You Might Be a Liberal

by C Edmund Wright

  Like I said, living a lie is not a problem for liberals.

  Another thing that really cuts against the grain of much that liberals hold dear is that in football, the men and the women will never be doing the same jobs. Ever. The men will wear the helmets and the pads and the women will wear the Daisy Dukes and the white cowboy boots. Period. And frankly, I am cool with all of that.

  This is where the flexible and situational outrage of liberals is exposed. The folks at ESPN will simultaneously support Martha Burke in her attempt to change the sexist nature of Augusta National while preparing glitzy promotional ads for their NFL or college football programming featuring scantily clad women dancing in celebration of the heroic male football gladiators. Yet God forbid that our military dare understand the differences in men and women the way ESPN’s own creative department does. And the irony is totally lost on them.

  In fact, short of the still thriving Lingerie Football League (LFL), and gosh knows what might take place inside women’s correctional facilities, football is not even a sport that women play at any level. In other words, football, by its very essence, flies in the face of yet another liberal fantasy, which is that men and women are the same, save some plumbing equipment differences. And we know that in San Francisco, a decent major medical plan for union workers can even make even those variances go away.

  Another way soccer is the perfect socialist sport is the power vested in the nameless bureaucrats and their ability to never have to answer for their screw-ups. These would be the timekeepers.

  Consider “stoppage time.” In soccer, the official clock does not stop for out of bounds or other play stoppages. So the public clock is always wrong in soccer, much like the way our government publicly reports unemployment or debt and deficit figures. You know, always wrong.

  The time just rolls on in soccer, perhaps to keep the carbon footprint of the clock operations low. No one playing the game or coaching the game or paying to watch the game is actually given the correct information. You see, like socialists, the bureaucrats don’t actually want to trust the real movers and shakers with such information. I mean, why would a player or a coach or a fan need to know how much time is left anyway? It’s kind of like not knowing how much longer you can keep your current health plan if you like it. You’re just never sure.

  The little bureaucrats on the field—the referees—keep the time all to themselves. Since no one else knows, it’s the perfect case of untalented bureaucrats having power over the real talented people who make things happen (such that anything ever happens in soccer).

  And no liberal or socialist sport would be complete without a generous dose of self-importance, arrogance, and snobbery among its followers. I mean, it’s bad enough that we have to see the kids running around in almost soft-porn thigh-highs and sandals every Saturday as they pile out of mini-vans at every Shoney’s, Applebee’s, and Hampton Inn everywhere. But it’s the “yeah, but it’s the worlds most popular sport” attitude that really gets to me. Stick with me here for a minute.

  The insane popularity of football puts to death the liberal lie that soccer is the world’s most popular sport. Oh, I know you’ve probably never heard this challenged before, since it is often repeated as fact, much like the phrase “the Republican policies that caused this mess in the first place.” Both need to be challenged at every opportunity.

  You see, American football is the world’s most popular sport, if by popular you mean what people choose who have a choice. Soccer is merely the world’s most common sport. There is a huge difference. To say soccer is more popular than football is like saying dirt is more popular than gold simply because there is more of it. And yet, the entire international community insists that it is true.

  To buy into this without really looking at what is behind the myth is much like the liberal inclination to always take the world’s point of view when it contradicts a purely American point of view. Liberals and internationalists love to point out incessantly that soccer is the world’s most popular sport for one reason and one reason only. It is not an American sport. As good conservatives, we should not stand for that.

  The point, of course, is not soccer and football per se. The point is that liberalism can creep up on us when we’re not expecting it, and the rules and culture of soccer are merely a fun way to point it out. Be on the alert at the next World Cup, and when you watch ESPN Deportes.

  YMBAL’S #23

  If you don’t believe in prayer, but offered one up for Obama’s health just in case after imagining Joe Biden in the Oval Office…

  If you have ever believed that government spending is the same as “investing”…

  If you don’t understand the concept that an electric car is really a “coal powered car”…

  If you posted your anti business ramblings on Facebook and then wondered why you got fired…

  If you had an Obama sticker on your car in November of 08 and got laid off in December of 08 and can’t figure out why…

  If you go around trying to apply quotes from the Bible but have never actually read it…

  If you’ve ever gone to a job interview with the waistband of your baggy jeans hugging your legs below your butt…

  If you’re offended by a picture of a gun at a Tea Party rally and yet pay no attention to a 73 year old lady being pushed down steps near an Occupy rally…

  If you’ve ever backed into a cop in riot gear at a political rally and then screamed “his fault his fault” for the camera…

  If you’ve ever won a Nobel Peace Prize for not doing anything or cheered anyone who has…

  If you’ve ever wondered which is more embarrassing, winning a Nobel Prize for nothing or losing the Olympics for Chicago…

