George Rebane

It was bit mind boggling to watch the news last night.  Hard to tell who is more expert at playing Pander the Public.

1. Reid and Pelosi are now vilifying the health insurance industry as being terminally evil for having their profits increase 450% over the last decade.  That’s it, just that their profits increased and they’re making a lot of money.  That statement is supposed to be enough to have us assemble in the town square after dark with torches and pitchforks.  Same drill as you’ll recall with the oil companies.  The revenues of both sectors went up significantly, but their margins stayed the same.  In fact, the insurance companies at 1.5-4% margins are lower than the SP500’s average margin.  So if revenues go up because people are buying more insurance (due to reasons we can only guess, but you can bet there’s a tort lawyer in there somewhere), of course the amount of profit dollars go up because the amount of insurance coverage and the premiums collected has gone up.  So Reid and Pelosi think the American voters are idiots to jump at this bait, and start tarring up their torches for the night’s rally.

2. Bill Maher, arch leftwing commentator and showhost, states unambiguously that we Americans are all ignorant knuckledraggers, especially those who are religious.  Of course, he feels that way because we don’t see the left-leaning lights at the end of the tunnel, but you get the general gist of his argument.  He is joined by many commentators on the other side of the aisle who have more problems offering such explicit assessments, even though they do point out all the causes – bad educational system, excessive self-esteem, political correctness, revisionist history, etc. – why the last couple of generations are characterized by academics as being in the “post-intellectual” era.  And always-right Bill O’Reilly seems to be totally confused about the difference between a governor’s “intelligence” and how regionally entrenched ideologies helped her/him in the governing of states like Alaska and Massachusetts.

3. Gotta love ol’ Barney Frank.  That guy really lets loose with some penetrating insights in unguarded moments.  Walking down one of the Capitol hallways, he said it plain and clear on camera that to get the country into a socialist single-payer system, we have to convince the sheeple to first accept the so-called ‘public option’.  Because, contrary to Obama’s lies from the podium that you get to keep your current health plan, everyone with half a brain knows that once the government starts competing with its own subsidized plan, and also plays referee in the health insurance derby, all private suppliers will be forced out.  Now why don’t the MSM make that little bit of Democrat strategy known in banner headlines?

4. And the Republicans are totally out of new ideas about how to regain power.  As usual, the Democrats are promising everyone who votes for them a free ice cream cone paid for by someone else.  The Republicans are sticking with their historical core message, and taking it to an electorate that no longer has much skin in the wealth creation side of the equation, nor understands how that core message will help them.  Both parties are on the same basic merry-go-round.  You get to be the party in power; you screw up in spades; your opposition points out all your bads and promises a new golden age; you get kicked out of power; then you work like the dickens to shove slats into the spokes of the other guys’ bikes, and hope to hell that they screw up so that the cycle can start all over again.  Meanwhile the country sinks into greater debt, dissonance, and ignorance.  But hey, if you’re a politician, the cycle works – what goes around comes around – you just have to do whatever you must to stay on the merry-go-round.