Mountain Views News          Saturday, July 31, 2010

8

OPINION

 Mountain Views News Saturday, July 31, 2010 

STUART TOLCHIN ..........On LIFE

HAIL Hamilton

My Turn

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10 Most Outrageous 
Quotes About Health 
Care Reform

So What Can I Tell You?

 A couple of 
weeks ago my wife 
and I took a trip 
to San Francisco 
and found 
ourselves taking 
bus rides. Riding 
a bus is something 
I rarely do in Los 
Angeles and being on the bus was 
quite an experience. At Los Angeles 
concerts and at sporting events we 
may actually sit right next to other 
people, but at those events we are all 
busy being entertained by something 
else. On long and crowded bus rides 
there’s nothing much else to do except 
to look at one another.

 All at once I noticed my wife 
staring at someone. She was eerily 
fascinated by some kid; a skinny 
fourteen or fifteen year old boy sitting 
next to his friends on the bus. “It’s 
you”, she said. Well, what do you 
know; he did look an awful lot like 
pictures of me taken when I was that 
age. To me the resemblance didn’t 
seem overwhelming. This kid seemed 
confident, happily riding around the 
City with his friends. At that age I 
never felt confident about anything—
at least not on the inside. Who knows 
what I looked like from the outside? 
My wife said, “Pretend that’s the 
young you. What can you tell him? 
What advice do you have to give?”

 In a couple of minutes the kid got off 
the bus but I’ve been thinking about 
my wife’s question ever since. What 
lessons have I learned that might be of 
help to anyone else or even to myself? 
Okay, the very first thing is that the 
unthinkable, the impossible happens 
all the time. Even though I feel like, 
day after day I have consistently 
remained the same person inside, I 
now look in the mirror and there’s this 
strange old guy looking at me. Who 
the hell is he? Well, kid, it happens to 
all of us. Whoever we think we are, it 
keeps changing. In fact, at any given 
moment, the person that we think we 
are looks very different depending on 
who’s doing the looking. This outside 
appearance is kind of irrelevant 
anyway. What feels most real is the 
experience we have inside. But guess 
what? Even this isn’t real.

 What I mean is that most of the 
time there is this voice inside of us 
telling us what we think and what we 
feel. Unfortunately and surprisingly, 
this voice has little to do with who we 
actually are and what we actually do. 
The voice can say that it is important 
that I follow a diet or regularly exercise 
or get up at a certain hour or go visit 
my mother or even slow down my 
golfswing. All within my control and 
all regularly ignored. Someone, or 
something else, is calling the shots. As 
far as I can tell the only way to learn 
what I want is by watching what I do. 
It would be nice to know what I was 
going to do before I did it, but life just 
doesn’t work that way.

 I saw a TV program this week that 
said that the ancient Greeks went to 
the oracle at Delphi to obtain wisdom. 
In answer to the question as to what 
is the most important thing in life, 
the oracle responded, “Know thyself”. 
Wonderful, what does that mean? I 
really don’t know but, nevertheless, 
that’s my advice to the kid. Observe 
yourself, learn about you. Really, you 
(me or whoever it is that I’m talking 
about) are an incredibly interesting 
entity. You contain the whole 
universe. You know those people 
whose opinions are so important when 
you’re young? Those people’s opinions 
are inside you. You know those values 
that seem so overly important right 
now? Pretty soon the importance 
of those values will change and you 
probably will not even notice it; but 
if you watch closely you will see the 
difference in your actions. Notice how 
your feelings change about everything 
when you’ve had a good night’s rest or 
have had less coffee.

 As far as I can tell the hardest thing 
to do is to maintain an accurate sense 
of what are real needs as opposed 
to unnecessary and passing desires. 
Desires are these weird things that 
are often important to that annoying 
inner voice. Desires sneak into us 
from the outside. They distract us 
from fulfilling our own real needs. 
Imagine the serpent tempting Eve to 
bite the apple. She probably wasn’t 
even hungry. Our consumer culture 
confronts us with thousands of 
unnecessary and harmful temptations 
every day. We are told we are not 
good enough the way we are. We must 
purchase something else or smell 
better or look forever young. It ain’t 
so! We do have needs, but these needs 
can’t be satisfied by owning something 
or fooling somebody. The whole 
society is trying to mislead us and it’s 
a real battle to not be mislead.

 Okay, that’s my message to the kid 
and to you and to me. Just keep it in 
mind. 

 Now that 
health care 
reform has 
passed (even the watered down version), 
I thought it might be instructive to 
review some of the more outlandish and 
moronic statements made in the last year 
by its opponents. The following seems to 
be the consensus on the net. The quotes 
speak for themselves. 