  If you’ve ever slept through 20 years of Jeremiah Wright’s sermons and yet practiced everything he preaches…

  If you look at Jon Corzine’s performance as governor of New Jersey and as CEO of MF Global and still think he’s a genius…

  If you don’t find any ironic humor in the fact that Bernie Madoff’s screwed clients were almost all liberal…

  If you don’t see a resemblance between Madoff’s investment scheme and Social Security…

  If you don’t know where the money comes from…

  If you think it’s ok that the private sector pays public sector bureaucrats twice what they make just so they can screw up the private sector…

  If you think that vegetables and plants have feelings and that animals can think, but that a fetus is an unviable tissue mass…

  ...you might be a liberal. (YMBAL)

  “When the American auto industry was on the brink of collapse, I said I believe in American workers, I believe in this American industry, and now the American auto industry has come roaring back and GM is number one again. So now I want to do the same thing with manufacturing jobs not just in the auto industry, but in every industry.”

  —Barack Obama

  “Government ‘help’ to business is just as disastrous as government persecution... the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.”

  —Ayn Rand

  24: OUR MANDATE VERSUS THEIR MANDATE

  If you think a mandate means that tea totaling, church going, conservatives have to pay for drugged up transvestites’ sex change operations and rehab treatments…

  One of the more annoying things liberals do, besides continuing to breathe, is to go back in history and find some Republican, or maybe some conservative, who said or did something that can be used to support whatever insanity liberals want to do now. They may quote some liberal Republican like, say, any member of the Bush or McCain family to support the notion that conservatives should give in on whatever the issue of the day is. Or they may take something from history totally out of context.

  Either way, it’s maddening, because they are always suddenly in love with folks, post de facto, that they could not stand at the time. Such is the case with say, Newt Gingrich, or th
e Heritage Foundation, and the individual mandate.

  You don’t have to search the commentary on Obama Care for very long before you come across someone, usually a liberal pundit or office holder, saying something to the effect of, “Yeah, but, as you know, the mandate was originally a conservative idea.” And they are right, in that a kind of mandate was and still is a conservative idea, but in spite of the similarity in the names, the conservative mandate idea is almost the opposite of the Obama-Sebelius mandate dream. It is vital that these differences be brought to light.

  That assigning of the mandate idea to conservatism really picked up shortly after John Robert’s fanciful ruling on Obama Care. The Jurassic media was in a rush to say that everything about Obama Care is ‘settled’ and that what the American people really don’t want is any more divisiveness about this issue. At which time they would launch into a little bit of light revisionist history about The Heritage Foundation, some at The Cato Institute, and Newt Gingrich and the love of the individual mandate by conservatives.

  “You know, it was your idea (as conservatives) to begin with, so just shut up, sit down, and abide by Robert’s decision. Can we please just move on to something really important, like Ann Romney’s horseback riding or Bain Capital’s involvement with some company that performed services like fetus disposal?”

  Uh, no, we can’t move on and we will not move on, because what the people hate about Obama Care is Obama Care itself, and not the divisiveness over Obama Care.

  Which brings us back to the supposedly sticky issue of the individual mandate being a conservative notion in the first place. That talking point is probably somewhat effective and frankly, I have been dismayed at how ineffective Heritage, Newt and others have been in offering what seems like the obvious rebuttal to that concept. Newt, in fact, refused to respond as people like Rick Santorum and Michelle Bachmann gashed and slashed him during the Republican debates in the winter of 2012, calling him ‘Newt Romney.’

  Anyway, without getting into too many of the weeds—which perhaps Newt and Heritage did back in the 90’s—the conservative notion of an individual mandate is simply based on the very simple concept that people should pay for what they use and not rely on others to pay for it for them.

  That’s right. You use it? Fine. You pay for it. It’s called free enterprise. Or common sense. Or right and wrong.

  Now, in the name of freedom, you can choose to pay for it through your choice of insurance, or you can pay fee for service, or you can do a combination. Heck, if the provider agrees, you can even barter some chickens or a new hot tub installation. The point is, you don’t rob the provider or the public by insisting they pay for your care. This is really a very simple concept. It is closely tethered to freedom and free enterprise. Liberals do not want this. They want to dictate everything about the transaction, including how much you pay and how much the provider of the service receives. There is no liberty in that equation, but, of course, there are additional government jobs to keep up with all of this.

  There are many reasons why paying for health services is considered too difficult or even impossible today, but the concept of paying for what you use is absolutely conservative to the core and is simply based on individual responsibility. It’s a shame it was called an individual mandate. Perhaps it should have been something technical like, say, “no tickie, no laundry.”

