Pelosi Apologize?

You gotta love Limbaugh. This from yesterday's program:


"If I were Joe Wilson, I would say, 'I'll apologize as soon as Pelosi apologizes to the CIA.'"

The Crisis in Health Care

Let me tell you how the conservatives have lost the debate on health care and most of them don't even know it.

I listen to talk radio every day. Talk radio is dominated by the right in this country because the audience for talk radio is naturally on the right--traditional working people who keep up with the world. Lefties have other media that they use to get out their opinions, chiefly traditional news sources and government sponsored media such as National Public Radio.

As an aside, the content of NPR is so dreadfully inane and boring that it would never survive if it had to depend on things like listeners and sponsors--you know, actually make it in the real world.

Dennis Miller says that lefties do not do well getting a radio audience because no one wants to tune in and listen to how bad they are and how they are to blame for all of the world's problems. I'm not sure how accurate Miller's assessment is, but I find it amusing.

As I was saying, I listen to talk radio and by far the dominant theme this week has been Obama-Care. I listen to the conservative pundits denounce and expose the evils of socialized medicine and I listen to leftist callers as they argue the Democrat talking points on the matter. I know both sides of the issue and am adamantly opposed to socialized medicine both on principle and for pragmatic reasons.

But the conservatives have lost this debate and the Republicans, typically, are back on their heels trying to stop the Obama/Pelosi juggernaut and offering their own alternative plans to fix the health care crisis.


And that is exactly where conservatives have lost this debate. They have conceded the premise of the opposition, a premise which is false.

There is no health care crisis in America.

I'm sorry, but there just isn't, and anybody with any sense of reality should know that. Are there problems with our health care system? Certainly. Are people dying in the streets? Certainly not. But you wouldn't know that by listening to the left.

We have the best, most effective, most innovative health care system in the world. We have the best hospitals, doctors, nurses, and research facilities. We are the healthiest people who have ever lived in the history of mankind.

And we have a health care crisis?

The typical leftist response to my assertions would be to point out the problems we have. But I don't deny there are problems. I only deny that a crisis exists. But to listen to Washington and the main-stream media you would think the whole thing is about to collapse and we had better act now, right now, before it is eternally too late to save it.

Horse manure.

But conservatives have lost the debate on health care reform because they have conceded the premise beneath which it lies. And, thus, we are poised to destroy the best health care system in the world.

No Longer a Republican

Dennis Miller is one cool cat, to use an expression he might use. Miller has an exceptional vocabulary, an encyclopedic memory, a razor wit, and a unequalled command of the art of the metaphor. I love Dennis, absolutely love him.

Today he had Mike Murphy of NBC news and Time magazine as a guest on his radio show. Murphy is one of those northeastern Republican political pundits . . . let's not go there . . . and the topic of discussion was Sarah Palin, her resignation, her impact on the McCain ticket, and her possible political future. Murphy is no Palin fan. Too bad for him.


There were several things I disagreed with Murphy on, but I think the thing that grated on me the most was the apparent lack of understanding he displayed of what is going on with the Republican "base." Rank and file conservatives are fed up with how they have been treated lately by the Republican party and Murphy doesn't get that.

According to Murphy, Palin was a drag on the McCain ticket because she didn't add anything. Admitting that she was a charismatic and engaging figure, Murphy could not see how that was anything McCain really needed. I won't quote him from memory, but the gist of his point was that McCain needed someone who would bring in swing voters and Palin could not do that. All she could do was energize a base that was going to show up for McCain anyway.

Wrong.

Murphy said to Miller something akin to Come on, Dennis, those guys were going to the polls for McCain anyway. Do you think they would vote for Obama?

Wrong again. I wanted to talk to this guy so badly, and they did take some callers but I was not in an area for a good signal, so I didn't try.

Mike Murphy could not be more wrong. I was not going to vote for John McCain. I did not like him. I viewed him as a compromiser. I viewed him as a man who epitomized the problem with the Republican party and I absolutely, positively was not going to vote for John McCain.

And, no, Mike Murphy, I was not going to vote for Generalissimo Obama either.

I had made up my mind to go to the polls, vote in every other race, then for President vote for Ronald Reagan as a write-in candidate. My first Presidential election was 1988 and I never had a chance to pull the lever for the Gipper and I thought that this way I could at least tell my grandchildren that I had.

But John McCain was not getting my vote. Period.

Then McCain picked Sarah Palin as his veep and I decided I would vote for them . . . her. So I did.


So, yes, Mike Murphy, Sarah Palin did add something to McCain's ticket. She added me and along with me a whole lot of other frustrated, disgusted conservatives who had also planned on sitting out. If not for Palin it would have been far uglier than it was.

As for me, after seeing how the McCain campaign treated Palin, and after noting that not one Republican political figure would stand up for her, I dropped out of the ranks of the Republicans. I now consider myself a constitutionalist--a libertarian independent. And I will never vote for a moderate Republican again--for anything.