ObamaCare’s Opposition Comports With Reality

This post is written by guest author Edward Mahee. Mr. Mahee boasts an extensive legal background, and is an emerging conservative thinker. Expect articles from Mr. Mahee every other week. This is his fourth posting for the site.

Recently, supporters of President Obama’s healthcare plan have claimed that the rising tide of opposition to the plan is the work of hucksters, conspirators, and other malefactors.  The protestors, we are told with assurance, are either toothless and witless hicks, or are too well-dressed and well-spoken to be real protestors.  The healthcare escapade has been very revealing, both of the Obama Administration and of its opposition. 

President Obama’s swift rise to power was built on, more than anything else, air—the power of his rhetoric.  Unfortunately for him and his supporters, however, actual policy initiative must comport with reality.  His healthcare proposal simply does not, and people have finally woken up to the danger. 

Liberalism holds itself as an ideology that deals with problems empirically, dealing with facts and reality, while it claims its opponents deal with problems beyond the cloud of unknowing.  Yet, with healthcare, as with so many other things, the promises of liberalism cannot be kept. 

Mr. Obama and his acolytes are right when they say that the current healthcare system is broken and financially unsustainable.  Medicare and Medicaid are financial black holes, which if not dealt with will destroy the federal budget, and by consequence, the currency and the economy. 

However, Mr. Obama’s solution is to make millions more people dependent on the federal government for health insurance and to increase federal expenditures on healthcare by trillions of dollars. Mr. Obama risibly claims that his plan will increase coverage (and quality) and decrease costs.  He might as well try and convince people that 2+2=5 (if he did try, CNN or The New York Times would be quoting some mathematician somewhere saying that 2+2 can in some instances equal 5).

Because people have finally caught on to this, they have begun to move in great numbers to voice their opposition to Mr. Obama’s healthcare plan.  Mr. Obama is learning the hard way that “hopey-changey” talk is powerless against the immutable laws of arithmetic, especially when ordinary people have a much sounder grasp of the concepts than the administration, the sycophantic media, or the hapless politicians who are trying to argue with people who have actually read the bills in question.

Mr. Obama and his friends in Congress and the media have done their best to quash the opposition.  They have resorted to ridicule and insult, even bussing in their own counter-opposition to town hall meetings (paid for by ACORN).  But the great thing about the American people is that once moved, they will not be intimidated by cheap insults or threats.  The counter-opposition may have fancy signs and misinformed bumper-sticker slogans, but the real opposition has passion—a genuine passion whose source is the fear that this administration is bent on taking away their cherished freedom, while at the same time spending the country into bankruptcy. 

No doubt in the days ahead we will hear more tales from the media of the heroic Mr. Obama standing athwart the great unwashed, bravely facing the tide of shallow closed-mindedness.  We will see more stories of healthcare protestors who are bringing arms into these meetings to intimidate the brave liberals who are only trying to do good by their constituents.  None of it will be true. 

The people who have been showing their spirit at these meetings, and voicing their opposition to Mr. Obama’s healthcare plan, are simply free citizens exercising their rights.  They are genuine opposition, and their passion comes from their understanding of a very simple truth: Flowery rhetoric and heart-wrenching sob stories cannot make 2+2=5, and any policy that tries to make that equation work will only end in disaster.

-Edward Mahee from TruPolitics.net