McCain gives the right answer on health care as a responsibility not a privilege or right. Obama says it should be a right. Why is health care a right but not food or shelter? I’ve never understood why the left thinks that health care should be the government’s responsibility. Government already provides health care for the poor.
Contentions
2 Responses to “Health Care”
June 2013
-
Articles
-
The Case for Drones
Kenneth AndersonThe United States can now wage war in a more nimble, low-risk, and humane fashion than ever before.
-
The ObamaCare Blame Game
Tevi Troy
Fiction
-
Past Due
Christine Sneed
Politics & Ideas
-
Gray Matter Chatter
Robert HerrittA review of Sally Satel and Scott O. Lilienfeld's Brainwashed
-
Vali of Doom
Sohrab Ahmari -
Beyond Good, Quite Evil
Andrew Roberts
Culture & Civilization
-
Exit Laughing
Rick Richman -
How Hitler Destroyed German Music
Terry Teachout -
Widow's Peak
Fernanda Moore -
Turncoat in a Toga
Stephen Daisley -
The Los Angeles Times Earthquake
Andrew Ferguson
John Podhoretz
-
The Second-Term Curse
John Podhoretz
Threat Assessment
-
Disappearing Red Lines
Jonathan S. Tobin
Letters
-
Republican Recovery
Our ReadersResponses to Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner's "How to Save the Republican Party"
Enter Laughing
-
Get Our Free Newsletter
The most characteristic disservice we do today to members of minority groups is to treat them condescendingly as incapable of playing by the same rules as everyone else. We help them develop and nurse an excessive sense of grievance, and we try to ignore things they do or say that would normally get someone in trouble. How exactly does this help them to rise in society on merit?
I am expecting AG Holder to soon send FBI agents to my door to make sure I am not hanging out with other people of pallor over the weekend. Welcome to Amerika!
I’m sure Holder and Obama are sincere about wanting to have an open national conversation about race, but there are obstacles they don’t acknowledge.
On my side, I wouldn’t have an open conversation because I am deathly afraid of giving racial offense. I suppose I could approach a black co-worker and initiate a discussion of how awesome black history is and how much I admire George Washington Carver and Langston Hughes, but even then I would be afraid of giving offense. (In this sense, I suppose I am a coward). I imagine there are similar issues on the black side of the conversation as well.
#1 is bang on. Jews are particularly egregious offenders, endlessly giving black people a pass for behavior that Jews would condemn in another Jew. It’s the “what can you expect from the Shwartzes” mentality, and it’s contemptible.
I think that many may be taking this speach out of context. By “we”, Holder is clearly referring to “all” in regards to addressing racial relations. That’s his perogative to feel this way. And he does have good points which is why the press and public and aren’t raising a fuss and won’t.
For my part, I don’t enjoy discussing racial relations. Human beings are human beings regardless of race, ethnicity, religion or national identity. I just don’t care about these things and I find it to be uncomfortable to discuss this stuff with Blacks, Hispanics, American Indians, etc… I guess then by Holder’s definition I’m a coward due by unwillingness to discuss race. But why should I discuss this crap? Typically these conversations lead to hot-headed arguments about past injustices that happened long before I was born. None of us have a time machine on hand to retroactively adjust slavery or massacres of American Indians or discrimination against Mexican Americans. So why bother discussing? I find the best approach to dealing with race is just to treat people with respect and courtesy – regardless of skin complexion or racial identity. We can’t fix the past, but we can learn from it. We can move forward with politeness, courtesy and respect to our fellow citizens. This is the best that we can do.
eric holder’s behavior in the marc rich pardon process – and his associated memory lapses about his professional and personal role in that affair – certainly gives us insight into his standards for bravery…
…ms brown’s ‘no bias, no bull’ is matched only by its ‘no substance, no critical thinking’…
i look forward to the new & improved ‘fairness doctrine’ being applied to cnn…
“While the endless round of self-congratulation on the part of so many Americans for doing this [electing a black president] may be tiresome”
It sure is. But that is why many voted the way they did, so they could spend the next four years patting themselves on the back. That is the big payoff. Whether the guy is actually up to the job is secondary.
