It could be that the president has a soft place in his heart for Philadelphia, that city of brotherly love in Pennsylvania, the state he visited back in 2008 a short time before he described people who were obsessed with grasping their Bibles and firearms and rooting out illegal immigrants in the process…right before visiting Pennsylvania again. Maybe he meant the “typical whites” to which he referred in the campaign, sorta suggesting his grandmother to be one such, i.e., a bit leery of being around people “not like us.” Anyway, he picked the Philadelphia area on 08 March to deliver a stem-winding message to Congress to pass immediately his health-care bill (though he actually doesn’t have one).
The prexy’s March 2008 speech, almost exactly two years ago, was referenced as a speech on race. Apparently, this speech was meant to be part of a defining moment of his candidacy not long after it came to light that Obama had sat under the ministry of the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, who had a habit of castigating this country on a regular basis, outlining the white folk as trolls, more or less, and had screamed from his pulpit (still everywhere on YouTube) that God should damn America and that such action was in the Bible, even though America did not exist in the Bible days.
The 2008 speech, predictably, was largely the usual “slavery boilerplate” served up by the likes of Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, but in actuality was a lame apologetic for Wright, a large portion of the POTUS teleprompter being dedicated to that subject. It didn’t fly with the reverend (and certainly not most citizens), probably because Obama mentioned that he didn’t agree with all he’d heard Wright pontificate in 20 years, whereupon Wright went on a tear (National Press Club) saying more bad things about the country. The upshot, of course, was that Wright was thrown under the bus and more recently has stated that the Jews surrounding Obama have kept him (Wright) from connecting with his former congregant.
There was nothing new in the speech on 08 March 2010, featuring a rousing campaign-style oratory full of sound and fury but signifying very little. It was delivered on a college campus, where it could be safely assumed that any entitlement of any kind was considered a “right” and that republicans are just a notch lower than Adolph Hitler, that idea probably ingested by faculty courtesy of Senate Majority Whip Durbin, who described American GIs a while back as roughly the equivalent of the dreaded Storm Troopers Hitler sic-ed on the Jews in the 1930s-40s.
Obama declared war on the evil insurance companies in his speech, probably with some justification, but certainly not enough to call for his preference, the complete takeover of the health-care system. Medicare came on line in the 1960s but had been so badly managed by the government by the 1980s that it was turned over to private insurance companies for its administration. One cringes to think about the many bureaucracies introduced in the current bills trying to manage the entire system. The result would be chaos on a scale too scary to even imagine. Fraud, waste, other corruptions would undermine it to death.
The president also declared war on the lawmakers in Washington, accusing them of “gaming” the politics, worrying about positioning themselves for the elections in November instead of doing what he said was RIGHT, apparently figuring his conception of RIGHT as being totally superior to theirs. In this, he was castigating his own party, which barely snuck through health-care legislation last year, the Senate in a frantic exercise on Christmas Eve and the House by an excruciatingly thin majority, which seems now in danger of being diminished further in November. Reason: All the polls indicate: (1) Something like 80% of the citizens are satisfied with their care, though perhaps not its cost, and (2) The whole idea is anathema to the public, which already holds the Congress in such low esteem that it distrusts the legislators to do anything that won’t hurt.
Of all people to point fingers at “spineless” Congressmen, Obama, more than anyone else, should stuff it. He voted “present” at least 129 times as an Illinois legislator instead of taking a stand on issues. He castigated the republicans for not doing anything about health-care for 10 years but didn’t mention the prescription-drug bill for old codgers passed in the republican-controlled Congress and signed into law by George Bush in 2003. Even with the so-called “donut hole,” it has been of great benefit to those needing more medicine as they get older in order to keep it all together.
The Philly speech may represent desperation on Obama’s part. Without question, his minions are arm-twisting to an extent one can only imagine, on the basis of media coverage. The Senate bill was passed by more than just one well-documented case of bribery to Senators to vote the RIGHT way, for instance. The unions got unbelievable and unfair windfalls vis-à-vis the rest of workers, the payoff for their activities in getting Obama elected. The president, at a time when the nation is living on borrowed money, is proposing a package that will bankrupt the country when he should be focusing on getting people back to work. This is disgusting, but it’s the name of the GAME in Washington now. The president referred to the enterprise as SPORT.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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