My column for this week: Are You Stupid? Before you begin, I am not writing this as an indictment of any one particular person. Nope, to be sure, I am writing it to illustrate just how little the powers that be in Washington D.C. think of you, me, and everyone in between us. We all remember the hullaballoo surrounding what is popularly called “Obamacare.” Again, I am not writing this as a condemnation of that body of legislation, although I must say I am nowhere near convinced what it offers is what America as a whole really needs. There were a lot of folks far smarter than me screaming to the high heavens that Obamacare was an abomination of power, that it veered the nation far too close to socialism. So, trying to be an informed citizen, I took it upon myself to try to read through it. I don’t know how many of you have actually tried to do that, but let me warn you – if you do, you better have a bottle of aspirin and a soft spot to lay down nearby. Totaled there are 11,588,500 words in the ‘Affordable Care Act,’ which equals over 10,000 pages of legalese gibberish so confusing and tangled that even the politicians who were supporting it were saying they’d push to get it passed and then read it later (‘later’ meaning ‘never.’) Of course, after much legal back and forth all the way up to and including the Supreme Court, the act was passed into law. Much of the legal focus was placed on whether or not the act should be considered a tax. In one of the more contradictory rulings in recent history, the Court ruled that the individual mandate that fuels Obamacare is not a “penalty” but rather a tax, and therefore represented a constitutional application of Congress’s taxation power. Uhh…ok, if you say so. Needless to say, after all was said and done I - along with most of you - pretty much just shook my head and accepted the fact that Obamacare was here to stay, even though very few seemed to have any real clue as to what it really was or what its ramifications might be. So this week, a video emerges of one Jonathan Gruber, a slick-talking economics professor from MIT who apparently was one of the principal architects of the wording of Obamacare. In it, Gruber says and I quote: “In terms of risk-rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in—you made explicit that healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed, okay? Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass…Look, I wish that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.” OK. Take a moment and read that one more time. So, this slime ball knew when he was helping compose this monolith of political bloviating that the only chance his work stood to get passed into law depended mainly on the stupidity (his word, not mine) of the average American voter? Wow. Let me translate his words for you, since, you know, you’re clearly not smart enough to figure it out on your own: “As far as risk-rated costs are concerned, if we were honest and told Americans the truth that huge sums of money from healthy people would be sucked dry by sick people, it would have gone about as far as I can throw Chris Christie. Being dishonest is a great way to get a leg up politically. And really, because Americans voters are stupid, we had to have them support it or it never would’ve passed…see, honesty would be nice, but if it takes lying to get what we want then that’s fine by me.” The part that really, really chafes my hocks about this kind of arrogant, P.O.S. (Political Operating System) mindset is that this really gives us a look inside the total lack of respect with which these self-serving ‘public servants’ view America. If this doesn’t illustrate the fact that we are viewed as little more than sheep whose purpose is to be herded en masse whichever way they feel serves their purposes – and not ours – then I don’t know what will. I don’t care which party your ‘allegiance’ is with, you should view this kind of condescending attitude with outrage and condemnation. Remember – these people are supposed to be serving YOU, not the other way around. Of course, we were also told this week by attorney general nominee Loretta Lynch that racist politicians in the Deep South have passed voter ID laws so that minority voters would be disenfranchised.” I see. I guess that’s why Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and South Dakota all have strict voter ID laws, too, since, you know, they are from the Deep South, too. Hopefully if nothing else, the elections of last week might send the message to Washington to stop the nonsense, stop playing games, and get to work - or else we’ll vote all y’all out, too. I guess we might be dumb, but we apparently ain’t that stupid.
Posted on: Wed, 12 Nov 2014 03:08:54 +0000