WSJ: health care bill coming to House floor on Saturday

Suddenly we learn from the Wall Street Journal that the House has scheduled a one day debate and a vote on the Democrats’ radical, tyrannical, confiscatory, unconstitutional, and insanely unworkable health care bill on Saturday. That’s tomorrow, folks. Actually, today. What the hell is going on? Remember how just three days ago we were told this by Jonathan Karl of ABC News:

Top Dems: Obama Won’t Get Health Care Bill in 2009
Senior Congressional Democrats Now Say Reform Before End of Year is Highly Unlikely

I wondered at the time, who were these senior House Democrats making such an authoritative statement that went flat out against the Speaker’s plans? Was this a way of indirectly sending Pelosi the message that she didn’t have the votes and had to give up? Alternatively, was it a head fake aimed at putting the opposition to sleep? Now it occurs to me that it was a fake aimed, not at the GOP, but at the Speaker, to get her to pull back the bill, and the fake failed.

All this is guessing in the darkness. But it shows how the news stories that are published, and that we rely on, report, and discuss, are often simply untrue. Or, rather, they are complicatedly untrue, consisting, not of facts, but of “leaked” coded messages being sent by political insiders to each other, using the news media as their secret courier service, and using apparently legitimate news stories as the code in which the real messages are written, while we suckers out here in the public are foolish enough to believe that the coded insiders’ messages have anything to do with what they purport to be about.

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Charles T. writes:

I talked with an aide from my Congressional Reps office about an hour ago. I asked her what time the vote would be today. She stated they did not really know what time it would occur. Interesting. A vote today, but not a scheduled time for it.

Larry G. writes:

It reminds me of the days when people would try to divine changes in China’s internal policies by noting changes in the way Chairman Mao parted his hair. The problem really is the Democratic “true believers” who seem immune to reason and reject any criticism. Look at Barney Frank. He should be in jail. Look at that Congressman who says Republicans want you to die quickly. He’s either evil or insane. Look at Pelosi herself. Arrogant to the point of being demonic. A bunch of Captain Ahabs they are. They are determined to impose a command economy on the U.S., with them in command. That’s beyond socialism. It’s fascism.

But this is not what the vast majority of the people want, if only they knew what was in the bill. (They make them so large to hide provisions the people would never support.) I reject the position that if this passes it can never be repealed. This is not like Social Security or Medicare that people in some measure welcomed. This is unpopular, and there is no reason it should be seen as a new, untouchable, sacred cow the minute it’s passed. The Republican proposals are vastly superior, simpler, and would be welcomed by the majority of people, I believe.

In any event, if we can rid ourselves of this Democratic majority and Il Duce by 2012, a conservative administration will have to start making major cuts in entitlements, and this newest one is the most likely to go first. We simply don’t have the money. We’re broke. We’ve become a debtor nation. Are we going to start paying China by granting them oil drilling rights off our coasts or ceding them parts of Alaska? We have been living beyond our means as a matter of government policy for decades, and changing that will be painful but necessary if we are to survive as a country.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 07, 2009 01:22 AM | Send