care and Apartheid: Basically the Same Thing

As Republican politicians fight their never-ending battle to out-stupid one another, one of the more consistent front-runners is Rick Santorum. Santorum's regularly demonstrated ability to combine right-wing dogma, pseudo-Christian hypocrisy and general tone-deafness is nothing short of breathtaking. That someone with multiple university degrees is capable of saying so many profoundly dumb things (as reported previously) just goes to show that book-larnin' ain't everything, I guess.

Today's award-winning demonstration of Santorum's ignorance took place on Bill O'Reilly's show (an appropriate forum for that sort of thing). Discussing the passing of Nelson Mandela, Santorum told O'Reilly, "Nelson Mandela stood up against a great injustice and was willing to pay a huge price for that, and that's the reason he is mourned today, because of that struggle that he performed… And I would make the argument that we have a great injustice going on right now in this country with an ever increasing size of government that is taking over and controlling people's lives, and Obamacare is front and center in that."

Wow! I'm impressed. And he said all that with a straight face, no less. Yes, Rick believes that a law enacted to extend the benefits of affordable health care to tens of millions of Americans, and to keep millions more from getting screwed over by their health insurance providers, is pretty much the same as a brutal government-mandated system of racial discrimination that regulated where you could live, where you could work, where you could go, whom you could associate with. The similarities are pretty obvious, no?

You're right, this does remind me of Obamacare

I think that with this pronouncement, Santorum has secured himself a comfortable lead in the stupid sweepstakes, ahead of perpetual challengers Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. Not that they aren't putting up a fight, mind you. Palin's recent statement about the federal debt and slavery come to mind (helpful hint: when someone prefaces a statement with, "and this isn't racist, but…", you can safely assume that whatever comes next will be pretty offensive). Bachmann has since countered with claims that Barack Obama "has rewritten the Constitution for himself as a part of his effort to fundamentally transform the United States of America"—golly, I didn't learn in my high school civics class—the one in which I scored 100% on every test but only got a "B" because the teacher said I "had a bad attitude"—that the president gets to rewrite the Constitution. But I think Santorum, with his "ACA=apartheid" equation, once again leaves Sarah and Michele in the dust.

What is it about these right-wing Republicans that enables them to make these pronouncements that attain an almost magical level of stupid? I am simultaneously fascinated and repulsed; I guess it's the same thing some people get out of watching those "Saw" movies. I don't need to watch that stuff—I can just watch Republicans being interviewed on Fox News to get the same kind of sick thrill.

Turn that thing off! It's frightening the children.

Nelson Mandela was, and I'm sure will remain, an inspirational figure to people the world over. He was a man who fought against outrageous injustice, suffered his punishment for that with dignity and ultimately emerged triumphant. Where others might have sought retribution, he worked for reconciliation. He was a respected statesman who was elected to lead his country and, unlike so many of his peers among African leaders, when his term was up, he went. I cannot for the life of me imagine a Santorum or a Palin or a Bachmann (or a Cruz or a Paul or practically any of the more vocal Republicans) ever rising to even a small fraction of that level of moral authority. That Rick Santorum, the supposed champion of Catholic teachings, would somehow link this figure, who for the good of his country truly turned the other cheek to seek rapprochement with his former tormentors, to his own immoral crusade to deprive America's least privileged citizens of a little bit of progress toward health care security tells me everything about him (and his fan base) that I would ever care to know.

Wait… Jesus said what??!!

Oh, So That's What "Liberal Education" Means

I was going to try to stay off this blog this week and instead get to bed at a reasonable hour, but Rick Santorum just said too many irresistably crazy things over the weekend. There was the thing about wanting to throw up about Kennedy distinguishing between church and state, or the claim that elderly Dutch people are afraid to go to the hospital because the nice doctors will have them put down. But as the father of a high school senior who is presently in the middle of the stressful college selection process, one item in particular caught my attention. It was the one about him addressing some tea party group in Michigan and calling Obama a snob because "he once said he wants everybody to go to college".