 1. “The America I know and love is 
not one in which my parents or my 
baby with Down Syndrome will have to 
stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ 
so his bureaucrats can decide, based on 
a subjective judgment of their ‘level of 
productivity in society,’ whether they 
are worthy of health care. Such a system 
is downright evil.” —Sarah Palin, in 
a message posted on Facebook about 
Obama’s health care reform plan, Aug. 7, 
2009. 

 2. “To our seniors, I have a message 
for you: you’re going to die sooner.” –
Sen. Tom Coburn (R- Okla.), on what 
will happen if health care reform passes, 
Dec. 1, 2009

 3. “If ObamaCare passes, that free 
insurance card that’s in people’s pockets 
is gonna be as worthless as a Confederate 
dollar after the war between the states — 
the Great War of Yankee Aggression.” 
–Rep. Paul Broun (R- Ga.), March 18, 
2010.

 4. “They intend to vote on the Sabbath, 
during Lent, to take away the liberty that 
we have right from God. This is an affront 
to God.” –Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), 
interview with Glenn Beck, March 18, 
2010

 5. “Don’t get sick, and if you do get 
sick, die quickly.” Rep. Alan Grayson 
(D-Fla.), summing up the Republican 
health care plan

 6. “Obama’s got a health care logo 
that’s right out of Adolf Hitler’s playbook 
… Adolf Hitler, like Barack Obama, also 
ruled by dictate.” —Rush Limbaugh, 
Aug. 6, 2009

 7. “You have three people in the White 
House that are in love with eugenics or 
whatever it is you would call it today. 
… Please dear God, read history. Please 
dear God read the truth of what these 
people have said in their own words, and 
ask yourself this one question: Do you 
trust these people enough to give them 
control over who lives and who dies? 
Because that’s what health care is when 
you have no other choice but to go to the 
state.” —Glenn Beck, comparing health 
care reform to Nazi eugenics, Aug. 6, 
2009

 8. “We should not have a government 
program that determines if you’re going 
to pull the plug on grandma.” —Sen. 
Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Aug. 12, 2009 

 9. “That’s why people need to continue 
to go to the town halls, continue to melt 
the phone lines of their liberal members 
of Congress, and let them know, under 
no certain circumstances will I give 
the government control over my body 
and my health care decisions.” —Rep. 
Michele Bachmann (R-MN), a pro-lifer 
who completely missed the irony of 
using the same slogan as the pro-choice 
movement 

 10. “Exercise freaks ... are the ones 
putting stress on the health care system.” 
—Rush Limbaugh, June 12, 2009

 For me, this bill is a good start. But 
there is still much to be done to achieve 
true Universal Care. For the President to 
get this far is historic. Yet we still have a 
way to go. 

My hope is sanity will eventually win out 
and all Americans will have access to the 
inexpensive universal state-of-the-art 
medical care they deserve.

 I wonder what the liberal progressive 
former senator, vice president, and 
presidential candidate from Minnesota, 
Hubert Humphrey, would have said 
about health care reform were he still 
alive? I remember what he did say at 
the dedication of headquarters of the 
Department of Health and Human 
Services in his honor: 

 “…the moral test of government is how 
that government treats those who are in 
the dawn of life, the children; those who 
are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and 
those who are in the shadows of life—the 
sick, the needy, and the handicapped.”

 Last Speech of Hubert H. Humphrey, 

November 1, 1977, Washington, D.C.

 Whatever happened to the kinder, 
gentler, compassionate country that used 
to be America?

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Left Turn/Right Turn

GREG Welborn

Callous Disregard For 

Individual Life

HOWARD Hays 

As I See It

 
A column in last 
week’s MVN went to the 
heart of the matter in the 
story of Shirley Sherrod, 
State Director, USDA 
Rural Development, who 
resigned after the release 
of hacked-up excerpts of her address at an 
NAACP banquet which attempted to depict 
Sherrod (or at least her audience) as “racist”.

   I’m not referring to Greg’s column - wherein 
he explains that in a country boasting a black 
president, Oprah and Clarence Thomas, 
the racism to be concerned with is directed 
towards us white folk.   Greg notes there 
hasn’t been any “substantive evidence” of 
racism in the Tea Party - so never mind those 
depictions of President Obama as a monkey 
or bone-through-nose witch-doctor, or that 
blog posting by Tea Party Express spokesman 
Mark Williams of an imaginary letter to 
Abraham Lincoln from the NAACP: “We 
Coloreds have taken a vote and decided that 
we don’t cotton to that whole emancipation 
thing.”   

