One of those eternal - and transparently one-sided - controversies regarding "death panels" has begun yet another victory tour of the internet, this time on the word of an ostensibly degreed neurosurgeon who claims Obama and his minions are about to extinguish anyone over 70 with a brain bleed. Yipee. He calls this in to a noted right wing talk show hack who concludes Sarah Palin was right, and the rest is...history? I wish these people paid any heed to it, actually.
A lot of this is like overhearing chatter in a high school bathroom, the frantic gossipers always there instead of in class where that boring, fact-based education and dialogue might dispell what are otherwise fun rumors for the clique to circulate in the hopes they will ostracize the bad people and preserve their cozy, if hallucinated, advantage. American politics are bipolar in that regard: there are the politicans and callow pundits who go about their business projecting images on the one side, and the spooked peasants who dutifully distribute the pablum as if playing fantasy baseball in the hopes that one of their picks will be worth something one day.
I mean, I'm no Obama fan and if this were true, I'd say let's hit the streets - not because of him, but to get change like we did in the sixties and seventies, by pressing the will of the people. But we "hippies" are exactly the ones these people despise, oddly enough, because we fought for equality and cultural, political and environental change. The proud and always offended instead like to posture as folk deeply concerned about our safety and rights, while calculatedly raising the spector of commnism and Hitler by way of rallying support for their inventions that say more about their sorry and narrow existences than any public threat. After all, sensationalism is all the willfully uninformed and lazy need to cry that the sky is falling to enliven things.
Yet in the last 40 years where were they when all the unnecessary surgeries were done on women, or profits were made neutering and infecting Black men and women? Unless I missed it, these self-proclaimed patriots, screaming about communism or the Final Solution, were notably mum. Even today: while insurers disallow procedures, deny options through the auspices of a private company, which conforms to the bargain-basement generalizations these phonies cling to, like, "death panel" - we hear nothing from them. And espeically surgeons, I might add, at least until the easy target government might get involved. The plain fact is that those death panels already exist today, and people are dying. Where's the love and outrage, neurosurgeon?
If he and his confederates care to actually do research to cite parallels to Hitler, of course, he would learn the name our extra legal shadow government, "Homeland Security," coined by the last administration, was actually copied from a department instituted in Germany in 1933 after the Vice Chancellor conspired to invent a "terrorist" incident to bring those "others" into line. That department, which was the reason for the ruse and trumped up charges of conspiracy, then became the famous Storm Troopers in the military takeover during the Weimar Republic toward effecting that Final Solution. To ensure success, Hitler - as America has now done - had to stencil people with identification to better restrict movement, declare war on immigrants, remove Habeas Corpus, privacy, and the right to vote (which of course the surgeon is also untroubled by since the people most affected aren't in his social circle).
So it appears we have some more immediate problems to be solved first if we want to act rationally in preserving our freedoms. Along with health care, Americans should actually search and find out the facts, and if Obama is the Evil Genius these frantic numbskulls pretend, then let's hit the streets. But all for one and one for all this time, not limited to the usual beneficiaries of selective political brinksmanship who would like you to think they have been disenfranchised like the rest of us, and open the door for the wolves who lie in wait.