There are times when you read something in the ostensibly serious media so pugnaciously stupid that you are compelled to Google the author, if only to find out what rock he crawled out from under. This is one of those times, Blake Fleetwood – a former reporter for the New York Times, apparently - is the author, and, as so many times in the past, it is the Huffington Post that does not disappoint:
In classic “Wag The Dog” scenario there is a neat little war brewing between American and Russian proxies, and real Russian troops, in the Caucacus (sic) Mountains on the Russian border.
It couldn’t come at a better time for the Republicans.
McCain gets to act and talk tough against the Russians, while Obama is on vacation in Hawaii, issuing “can’t we all get along statements.”
It perfectly augments Republican campaign points: Obama is not ready. He is not tough, experienced enough to deal with a dangerous world.
I’ll give you a moment to catch your breath from the probably contagious, wheezing idiocy of that implication – that Georgia went to war with Russia to help John McCain win the US presidency – before asking you to consider what inspires such an absurdly navel-gazing world view. Let us lay aside for the moment the inference that a move from tyrannical corruption to democracy openness makes for an American “proxy” – we should be so lucky to be thus associated – but in Blake Fleetwood’s world it is apparently far better that the croppies should continue to lie down.
No, what really underlies this worldview is the desire to wave fairy dust over the darkness of the world, to wish it away, avert our eyes from the world abroad while retaining a prim sense of personal moral rectitude. Then those nasty Republicans with their stupid foreign policy credibility wouldn’t be able to deceive people at from voting in their own economic self-interest.
Then, at last, we could have national health care!
Ahhh … national health care. It’s worked soo well in Britain and in Canada. It results eventually in responsible adults succumbing to payment of the national tax on them to pay for the lotos-eaters who pervade the country to have free health care, and then proceeding to buy private health care for themselves and their families so that they can get effective treatment for family health emergencies [the heart attack here, the stroke there]. This is called a “two-tier” health system, and I see it rushing down the road toward us if Mr. O wins the White House.
Not a pretty picture, is it?
Marianne
ah, there goes another one of those Russian Bassoons….
{cf: return of history #21 below for ref…)
How do people this stunningly stupid even remember to inhale and exhale on a consistent basis?
Maybe this is where he got the idea:
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YWEzOTc2YjQ5Y2EwMzA4MTRiZjFmYzI5ZjA0ZDJiNWU=
You got it all wrong, here let me explain *puts on his stark raving mad cap*:
Russia = Oil = Republicans = McCain. See, Russia Big Oil wants one of their paid lapdogs in charge, so they got Russia start the war.
This post brought to you by: Whee, sugar and caffeine all day.
I thought it was a joke at first, but the commenters were all gung ho on the wag the dog deal, so that clinched it.
No clue, these people…
Of course. Why not. It (his column) sounds perfectly plausible to me. It was probably arranged during GW’s last visit to Europe.
GOOD GRIEF…How incredibly stupid. Fleetwood must have laid awake at night trying to come up with that one.
President Bush is due to speak at 5:15 p.m. ET today on the conflict-according to Passport Blog.
So apparently the Georgians felt that getting McCain in office was sooo important that they’re willing to risk the Russian Army taking over their whole country? After they’ve fought like hell to get out and stay out of Russia?
Wow…what thought drives someone to think that?
Un-freakin’-believable.
Come on Cap’n, Don’t tell me you are surprised. Just more of the same from Huff Po.
Blake Fleetwood sounds like an unlikely unbelievable pseudonym. I mean, really.
Inspires me, though. I may just start posing as Hyman Goldberg, or Padraig O’Malley, or something.
My, oh my:
Praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition. For a while I thought Lex had a small stroke that obliterated his bilious view of government involvement in medical care, except of course that rendered to service men and their families. But no, it was dormant, only to be re-awakened, to its full fury, by a bit of nonsense in the Huffington Post.
To those of curious mind, the issue is what exactly caused this strange linkage of Georgia, Russia, war, with Health Care in the US. My own suspicion is that it relates to the Feds recent gross intrusion into the magic of the Health Care marketplace. Certainly coordinated FBI and locale police raids can be looked upon as a “foreign incursion” into the free market system.
On the other hand, it is well known that in the stockades of the Center Right (where personal moral rectitude reigns) data is never allowed to clash with ideology. The fact that physicians prefer a single payer system, or that our health care system may not be all that it is cracked up to be, must be counteracted. What better approach than linking National Health Care with those dastardly Russians?
Yet, despite all my laments there is a faint rainbow in the horizon. To counteract the indisputable fact that medications in the US cost twice as much as in Canada, McCain’s stay the course Health Care proposal has one modest deviation. We will be allowed to buy our medications from over seas sources. Brilliant!!! The free market system is preserved and the function of that pinko government agency, the FDA is subverted, all for the minor cost of shipping our pharmacy jobs overseas!
As for great unwashed who have inadequate health insurance, why there is always Hospital Emergency Rooms, where they will have to compete with the local rent a bum outfits.
Oh, it’s not just that I enjoy baiting you out of your silence, OP. But nationalized health care is the Final Frontier, the last extension of the busy do-gooder, nanny-state into the private lives of the citizenry. Everything else – wealth redistribution, soaking “the rich”, speech codes, identity politics balkanization and concomitant grievance mongering, the elimination of risk/reward calculus, mandatory equality not merely of opportunity but also of outcome, obligatory abortion celebrations – all of that is different only in degree for your true statist visionary. Government health care – that’s the ticket to Utopia!
Never to fret: We’ll work our way into total dependency upon the federal bureaucracy in time.
Even here, in sunny southern California, in my own neighborhood of two-income parents living in $800,000 houses underwritten with adjustable rate mortgages, paying 35% of their wages to the federal, another 9.4% to the state and an as yet-to-be-determined sum in oppressive real estate taxes to a bankrupt city government sport Obama! bumper stickers on their leased Mercedes SUVs.
Because they can’t make ends meet, and they’re sure he’ll make it better. Probably through health care.
Of course OP has to snark at the seeming hypocrisy of service members utilizing government provided health care. But is it hypocritical at all? No, it was a contractual obligation freely entered into by both the government and the servicemember. Indeed, few things are more indicative of the marketplace than the honoring of contracts.
That is a horse of an entirely different color than forcing the entire population to join a system of healthcare where they did not choose to do so.