PrintMarch 2, 2010
Obama's Government without Love
God made it official through Paul, the first century rabbi who dabbled in community organizing, that "love is more important than anything else." The Doobie Brothers (neither rabbis nor community organizers) rephrased it for the modern age: "Without love, where would you be now, without love?"
This question was answered by Barack Obama and Democratic Party leadership as they sat around the Blair House banquet table at the health care summit this past Thursday, determined to push and pull a protesting citizenry into a loveless future.
Welcome to the United States of Obama. Without love, this is where we are now.
Gone is the love of the founders for individuals "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights." It has been replaced by the derision of a political and media elite -- David Brooks of the New York Times proudly calls this the "intellectual class" -- determined to control every part of the lives of those they judge "too dumb" (Time magazine) to be allowed choice.
Forget the God talk and the founder mumbo-jumbo about individual worth, Obama and friends say. We need to take charge of the "dodos." The Communist Chinese have it right, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman writes wistfully, in ruling "from the top down."
Obama and the Democrats must take control of our citizens, the Times urged after the summit, and ignore widespread opposition. Citizens need to know their place, and their place is to do what the intellectual class says.
Arrogance? No, it is just an emerging order of privilege, largely liberal and Democratic, in which elites live by a different set of rules. Case in point: Federal and city tax dollars went to build a New York Times headquarters that had a restrictive lease that the Village Voice described as "'Times' to Commoners: Go Elsewhere." Meanwhile, Congress exempts its own from Obamacare.
And so choice is no longer to be an option in health and medical services. As the Blair House summit showed, Obama and congressional leaders relentlessly continue to push government control over individuals, all the while adding to their personal power and wealth through confiscatory taxes and regulation.
Without love, the average citizen is biodegradable fuel for the lifestyles of the elite and powerful. And it is why an 86-year-old New Jersey senator gets life-saving cancer surgery to be denied under the proposed Obamacare rules for the rest of us. And once Obamacare is established, he would still get the surgery -- while a senior not in Congress will not.
Listen up, people, they say: The senator may be old, but he is one of us. And you -- you're just old, of no "instrumental value," as the president's Ivy League social engineers put it. Don't let the coffin lid hit you on the way out.
No love for the sheep. Our elite shepherds have developed a taste for rack of lamb and use our taxes to buy the mint jelly. The Democratic contribution to the Ritual Decalogue of Judeo-Christian tradition: Thou shalt cook a goat in the mother's milk.
The Obamacare summit showcased rationing for those officially proclaimed less desirable, increased taxes, and vast new federal bureaucracies. Obamacare will create 400,000 new jobs "almost immediately," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi crowed.
And buried in the 2,400 pages a Virginia Republican put on the banquet table are the details: thousands of new clinical and abortion centers staffed by ACORN-like community and union activists hired by Democrat-affiliated groups to stand between patients and doctors. Health care, brought to you by some of the same folks who gave you taxpayer-funded child prostitution.
And so the nine-year-old son of the golfing partner of President Obama is cut while surfing in Hawaii and is immediately rushed to the hospital at taxpayer expense. But in Chicago, low-income children are turned away from the University of Chicago hospitals. They are forced to take public transportation to other hospitals as the result of a scheme by hospital executives to "cherry-pick wealthy patients over poor," as the the American College of Emergency Physicians put it.
The executives behind the scheme to "redirect" the poor and unconnected: Michelle Obama and Obama senior adviser David Axelrod during their pre-White House years. Don't let the emergency room door hit you on the way out.
Love is a great affection and liking displayed in respect for the God-given rights of individuals, said the nation's founders. But without love, the Boston Herald noted, the Blair House was a "summit of arrogance." We love us, not you. Consequently, there is one set of rules for us, another for you.
Without love...Nancy Pelosi takes the hard-earned dollars of citizens and uses the military "as a multi-billion dollar chauffeur- and baby-sitting service." At the same time, she pushes through environmental exemptions for the California wineries owned by her wealthy family and friends while leaving 35,000 farmers and laborers in central California out of work because the federal government has restricted the water for farming at the request of wealthy environmental groups.
There is no love in Washington for ordinary citizens. Barack Obama tells Americans to "prioritize, make tough choices" about what to spend in these hard economic times. Meanwhile, he is the first president to have the taxpayers fund a "steady stream" of celebrity chefs to satisfy the first couple's "well-documented high-end appetites" and serve $100-a-pound gourmet beef at casual dinners and parties.
This is a government that believes it has outgrown the vision of Jefferson and Madison and the other founders of a nation based upon a love of individuals "endowed by their Creator." It is a government of privilege, bolstered by media elites -- on both the right and left -- convinced that the average American is "Too Dumb to Thrive," as the Time headline put it.
The New York Times puts it this way: "Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?" And then its reporter answered, of course -- citizens "are ignorant."
Tea party, anyone?
Stuart H. Schwartz is on the faculty at Liberty University in Virginia.
