Mean and Heartless

 Although no longer recommended to induce vomiting, ipecac still finds its way onto crossword puzzles. Whenever I see the word, I immediately think of one much more efficient emetic: the sight of a smug, unctuous Chuck Schumer peddling his moralistic snake oil from the floor of the Senate. His over-the-top hypocrisy and cavalier disregard for facts should be enough to make anyone gag.

 

Schumer’s latest show of divisive demagoguery is leading a Democrat chorus branding the latest Republican senators’ health care proposal as mean and heartless, when its intent is to fix the problems of the disastrous ObamaCare that he and his Democrat cohorts foisted upon the American public.     

The Republican proposed legislation (ACA) is far from perfect; it must improve to earn the support of holdout senators. It needs to remove insurance subsidies, for instance. But even in its current form it is far better than ObamaCare. It removes job-killing employer mandates and fines on young people for not enrolling in the program; it eliminates mandates to buy coverages people don’t need or want; it retains coverage for pre-existing conditions; it reduces taxes and allows markets to work. That does not, in my view, meet the definition of mean and heartless.

What would be mean and heartless is leaving the shattered remnants of ObamaCare in place, a system that has broken its promises to the American people (If you like your plan, you can keep your plan….), increased premiums and deductibles by over 100% for many, and left an increasing number of states with no insurers at all.

ObamaCare is collapsing because its numbers are unsustainable and depressing the economy. Yet, when Republicans offer a plan to control the expansion of Medicaid, they are called “killers” by Democrats and the liberal media. When they look to cut costs, Senator Warren calls the cuts “blood money.” And the smarmy snake oil peddler from Brooklyn continues to smile and lie.

Hate, Rage, andd Violence

            Our country is in trouble. It is descending into a polarized climate of hate and rage, and, as we have seen so often in the recent past, violence. We have witnessed wanton destruction in Ferguson, Baltimore, and Milwaukee; we have seen anti-police riots and killings; we have watched masked thugs vandalize and burn to prevent free speech.

            Whatever happened to civil dialog? To friendly persuasion? To fair and honest debate? Instead we are treated to the bloodied head of a decapitated Trump and a play featuring the assassination of the President disguised as Julius Caesar? Is there no limit to the vulgarities and the outrageous lies?                       

            Last week a Bernie Sanders supporter and fan of Rachel Maddow fired his rifle into Republicans practicing baseball and almost succeeded in assassinating Congressman Scalise. For one day Democrats and Republicans condemned the violence and called for unity. But not two days passed before the New York Times resurrected the debunked canard of the assault on Gabby Gifford to direct the blame on Republicans. Right on cue, Congressional Democrats resumed their attack on President Trump, and the President fired back with a barrage of tweets to further inflame the Left. The war hardly took a breath.

            In this case, as in so many others, we can draw a straight line between hate, rage, and violence. What is truly appalling, in my view, is that this mindless assault on the fabric of our society is abetted by a biased mainstream media that has abandoned investigative journalism in favor of leftist propaganda.

            For the most part, the Left is focused on what it believes to be the illegitimate presidency of Donald Trump. It may very well be that nothing will change until he leaves (or is forced out of) office. What then? Will our Constitution have survived? Or will we be kicking around its ashes? The haters should think about that.

Killers

                        The greatest killers in the history of this earth have been: 1. Natural disasters (tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and giant meteors like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 60 million years ago); 2. Pestilence (the 14^th century Black Death that killed up to half of some European countries’ populations, and the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic that claimed 50 million victims; 3. Disease (cancer, heart disease, malaria, tuberculosis, cholera, and the small pox that decimated Native-American peoples); 4. Famine (many examples, but the tens of millions starved by Stalin and Mao probably the most extreme); 5. War.

            Of these killers, war is the worst because war is a conscious and deliberate act. From the beginning of recorded history, men have warred on each other for any number of reasons: conquest, power, subjugation, revenge, independence, self-defense, etc. Yet, the most irrational cause of many of history’s wars has been religion and its inherent bias.

            Would there have been an invasion of Canaan had the Hebrews not felt entitled to the land as God’s Chosen People? Would there have been multiple Christian Crusades if the Holy Land had not been occupied by Muslims? Would Catholics and Protestants have fought each other in the Hundred Years War without claims and counterclaims to divine approbation? Would there have been genocide in Armenia or holocaust in World War II absent bias against Christians and Jews? Would we be having massacres today in the name of Allah?

            The jihadist murders in London on June 3^rd remind us that religious fervor and malevolence have coexisted hand in hand for millennia. These two contradictions have given us persecution, torture, Inquisitions, beheadings, and exterminations on a ghastly scale. But none of the world’s religious wars have been as tenacious and unrelenting as Islam’s war of conquest of the Infidel.

            The civilized world is in a quandary. What are we to do about a religion whose large majority of adherents are people who only wish to worship in peace guided by Quranic precepts handed down by a loving God, while a minority find justification for terror in the same scriptures? How can we effectively excise this cancer from our midst while political correctness and accusations of Islamophobia prevent us from condemning the carnage as radical Islamic extremism and taking the measures necessary to end it?

            That is the defining question of our age.