The Libertarian Massa
The Hubbie and I were discussing the 3/5ths rule of the American constitution. Some idiot had claimed that it somehow decreased the legislative power of the slave states.
HUH???
I was asking what the hell they paid off the rest of the early congress to get THAT little plum: “Fishing Rights?” (I think you’ll get the “1776″ reference. Which I don’t dare mention to H. or we’ll have to watch it again).
He said they didn’t want to have to keep up the roads, canals, etc., of their states. When I asked why the hell not? He said — and this is trenchant:
“They thought it was up to the individual to keep up his own roads.”
That’s it. That’s the whole basis of the Libertarian thought. They want to be able to KEEP UP THEIR OWN PLANTATIONS.
Of course the idea is they keep it up, not by themselves, but by non-paid slaves or poorly paid or obligated tenant farmers.
They want their plantations back. Massa.
This is the gang that reads Ayn Rand. Will somebody tell me how the hell anyone ever got through a single line of Ayn Rand without throwing it down and saying, “Well, THIS is stupid shit.”?
She sounds like she came of the same class Gogol wrote about in “Dead Souls.” She wanted her serfs back.
Guess who gets to be the serfs?
I want my government health care back!
All I ever hear about is the lack of veteran health care.
Vets come back from whatever idiot overseas adventure we’ve gotten ourselves dragged into, for whatever goofball reasons. Vets are screwed up in the head, broken in body, blasted in future, and they beat on their families. They come back here and – poof – they’re dumped out of the military, and then dumped out of the civilian health care system.
Here’s the trick, the clue, the point: if you’re not being given health care as a former veteran, the problem is not lack of care for veterans – it’s because you’re a “former” veteran.
You’re not being given health care because you’re an American. You’re not being given health care because your country has a greedy, stupid, rice-bowl-privatized third-world health-care system, that doesn’t take care of anybody who is sick, depressed, damaged, not married to a worker, and expects businesses to cover health care, instead of a pooled health care system at least on the level of Cuba’s.
I ran into two old Korean war vets in a local library who were bitching about health care, but they were only bitching about it as veterans. They evidently expect to get health care as veterans. They couldn’t hear about the homeless having no health care. They couldn’t – I think physically and literally – hear about the sick, the depressed, the miserable, the aging having no health care. They could only think about themselves, and how their country seemed to be screwing them over on health care.
Well, it’s about time all us vets stop whining and complaining about broken promises from a government that is supposed to cover all its citizens – and not just us.
You thought you were fighting for your country. Maybe you were lied to. Maybe you’re coming back and considering suicide because you were lied to and used like so many plastic toys. But the reason your government can keep doing this to you is because it does it to the rest of your country. So what the hell were you fighting for? Who were you protecting, and from what?
More people are going to die, just this year, because a health-care system they thought they could buy into will refuse to use their money to help them. Privatized health-care will strip them of as much money as it can get, and then throw them off their rolls for some stupid excuse.
One of their clinicians, when I changed my emergency health instructions to none – because if I was kept on life-support for 30 days, my husband would have to sell our house, and I would be damned if that happened, and yes, I will consider it murder – said (trembling a bit, I may add): “You don’t want government health care.”
Yes I do. I’ve HAD government health care. I had all my lousy teeth fixed, my birth control covered, and my warts removed, on army health care. The clinician had government health care when he was in the navy. But he wants to deny it to me, the rest of America, and you, because it would crack his rice bowl. Anchor-clanker pelican-raper.
Do you know why Canadians come to the US for health care? Breast implants and face-lifts. Yes, if they want elective security, they have to wait. But if they cut their hands off with a chainsaw, or are diagnosed with cancer, or need a kidney, they go to the head of the line. Damn straight I want government health care.
Our health care system already costs more than our bloated defense budget — where’s my damn hospital bed???
