George Rebane

To maintain some perspective on the national debates, I regularly read, view, and listen to leftwing media.  Debate may be too fine of a word for the type of exchange that today goes on between conservatives and liberals.  In fact, we do live on two different worlds.

This was again made clear in the recent issue of the liberal flagship Nation where Katha Pollitt (‘Healthcare We Can Believe In’) laments that Team Obama is not taking us to the promised workers’ promised land fast enough.  She writes “Healthcare is a right, part of the common good, something everyone should have, and if you can’t afford it in the marketplace, the government will provide it.”

This is a woman from the liberal legions who see every human need as an automatic ‘right’ without evincing a clue that she knows what is a right versus, say, a privilege (more here).  In her panoply of state provided and guaranteed goodies, rights bloom from every nook and cranny.  She sees no cost or convenience hindering the provision of rights to the people, all we need is proper political orientation and will.  People who are too dimwitted to understand any of this are immediately marginalized beyond the social pale.

As of this writing, it is far from clear how much of the vocal opposition to reform represents wider popular feeling and how much is a mobile mob of gun nuts, birthers and teabaggers paid for and organized by lobbyists and Republican outfits like Americans for Prosperity, Conservatives for Patients’ Rights and FreedomWorks.

The ‘debate’ has now gotten so sharp and angular that the usually civil and measured Peggy Noonan, WSJ columnist, has just penned a piece – From ‘Yes, We Can,’ to ‘No! Don’t!’ – that finally takes to task the blizzard of Obama’s lies which in polite company were formerly known as ‘continued campaign rhetoric’.  Here Noonan makes the case that Obama has slid to the “slippery” level as a politician, and is now seen as such by all who are not gathered under his messianic robe.

When Mr. Obama stays above the fray, above the nitty-gritty of specifics, when he confines his comments on health care to broad terms, he more and more seems … pretty slippery. In the town hall he seemed aware of this, and he tried to be very specific about the need for this aspect of a plan, and the history behind that proposal. And yet he seemed even more slippery. When he took refuge in the small pieces of his argument, he lost the major threads; when he addressed the major threads, he seemed almost to be conceding that the specifics don’t hold. …When you seem slippery both in the abstract and the particular, you are in trouble.

There are probably some semantic strides between ‘slippery’ and ‘sleaze’.  But I find myself among those having already taken those steps in their assessment of the current administration.  And so we send our unheeded missives from one world to another.  E Pluribus Unum, but what kind of Unum?