Bill Whittle on politics

A great rant/essay from Bill Whittle -- this was written after the passing of Obamacare; almost a month old but timeless and worth remembering come Novembers 2010 and 2012:

FREE WILL AND DESTINY
And so now we have it.

I thought I might need to try my small part to cheer people up and calm them down, but for once I have underestimated the American people. People, by and large, seem not only calm but absolutely determined. Everywhere I have looked this morning the reaction seems to be more or less the same: a nation of steely-eyed missile men. These Marxist bastards have no idea what is coming for them. No idea.

Laugh while you can, Monkey Boys.

What passed last night is a long way from the single-payer, socialist dream its supporters secretly � and not so secretly � really want. As a matter of fact, it�s hard to imagine a bill more perfectly constructed to tee off everyone: Conservatives hate it for it�s regulation, cost and explosive growth of government; liberals hate it because it forces people (so far, so good!) to buy premiums form the hated private insurance companies. (What the�!)

So, in terms of limiting the practical and immediate damage, holding it here � just holding it � is important and essential. Barack Obama, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have an IQ of 130 � that would be combined between the three of them and you can get to 150 if you throw in Biden � and so they actually believe that a few months from now, they will be able to add single-payer to this goat rodeo, this bloodbath, this circus of incompetence conducted by this museum-grade confederacy of dunces. It got them a bill that requires people to pay for private insurance � which I am, of course, utterly opposed to on every level � but that is way short of single payer and we MUST hold the line here and not an inch further until reinforcements arrive in January. And they will. In numbers that will astonish and amaze the most optimistic among us.

We need to understand the great lesson we have learned about these people in this debate. Barack Obama is, to the liberal cause, a politician that comes not once in a decade, or once in a generation, or even once per century. Barack Obama is, to them, a once in history opportunity for progressives to control this country, and they will fall on a forest of swords to achieve those ends because this is the best chance they have ever had or ever will have to permanently shackle the people to the state. They know that this Health Care fiasco will cost them the House and now perhaps the Senate in November, but that new Congress will not seat until January and in the ten months between now and then they will, I predict, start an orgy of legislation that will make this Health Care circus look like a tea party.

But it seems to me that they have spent every dime of political capital in the bank and have done nothing less than awoken from its long and deep slumbers the American Giant, who in attempting to sit upright discovers the Lilliputian threads that have been staked into the ground with finishing nails and who looks around, blinking and disoriented, fatter and softer and much, much poorer than he was when he last opened his eyes back in 1941, but possessed now as then with a terrible anger and capable still of mighty exertions.

So, to the short term: everybody knows that Reid and Pelosi and The Lightworker himself, obviously, are all hoping to use this bill as the foot in the door for the stuff they really want: a single-payer National Health System, or at least the �public option,� which is simply single-payer on the installment plan. We can�t let them get that. Going forward, we can�t let them get single-payer, or cap and trade, or amnesty, or any of it.

We can learn some lessons here. We have to. One lesson is message discipline. What is message discipline? I�ll give you an example:

What�s in a Big Mac? Two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun! That�s what�s in a Big Mac. We have got to understand that saying NO! to this socialism is admirable and essential, but that from now on there has to be a counter-narrative to what these Marxists are selling, because like it or not the human brain is wired for stories � that�s how we learn (and why the real fight is not for Washington but rather Hollywood � but that�s a story for another time.)

If we want to win on health care, or any other issue, we need to have an answer to what they are selling and that answer needs to be as simple and comprehensive as the Big Mac slogan.

Our position on health care? Two tax incentives, health accounts, crossing state lines, tort reform, competition on an auto insurance bun. And if we don�t learn how to do this we will lose.

A final thought on this darkish day: much is said about the �inevitability� of these kinds of legislation, that once enacted they are impossible to repeal or roll back.

This kind of thinking is self-fulfilling defeatism and has to stop. ANY law enacted can be repealed. We repealed a constitutional amendment, for God�s sake. From now on we must change our message from one of limiting government growth and spending and regulation to one of reducing it.

It is true that no nation has in the past ever recovered from the cycle of entitlement, moral decay and aristocratic rot that we find ourselves in. But it is also true that no nation � not one in history � was established precisely in opposition to these cancers. It is also true that never before have common people � otherwise known as the Host Organism � had the means to speak directly to one another, as we are here. It is true that if there is to be an historical exemption to the Cycle of Civilization it is only here that it will occur, and it is also true that the concepts of Free Will and Destiny are antithetical to one another. One of them is true and the other is not. It is my belief that you can chose to abandon Free Will and chose to believe in destiny and historical inevitability, or you can take the risk to believe instead that there is a new world populated by optimists and dreamers, but dreamers with rifles as well as quills and parchment� People who have never surrendered and for whom the very idea of defeat and despair is anathema.

That�s a choice I make every day. What we see before us is the result of lost elections and redemption will come from winning elections. Mark these words, my friends: We are going to whip these Marxists out of their little commie boots!

What he said. The 160+ comments are a great read as well. Here is one that caught my eye:

I would like to see the lid ripped off the Gramscian stealth march through the institutions that has been going on since 1972. It has in effect established a state religion with which children are brainwashed from pre-K through post-graduate work. The founders may not have known the word �ideology,� but I am confident that they would see the connection at once.

A good mix of ideologies -- Red Pill and Blue Pill. Curious to see the level of articulation of the one and the poo-flinging of the other...