Fight for everybody’s health care, not just your own. Get mad. Get damn-well pissed-off and get into a fight that’s real, this time. Don’t leave anybody out of the loop, or there will be a hole you can fall through, too.
Or be the crazy guy with a bullet in his head, bitching about how nobody helps you, thirty years from now in a library – because he didn’t get the bullet out, and he didn’t get to talk to a psychiatrist. Because his third-world country wouldn’t get him one.
I know vets can get together for a cause outside their own group. I saw Vietnam vets marching against the Iraq war. I saw them protesting the WTO. They’ve been there done that, being lied to by a government, and then come back and say “enough!”
Mobilizing the Vietnam-era vets should scare the hell out of the people who say we don’t want government health care. Let’s see those assholes try to swiftboat EVERYBODY.
While we’re at it — let’s get the pharmaceutical industry, and all the congressmen and senators who are in bed with them, too.
The Michael Moore Model
An astute friend recently emailed me that “a lot of people don’t like Michael Moore.”
I’ll bet! Moore gets between them and their victims. He takes small boats to Guantanamo. He faces off with corporations. He goes to Cuba. The guy must have brass balls the size of Houston.
Now if he could just retrain the victims to not be so stupid and listen to all the people who want to use and hurt them.
How to use Michael Moore’s weapons –
When I was in the army, I soon learned that as long as it was wearing a uniform, it could be jerked around by its own rules.
The suits are wearing uniforms. If you don’t look like them, you can sneak up on them and drill them.
Soldiers think anybody out of a uniform can’t get them — and the suits are stalked by their own belief that anybody out of a suit can’t get near them. They think somebody dressed like Moore — the harmless, stupid American slob — will be the usual serf-like, mindless victim.
Moore gets real close — and then he drills them between the eyes. With one or two questions that they can’t help answering.
And he uses a method NO human can resist — phrase the question so it’s a LITTLE BIT wrong — the target will IMMEDIATELY start trying to correct him, and give themselves away, blathering details they can’t help spewing. I use it as a jake-leg journalist, and it works every single time. No human can resist. I think it’s hard-wired.
It’s hilarious. We love watching Moore do it. He made that heartless asshole Heston run like a little girl.
ANYBODY can do it. Get a video camera, dress like a dork, pretend you’re dumb and nice — (and they think you ARE), ask simple, SLIGHTLY wrong questions — and then Youtube it!
I want my Government Health Care back!
Two rural ladies kept on me until I saw Michael Moore’s “Sicko.”
I know why, now — I tend to become a laser-pointed missile when I’m pissed off, and I’ll do something about it, and I don’t think they could. Maybe I can’t do a LOT, but I’ll do something (the Grain Of Rice or Grain of Sand model — it all adds up to harvests or beaches).
I knew what was in the film Sicko, but when I saw it all together, I was ready to kill. So I marched into the local clinic, and changed my Emergency Care paperwork to “No care” in the case of an emergency. I said that if my body had to be kept on life support for 30 days, I wasn’t going to make my husband sell our house to keep me alive.
The clinician muttered, “You don’t want government health care.”
Threatening his rice-bowl, I see.
I had government health care in the army — and I want it back! They fixed my teeth and took care of me as a soldier, and I want everybody to get the same, now.
Why should a woman raising children have to take a job to get her kids’ teeth fixed? Why should businesses be burdened with insurance payments? Why should we end up paying higher emergency room costs when all a homeless guy needs is a bandage or some antibiotics?
If they can bail out Wall Street and bad auto companies, where’s our health care? Where are our college educations? Why do people in Canada and France and CUBA pity us? Do we WANT to be redefined as a third-world nation?
The clinician’s Czech secretary totally understood. His young American secretary understood after we explained that SHE — and her kids — could have had the higher-paying job if the older woman had been able to quit — but she couldn’t because she needed the health insurance.
I told them all that if the lack of health care murdered me to keep my husband off the street, then so be it.
I think I embarrassed everybody. I HOPE SO.