The context of his remarks was that he was expressing the idea that not everybody is meant for college—there are many people for whom that's not the right path to a career. That's actually something I can agree with. I have known many people who never went to college and ended up in a trade or a job from which they earned a comfortable living and had a satisfactory life. I've known people who went to college for four years and found it hard to find any kind of job in their field once they graduated. I've also known people who never went to college or got any kind of real vocational training and ended up living a hand-to-mouth existence at minimum wage or a little more, bouncing from one more or less menial job to the next. I'll grant you that college is not the right thing for everybody. To be fair, Obama has also apparently never specifically said that every American should have a four-year college degree. This White House policy statement on education just says that "President Obama is committed to ensuring that America will regain its lost ground and have the highest proportion of students graduating from college in the world by 2020. The President believes that regardless of educational path after high school, all Americans should be prepared to enroll in at least one year of higher education or job training to better prepare our workforce for a 21st century economy."

I think the statistics show that the days when you could go from high school to a good factory job that would pay you enough to live a reasonably comfortable life with a home of your own and a decent pension waiting for you after retirement are long gone. You may not need a four-year college degree, but you need some kind of post-secondary training or education if you're going to have a chance in today's economy. You know those modern manufacturing jobs that the president talked about in the State of the Union address a few weeks ago? He wasn't talking about a job pressing the button that makes the machine stamp out another hubcap. The people who are hiring for the kind of precision manufacturing jobs that pay good wages nowadays aren't going to turn just any bozo loose on equipment that, if not run by an operator with some moderately high-tech skills, is going to spew out a bunch of very expensive garbage. And where are those kinds of skills going to come from? Rick, what's your solution to that?

What mostly caught my attention, though, was this: "There are good decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor to try to indoctrinate them. Oh, I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image. I want to create jobs so people can remake their children into their image, not his." That's great, Rick. I'm glad to hear that you are working hard to save my children from that horrible disease, that painful affliction, that eternal curse that is a college education. Let's make sure that they never grow up to become engineers or doctors or teachers. Or lawyers, like you, a guy who has a BA, an MBA and a JD. I can see what that kind of indoctrination leads to.

Santorum hasn't left it at that, though. He went on ABC's "This Week" show to further explain his position and told George Stephanopoulos this: "You talk to most kids who go to college who are conservatives, and you are singled out, you are ridiculed, you are… I can tell you personally… I went through a process where I was docked for my conservative views. This is sort of a regular routine. You know the statistic … that 62 percent of kids who enter college with some sort of faith commitment leave without it. This is not a neutral setting." Is that what's behind this? He went to a place where applying the scientific method is a core value and people gave him a hard time about believing in things for which there is no empirical evidence? Rick was intellectually bullied by a bunch of mean liberals when he went to college, and he's still mad about it. Good of him to warn me about the terrible fate that awaits my impressionable children. So I guess I'll take his advice and let the Indians and the Germans and the Chinese and the Russians get those college educations, and I'll just send my kids to church instead.

Congratulations, graduates! You're all
godless communists now.

Ronnie and Jesus

Something I find peculiar about Republicans/conservatives is the strange compulsion their leaders seem to have to perpetually, and loudly, trumpet their Republican-ness and conservatism. I don't see prominent people on the left perpetually going on and on about what exemplary Democrats they are, or accusing others of not being "liberal" or "progressive" enough. I am not saying that there is nobody on the left who does that, but I don't see leading Democrats like Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Kerry etc. going around impugning the leftist credentials of others, for example. Maybe I suffer from selective amnesia, but thinking back to the last presidential election, in which there were numerous candidates vying for the Democratic presidential nomination, I remember them attacking each other in various ways, some of them pretty scurrilous, but I don't recall any of them accusing one of the others of simply not being ideologically pure enough to deserve the nomination, or putting him- or herself forward as the only one who is.

Observing the current race for the Republican nomination, I see all kinds of examples of that. Here's Rick Santorum telling you that he is the "true conservative" and here he is telling you that Newt Gingrich is some kind of impostor. Before dropping out of the race, Rick Perry wanted you to know that he is an "authentic conservative"; afterward, he insisted that Gingrich was the only true conservative left in the race. Romney says he's not just conservative, he's severely conservative. Today I see that Romney and Santorum are duking it out over each other's conservative credentials ahead of the Michigan primary. With the emphasis on ideological purity, I can't tell whether these guys are running for the presidency of the United States or for the chairmanship of some kind of right-wing politburo. Is it just an expression of insecurity? There's something weirdly fetishistic about this label obsession.