   As for Sherrod herself, she made clear 
in her NAACP address and subsequent 
interviews that it’s not a matter of race, but of 
economic empowerment.   When the subject 
arose of a meeting with President Obama, 
she suggested it would do him good to visit 
where she comes from, as the perspective of 
a mixed-race kid raised in Hawaii might be 
different from that of a rural black family 
from Baker County, Georgia.

   In her address to the NAACP last March, 
Sherrod spoke of growing up with four sisters 
and a father who wanted nothing more than 
to have a son.   When she was 17 they learned 
he was to get his wish - and he painted a room 
blue in anticipation.

   She told how her father was murdered 
two months before her brother was born, and 
how, despite three witnesses to the crime, 
the grand jury refused to indict.   She told of 
black men “periodically” murdered in Baker 
County, while “in every case, the white men 
who murdered them were never punished.” 
  
She mentioned this was the 45th anniversary 
of her father’s funeral.

   She told how a Baker County sheriff at the 
time was party to a significant Supreme Court 
ruling twenty years prior.   He’d participated 
in the lynching of a Sherrod relative and 
was convicted by a federal jury of having 
deprived the victim of his civil rights.   The 
conviction was overturned by the Supreme 
Court because of failure in “proving intent”; it 
had not been shown the sheriff was intending 
to deprive civil rights at the time he was 
committing murder.   (Sherrod didn’t mention 
that, after having been savagely beaten, the 
victim was tied to the back of the sheriff’s car 
and dragged through the courthouse square.)

   She told how shortly after her brother was 
born, a group of white guys burned a cross on 
their front lawn.   Her sister called to summon 
neighbors, who came and surrounded the 
cross-burners.   Her mother emerged on the 
porch with a gun and, although some of 
the neighbors wanted to take further action 
themselves, told the intruders to leave - and to 
remember she knew who they were.   She told 
how eleven years later her mother became the 
first black elected official in Baker County and 
who, 34 years later, still served on the school 
board.

   She told how throughout her life she’d 
determined to move up north, attend a 
northern college and marry a northern guy 
so she’d never have to return to the south. 
  
She told how on the night her father died 
she answered her father’s death by deciding 
instead to stay where she was and work for 
change.   Although that night her commitment 
was made to black people, she soon realized 
“the struggle is really about poor people.”

   She told of the white farmer, and his having 
to come to a black woman for help.   “While he 
was spending all that time trying to show he 
was superior to me, I was trying to decide just 
how much help I was going to give him”.   She 
told how the farmer called in desperation a 
couple weeks later to say he was being denied 
bankruptcy protection and his farm was 
facing foreclosure, and how she got on the 
phone with “everybody I could think of” and 
managed to save their farm. “Working with 
him made me see that it’s really about those 
who have versus those who don’t . . . poor 
people, those who don’t have access the way 
others have”.

   She told how in the late 16th and 17th 
centuries blacks and whites served together 
as indentured servants - living together, 
marrying each other, seven years and then 
freedom.   They saw injustices together, and 
together posed a threat to the moneyed elites 
- who then banned intermarriage and made 
blacks slaves for life.   “They did this to keep 
us divided . . . and here we are, over 400 years 
later, and it’s still working.”

   The column last week of particular 
relevance was Stuart Tolchin’s, in which 
he wrote of the series “Mad Men” and its 
depiction of Madison Avenue advertising 
culture.   This culture of manipulation not 
only instills wants, but also fears - from “ring 
around the collar” and “iron-poor blood” 
to “environmental extremism”, “terrorist 
appeasers” and “the gay agenda”.

   Taken to its extreme, we have a career 
ruined and a message twisted in order to 
instill fear of “racist” black people.   Shirley 
Sherrod told how “. . . folks with money want 
to stay in power, and . . . they’ll do whatever 
they need to do to keep that power” - even 
if it means keeping us divided against one 
another.   

   Those who fail to see that and fall for the 
“Mad Men” manipulation, I wouldn’t call 
them “racist” - but there’s a term used by 
Colorado Republican Ken Buck that would 
be appropriate. 

 
If my anger boils over in this 
article, please accept my apologies 
in advance and recognize that it 
is a righteous anger which flares 
when the value of individual 
lives is callously disregarded. 
Julian Assange, the editor of 
the WikiLeaks website, has just 
released some 90,000 classified 
military documents which are of 
minimal public value but which 
will inevitably result in the torture 
and murder of dozens of innocent 
Afghans who want nothing more 
than a better, more democratic 
country.

