Obama's Weak Case for More Bureaucracy
by JBEZL
Jul. 23, 2009 10:24

David Freddoso writes today in the Washington Examiner about President Obama's oversimplification of the problems with health care in America as well as the solutions.

Here is a well-meaning government official who so fails to grasp the problem in health care that he can present such absurd oversimplifications and suggest that this sort of thing is the real problem -- doctors simply lack the common sense to make obvious medical decisions. President Obama wants us to solve this problem by putting himself and other government officials in charge of rescuing medicine from the medical profession. If medical doctors with a decade of schooling cannot distinguish between good cures and ineffective ones that must be discontinued, then by gosh, we're lucky that the good folks from the government can.

[...]

The one thing President Obama did not do last night was address directly any of the concerns that Americans have about his pending reform proposals. With this sort of rhetorical detachment from reality, it is not surprising that public support for his vision of health care reform is gradually eroding.

Maybe it's just a genetic deficiency I have for being uncool, but I've never been even the least bit seduced by Obama's various siren songs -- his idealism for the sake of idealism, his subtext that if we only wish it, it will come to pass.

In that sense, I understand his meteoric rise. It's a great irony that Obama's popularity seems to float on the same myopic disregard for reality that the "alternative" and "progressive" movements in America openly abhor.

Those progressive and alternative movements holler, "Who thought we could plunder the earth for decades and get away with it? Who thought we could embrace ever richer and more refined foods without paying the price of a public health crisis? Who thought we could impose our will across the globe without the world eventually turning against us?"

"Naive, short-sighted, stimulation-hungry, indelicate, simplistic America," comes the answer.

And who thinks the answers to all of America's problems will be swept away by government bureaucracies built one on top of another? Who thinks punishing the rich will elevate the poor? Who thinks inefficiency is a key ingredient for the country's energy supply? Who laps up feelgood nonsense that virtually worships myopia, such as, "If you are hungry, you're not that interested in freedom of the press"? It's the same gyrating throng of groupies who are enabling the leftist Barack Obama to crowd surf across the once fruited plain.

Edited Jul. 23, 2009 11:12