  Of course, the mandate for healthy people to buy insurance is in Obama Care as a way to pay for unhealthy people with pre-existing conditions, as well as a way to bribe insurance companies into supporting the bill. See the chapter on crony capitalism for more on that. Frankly, it is valid to say that there has to be some way to pay for pre-exiting conditions. There is a way, and this is perhaps the one area where a small and separate government program might be considered. We are paying for this care anyway, in one form or another, as you know. The notion that the entire system must be debased to cover this one group of people is typical of liberal thinking on many issues. Find a few victims, get some sound bites, and then destroy everyone’s freedom in the name of compassion for those few. There are better ways to go about it. The liberal mind does not contemplate those, however, because the liberal wants government control and is not interested in real solutions.

  Which is why liberals want to blur the differences between the conservative mandate idea and what Barack Obama and Kathleen Sebelius mean by an individual mandate. The Obama Care mandate—largely undefined in a 2,700 page bill that leaves more questions for Sebelius and her bureaucrats to answer than it has solutions—would involve you paying for the health insurance the government insists you have so that your money can help pay for others. I suppose we should consider the possibility that Sebelius and her bureaucrats will actually mandate that companies cover the non-employed spouses for cancer for six years after they leave the employ of the company. Apparently now that’s the new standard, thanks to Obama’s Super PAC, which clearly coordinated that particular ad with the main campaign.

  This absurdity points out the inherent problems with employment and health care being tied together in the first place, which is another concept brought to us by way of liberal union thugs. As mentioned elsewhere in the book, it was this unnecessary marriage of medical care and employment that really sped up government involvement with medical care in the first place. Things have gotten only less efficient and more confusing since then. Who could have possibly seen that coming?

  In fact, as of this writing, there are something like 13,000 pages of ‘fill in the blanks’ regulation stemming from the original bill. If you’re scoring at home, that means Obama Care is about 16,000 pages and counting. Which is about one page for every new IRS agent hired by Obama Care.

  I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling sick already.

  And some of this fill in the blank language now means that yes, Bart Stupak, Obama Care will indeed be paying for abortions. I could say there’s a Stupak born every minute, but perhaps they will be aborted instead. Stupak is as Stupak does I suppose. We will also be paying for all kinds of other esoteric and weird services most of us would never want at the whim of Sebelius and her minions. This will be the ultimate social engineering project, and everyone will pay for a one size fits all set of services. However, you will only get your share of those services when some faceless bureaucrat allows you to do so.

  In short, the conservative mandate is a mandate that you pay for what you use. The Obama Care mandate is you pay for what we want you to pay for, so that the folks we want to get care can get the care we want them to get. And yes, we will have access to your records, including your income and your voter registration. Hint hint.

  The two concepts are really very different. One is empowering of the individual. The other is empowering the government.

  I admire both the work of The Heritage Foundation and the mind of Newt Gingrich. That said, I never fully understood their need to go policy-wonk on us and come up with all kinds of technicalities and bond schemes to simply present a common sense solution. It is a shame that they both did, and this badly hurt Newt’s campaign as he was incorrectly painted as a supporter of an Obama style mandate.

  Moreover, why this mandate misrepresentation has been allowed to be part of the public discourse for so long is another mystery.

  This is really a very simple issue that we have allowed to get too complicated. Health insurance, formerly known as major medical, is simply a financial planning instrument. It does not protect your health nor can it. It was originally designed to protect your bank account from the devastation of a dread disease. Now it ‘protects’ you from having to actually realize that you are paying for your own health care through co pays and other mechanisms which simply hide the customer from the real cost.

  The only real long-term answer is for more people to wake up and realize the true genius of that system—the simple straight forward and efficient ‘major medical’ model. In an effort to shield people from understanding the real cost of health care
by hiding it behind work place benefits and co pays and low deductibles and mountains of paperwork, we have created the most expensive and complicated system imaginable. We have worked all of the efficiencies right out of the system.

  You want to “bend the cost curve down?” Really? Then take the system back to a fee for service system for the inexpensive routine care and only insure—in the true meaning of the financial term insure—against the catastrophic heart attack or cancer or other dread disease. Take all of the paperwork and middlemen out of the small stuff and guess what? It will be small stuff. More on that in another book perhaps.

  In the meantime, it would be helpful if conservatives would gain their voice on the true nature of our mandate versus the very different Obama/Sebelius mandate.

  There are mandates—and there are mandates. Ours has nothing in common with theirs. Winning this Obama Care debate will ultimately rest on numerous issues, but the notion of individual responsibility and empowerment versus a life dominated by bureaucrats is one of the big factors. Liberals, on the other hand, want the control and expansion of government that comes with us losing control over our lives. We must, for so many reasons, bring clarity and victory to this debate. And it’s really not that hard.