 Mr. Assange tells anyone who will 
listen to him that he “loves crushing 
bastards”. What’s undefined, of course, 
is just who the “bastards” are. As of 
today, it’s now pretty clear that the 
“bastards” his actions will crush are 
the individual Afghans who have 
cooperated with allied forces and who 
are specifically named and identified 
in the released papers by their tribe, 
province, village and fathers’ names. 
Their lives, as well as those of their entire 
extended families, are in jeopardy.

 Mr. Assange has claimed that he takes 
threats to individual lives seriously 
and has expunged or changed names 
of thousands so as to protect them. 
Unfortunately, he’s not very good at 
this task, if he even attempted it at all. 
The Times of London assigned one of 
their researchers to pour through the 
released documents and within a couple 
of hours found the specific names of 
several dozen Afghans credited with 
providing detailed assistance to U.S. 
forces. Lest there be any confusion 
among people who might share the 
same first name, the leaked documents 
provide villages, provinces, tribe 
affiliation and father’s names so as to 
exactly identify who helped the U.S. 
liberate Afghanistan from one of the 
most brutal and backward governments 
the world has seen.

 In one specific example of this 
quoted by the Times of London, “[X] 
said that he would be killed if he got 
caught interacting with any coalition 
forces, which is why he hides when we 
go into [Y]”. Please note that the name 
deletions and replacement with X and 
Y were done by the London Times, not 
by Mr. Assange!!!!

 I don’t think that Mr. X of Y province 
will live more than 30 days unless he is 
being whisked out of the country by U.S. 
forces as I type this article or as you are 
reading it. The irresponsibility which 
has accompanied Mr. Assange’s (and 
much of the left’s) hatred for George 
Bush and this war knows no boundary 
– even to the point of sacrificing the life 
of someone who did something noble 
to advance the cause of freedom which 
the left takes so much for granted.

 The left has taken great delight 
in being able to 
reveal stories about 
wiretaps, swift bank 
codes and what we 
knew about terrorist 
financing methods, 
but has rarely shown 
any concern for 
the damage those 
actions have done in 
our ability to wage a war against those 
who would think nothing about killing 
those same lefties. The great irony 
about all of this is that the better our 
ability to identify the terrorists early, 
limit their communications and restrict 
their funding, the less likely it is that 
we’ll actually have to drop a bomb on 
some village where they’re hiding when 
it comes down to a firefight. 

 If the left really cared about civilian 
casualties and the plight of the innocent, 
you’d think they champion, not hinder, 
our efforts to stop the real bastards 
before they get a hold of a weapon, hide 
out in schools, hospitals and mosques 
and force our hand to stop them to 
prevent even greater carnage.

 In the words of former CIA Director, 
Michael Hayden, “if I’m head of the 
Russian intelligence, I’m getting my 
best English speakers and saying: ‘Read 
every document, and I want you to tell 
me, how good are these guys? What are 
their approaches, their strengths, their 
weaknesses and their blind spots?” The 
release of these classified pages will be 
a treasure trove for America’s enemies.

 Actions have consequences. This is 
one of the basic premises of the right. 
Intentions may be good and honorable, 
but we all have a duty and responsibility 
to understand the consequences of 
our actions, even when we commit 
them with the best of intentions. This 
obligation is even more pronounced 
among those who speak so loudly 
about caring for the little guy, the 
innocent and the poor. The left glorifies 
intentions, especially those with which 
it sympathizes, but ignores results. 

 I cannot state the case more 
explicitly. What Mr. Assange has done 
is knowingly aided in the murder of 
innocent Afghan villagers. He may 
never know their names (obviously 
he didn’t even read all the documents 
he released), how they died, or even 
have to hear their screams as they will 
undoubtedly be made to watch their 
family members tortured and killed. 
But Mr. Assange will be as responsible 
for their deaths as if he pulled the 
trigger or thrust the knife. 

 I will end with a moral challenge for 
Mr. Assange. If he truly believes that 
he is simply keeping the “bastards” 
honest and that his methodology is 
sound, then I would ask him to publish 
a couple of Mohammed cartoons along 
with his specific address and that of 
his family members as well. If he does 
that, I’ll publicly retract every word 
I’ve written here.

 I hesitate labeling anyone “racist”.   I’ll 
go instead with the characterization 
offered by Colorado senate candidate 
Ken Buck, who, while trying to get “Go-
Back-to-Kenya” birthers out of camera 
range at his Tea Party rally, referred to 
them as “dumbasses”.

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