The House or the Cancer?

Your Winnebago or your life?

In today's National Review column by Jonah Goldberg, Tyranny of the Typical, he covers a recent Wolf Blitzer/Ron Paul face-off during a Republican debate.

Goldberg makes his point by recalling Murray Rothbard's Fable of the Shoes (Libertarian Manifesto, Chapter 10) as he introduces his defense of Ron Paul's answer to the pathetic question: what should happen if a man refuses to get health insurance and then has a medical crisis.  Paul's answer needs no defense, at least it is a perfectly fine answer for anybody who has seen the world beyond the classroom or playground:

“We’ve given up on this whole concept that we might take care of ourselves and assume responsibility for ourselves,” he observed. “Our neighbors, our friends, our churches would do it.”

 I find myself surprised that the long running, frequently posed, false dichotomy has not been tossed out against Doctor Paul in the wake of the debate:  Someone lost their house because they had to pay for their own healthcare!  Perhaps that nonsense is still going on at Slate, The New Republic, and other bastions of socialism thinly hidden behind their latest Progressive banner?  At any rate, that was the topic I wanted to cover here and I shall hijack this debate question for my own sinister ends.

So, there was this old woman who lived in a house and she got cancer.  She had several well-to-do children and grandchildren and they did not know what to do.  The old woman had some insurance, but the did not have the foresight to purchase insurance with an infinite benefit, but her house was worth a fortune. So, the grandma was faced with a dilemma: sell the house to pay medical bills, or die and leave the house free and clear to her well-to-do relatives.

Of course, if the government were not ruled by 'Corporate Nazis' she would have universal healthcare and be cured.  That is why we need Hillary/Gore/Kerry/Obama Care, or those fascist Republicans will kill her!

I made up the version above, so the details are different, but the story is the same from one year to another.  My favorite version was from candidate Al Gore about one Winifred Skinner, who was reduced to collecting aluminum cans to pay for her prescription medications.  The truth was, her son has always offered to pay for anything she needed and she had other sources of income.  To make it look even worse, and I am surprised that Karl Rove was not given credit for the Winnebago portion of the story.  This 'poor' woman, who could not make ends meet, drove from Iowa to Boston for the event in a Winnebago.  Turns out, the vehicle and gas were furnished by the Gore campaign.

Now, to what sort of Leftist, Socialist mind is this a sympathetic character at all?  Only the loftiest of limousine liberals could possibly believe that adding a comfy recreational vehicle to this story makes it a bigger tearjerker!

So, imagine the woman really had a Winnebago.  What is more important, the drugs or the vehicle?  Yes, that is a serious question.  I have known people in my almost half-a-century on this earth who really would rather spend the last of their wealth on comfort over care that may prolong their lives for a few more years.  These are known as practical people.

The practical folk do not rely on others when they can do for themselves, well frequently anyway.  There is a range, I am sure, where they may grudgingly ask a friend or relative for assistance.  They are the opposite of the socialist, who will demand from all of society that they are provided for with the lifestyle of their choosing.  Many a college professor and politician come to mind.

The real question is: What is more important, your health or your stuff?  The socialists turn it into a punchline from a Jack Benny routine.

So, in the mind of the urban and suburban Leftoid, it is perfectly fine for the McMansion to remain the property of the ailing grandmother whilst the rest of us pay for her hospital visits and drugs so that a new generation can have an inheritance, at a value below the "rich kid" death tax rate, of course.

So, how did America survive before the government rushed in to save us from certain death and poverty?  Scroll back up and read Ron Paul's quoted answer.

So you think gays in the military is new?

Ernst Julius Röhm and the Hitler gang did it long before Clinton and Obama.

A couple of notes here.  The article has a good timeline on when the events pertaining to the SA, the Brown Shirts, who were a mostly homosexual paramilitary organization.  Think of them as Hitler's Leather Men, armed to the teeth with a passion for cracking skulls.

The article falls short in falling for the utter nonsense that Hitler was not a Leftist.  He joined the National Socialists when he was supposed to be infiltrating them because he liked what they had to say, agreed with destroying capitalism and expanding social handouts.  He did get support from large corporations, the corporations that wanted to continue their existence and had little problem sucking up to the new sheriff in town.

Additionally, Hitler used groups cast to the fringe for his advantage before throwing them under the bus.  The same as Obama did his own grandmother.  Some historians wish to hold the party line that the homosexual makeup of the SA is some modern Right wing fantasy, even though Ernst Röhm was openly gay and that is well documented.  Röhm was arrested in bed, with his younger male lover, by Hitler and executed ten days later.  At the time, Röhm was one of the only people who could challenge Hitler for leadership of the National Socialist German Worker's Party and that was certainly not coincidental to his execution.