Despite differences of opinion about who today's One True Conservative is, there seems to be a fairly widespread consensus among those who think of themselves as staunchly conservative that one president who did govern in accordance with their worldview was Ronald Reagan. He vastly increased defense spending, and sent troops into Grenada to prevent the commies from taking over, and fought the reds by proxy in Central America. He went to Berlin and told Mr. Gorbachev to "tear down this wall". He fought for deregulation and fired the striking air traffic controllers. He kicked off his presidency with that oft-quoted line, "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." He did all this and more, establishing himself as one of the more important deities in the pantheon of conservative American heroes. Conservatives look back at the 1980's and wish they could have another president just like Reagan.

And yet… various observers have pointed out that Reagan also raised taxes during his presidency. He signed a law granting amnesty to illegal aliens. He opined that people living below the poverty line should not pay taxes. He cooperated with notorious leftist extremists like Tip O'Neill. Those observers have asserted that with a record like that, it's pretty doubtful that Reagan, the conservative icon, could ever be a serious contender for today's Republican nomination, and I would have to agree with that. I personally have a hard time thinking of Reagan as a moderate, but by the standards of today's Republican party he would be found guilty of too many counts of giving aid and comfort to the enemy to be considered "a true conservative" and an acceptable presidential candidate.

Mortal Enemies

There's another guy who looms large in the background of the current Republican primary race. His name is Jesus; you have no doubt heard of him. We have certainly heard a lot from the candidates about "Judeo-Christian values" in this campaign season, mostly in the context of how these values are under attack from all directions and how only Mitt/Newt/Rick P./Rick S./Michelle/etc. can defend the faith. Newt sums it up nicely: "In a sense, our Judeo-Christian civilization is under attack from two fronts. On one front, you have a secular, atheist, elitism. And on the other front, you have radical Islamists. And both groups would like to eliminate our civilization if they could. For different reasons, but with equal passion." Or: "We see a president who is systematically trying to crush the traditional Judeo-Christian values of America" (Santorum on Obama).

I don't know of any other western democracy in which the appeal to religion is so constantly in the mouths of those who aspire to govern. This perpetual emphasis on how the man upstairs wants us to run the country puts us in good company with countries like, oh, Iran or Saudi Arabia. I guess that when you don't have anything substantive in the way of practical policy initiatives to bring the country forward, it's better to just change the subject and talk about your championing of "Judeo-Christian values".

And just between you and me, I wish these guys would drop the pretense of this ridiculous construction, "Judeo-Christian". Those of us to whom the "Judeo" part applies understand that the notion of shared heritage and purpose implied by that term counts only as long as we accept that wherever it conflicts with the "Christian" part, Jesus trumps Moses. Note to Newt, Rick et al.: We are deeply grateful for your willingness to accord us a kind of dhimmi status in exchange for our votes, but since we know you intend to govern according to the Jesus book, just drop the "Judeo" shtick because you're not fooling anyone anyway.

All this is not to say that living in the Jesus-driven state would necessarily be a bad thing. Let's keep an open mind. What would the Republican program look like if they really let Jesus write their platform?

For starters, I suppose they would push for a pretty strong social safety net: Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me. Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. (Matthew 25:34-40)

No doubt they would campaign to eliminate any special treatment for the wealthy, expecting them instead to contribute to society in proportion to their means: Jesus said unto him, If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me. But when the young man heard that saying, he went away sorrowful: for he had great possessions. Then said Jesus unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. (Matthew 19:21-24)

They might press for an even-handed and compassionate justice system: So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her. (John 8:7)

But enough of that, you get the idea… This Jesus guy sounds like some kind of dangerous socialist nut. We'd better make sure none of these foolish ideas get implemented in our future Christian state. It's a good thing this guy isn't running for the Republican nomination. But then with ideas like that, I guess he wouldn't have a chance anyway.

I say unto thee: Thou must pull thyself
up by thine own bootstraps, my son.