Wikipedia is not evidence, but . . .

I never much looked into the FDR concentration camps for Italians and Germans during WWII.  Most everybody knows of the FDR concentration camps for Japanese Americans and I have heard a lot of justification for it from different sides.  Well, more like different flavors of Leftists.  I suppose that the support was the usual boilerplate on their favorite National Socialist in the USA.  Anyway, the links above have some numbers to go with them, use it as you will.

In her well researched and documented book It Happened In Italy, Elizabeth Bettina documents how Jews were treated in Italy during the days of Il Duce.  Contrary to some accounts, she has documentation of concentration camps being set up well before the 1943 German invasion of Italy.  However, the personal accounts of the survivors are quite a bit sunnier than those of the Japanese who were rounded up by FDR and heavenly when contrasted against any concentration camp survivor under Hitler.

These differences are the basis for a section in Would You Like Borders With That Socialism? that compares the various National Socialist regimes that were at war with each other from the onset of the Spanish Civil War through the Cold War. A comparison between National Socialism and International Socialism is in the works for another section, but honestly, there is so little difference that it is hard to write very much on that.

New YouTube Playlist

Just arranged a new YouTube playlist for Would You Like Borders With That Socialism?

As of this writing, it is a set of six Jonah Goldberg video, speaking of his great book Liberal Fascism, plus a great BBC video of Useful Idiots.

Adding a few more books to the left margin.  All are must reads.  More to come.

Final Cover

Finally, I found PhotoScape, the program I used to make my other covers before my hard drive crash.  Still had to do some reconstruction, but this is the final cover for Would You Like Borders With That Socialism?

Working Cover

This is the cover I am working on right now.  Sadly, I am not a whiz at Inkscape and I cannot remember what the heck freeware I was using for the Suki series covers.  For some reason, black borders around text does not translate from .svg format to anything else.  Online converters try valiantly, but fail against the mighty .svg file format.

Would You Like Borders With That Socialism? Progress and Background

I think that I have most of this book in my head now.  The only hurdle is writing it down in a manner that others can follow, or at least stand to read.  The experience is a little strange, because I used to write papers, studies and long reports when I made my living as a defense analyst.  However, those writings were not for that broad of an audience.  There was always someone around to proof read too, and I am doing this solo.  My other books are fiction, set in the future, which is easier and harder than doing this.  It is easier because, in fiction, I invent the world that the characters populate.  Fiction is harder because In have to remember what I made up throughout a series.  I have no problem with consistency in non-fiction, but Socialists and Leftists have none of these problems, because they do not let that pesky consistency bother them.

Actually, the vetting of anything I touched in defense was reviewed, proof read, shot at, blown up, rewritten, and required approval of so many other analysts that it was nearly impossible for it to escape into the wild as bad work.

I am still reading Jonah Goldberg's book, Liberal Fascism.  I cannot stress enough what a must read book this is for any Libertarian, libertarian, conservative or Conservative.  Small confession here, when I began this writing project I sought out a copy of Liberal Fascism only as a reference source for my new book.  There was one, and only one, copy at Barnes & Noble and my only intention was to find a few important references that Jonah mentioned when he was speaking to the Heritage Foundation.  Being generous here, I will estimate that it took all of ten minutes for me to decide this paperback needed to be on my bookshelf.  It has been my constant companion, second only to my fiancee, for the past week.  See my YouTube channel under Favorites for video of Jonah Goldberg speaking before Heritage and at the Rio Grande Foundation.

One "problem" with this project is, like many other things, I thought of or observed many things that others have written about already.  Liberal Fascism covers more of things I thought of, within the scope of modern political divisions and their roots, than any other book I have found.

If that were all there were to it, I could just pass around writers and essays that match what I like and believe, help others to see the fallacy of Socialism, and be done with it.  Well, there is something else that I hope to bring to the table.  I see other connections that others seem to miss, or at least they do not connect them together.  Sticking with Liberal Fascism, Jonah writes at length about the Leftist/Socialist connection to Moscow.  There is a lot more to that than most political writers seem to acknowledge.

For this post, I leave you with yet another misuse of Fascist/Nazi combined with disinformation all rolled into one.  A video clip I shot 10 OCT 2010 that includes a Lyndon LaRouche supporter 30 seconds into the video.  If you do not know, the Lyndon LaRouche camp are the Democrats who show up at rallies with photoshopped posters of Obama wearing a Hitler mustache.  I allowed the LaRouche supporter to give his spiel about what they stand for.  Basically, they are for everything the Nazis were for, minus the genocide, but they paint Obama as Hitler.  I think the better image for Obama would be a black shirt with that cute little Il Duce cap and fasces.