Apply what #1 said to the Palestinians and you know why they should NEVER be given a state in which to attempt to try and dstroy their “oppressors”:
“The most characteristic disservice we do today is to treat THE PALESTINIANS condescendingly as incapable of playing by the same rules as everyone else. We help them develop and nurse an excessive sense of grievance, and we try to ignore things they do or say that would normally get someone in trouble. How exactly does this help them to rise in society on merit?
Excuse me? Why do we continually bestow the title of “mainstream” to the press? They are clearly partisan and should be address as the partisan media not the mainstream media. There is no mainstream media and if there ever was I would like to know when it existed.
Maynard, I see no evidence that Jews are more apt to fall into this error than others, except to the degree that more are liberals.
Maybe my memory is foggy after all these years (the Bill Moyers defense?) but wasn’t the point of Black History Month to encourage the study of black history by making a special time on which to concentrate on it?
It sounds a little bit like someone who has been bumped into first class complaining that he’s being oppressed.
I know this blog has to find material to discuss, but who the hell made Campbell Brown the arbiter of courageous leadership?
#10. I can’t say whether Jews are more likely to condescend to blacks than is the population as a whole. I can say that I find this attitude endemic among Jews, and it’s particularly egregious, coming from Jews, since their own experience equips them, better than most, to know what conduct best serves a historically marginalized, often despised and victimized people surrounded by an often hostile “other.”
Anecdotally, I’ve had Jewish friends tell me point-blank that they won’t expect blacks to meet white performance standards until blacks “have had the advantages of whites.” I reply: “Did your great-grandmother tell your grandfather that she wouldn’t expect him to bring home grades as good as the goyims’ until he had the goyims’ advantages? Why do you deem black people as less morally responsible than Jews?” Too many Jews do, and I doubt many Jews, searching their hearts, will deny it. It’s a perverse and destructive form of Jewish exceptionalism. Jews could give blacks no better advice than: “Live like Jews. Work harder, save more, and study longer than white people, and you’ll pass them. All the rest–affirmative action, calls for reparations, ‘acting black’–these are self-destructive snares.”
13: an (entire) gentile thanks you.
Forgive me for repeating a post from earlier:
Another scholar who doesn’t bother with history. We’ve been talking in this country about race since 1619 and this is where we are today?
What Holder means is that I don’t get everything I want when I want it, how I want it, without regard to the well-being of others. Standing there, speaking as the Attorney General, the top lawyer in the nation, and make a statement like that? God, grievances based on race will not end in this country as long as there is one minority person of color to complain of racism, as long as there is one minority religion to squeal intolerance.
It is not possible to salve the tortured souls of such people who refuse to take responsibility for themselves when they have the opportunities, without first latching on to the ghosts of the past with which to flagellate the people who offer them the same rights, responsibilities and expectations as any citizen of the nation – no more, no less.
Do not let this grieving scalawag represent me or my country in a court of law.
I might add I am a victim of affirmative action. I was denied an opportunity for which I had worked long and hard, and had been given assurances I would receive it. At the last moment, under congressional mandate (1967), it was taken away and given to a minority student who was less qualified, but quota-fulfulling, and I was left high and dry. I had the opportunity only one time.
What affirmative action does is create a new class of aggrieved people, who rightfully feel their Constitutional right of equality before the law was denied. We need to understand that we cannot make right the sins of the past by committing new sins today. Life does not work that way. What we can do is begin today to treat all people as equal under the eyes of the law.
Holder has his grievances and I and many others denied equal justice today have theirs.
Say, can it be debated whether or not the problems the blacks have are perhaps related to lower IQ, higher levels of implusiveness, and shorter time horozins?
Or must we be forced to believe that ever race is the same in all traits?
I’m just asking.
Maynard, I seem to be hanging out in other Jewish circles than you do. My take is that white liberals (including liberal Jews) typically treat liberalism as their primary affiliation and ideological reference point, while their grandparents’ immigrant experience is long forgotten.
If Eric Holder thinks the nation is acting “cowardly” when it comes to race, one need look no further than the strong reaction of the Left to an innocent cartoon of the chimp being shot and the cop saying, “That someone else will need to write the next economic stimulus bill.” Race (and any other social issue for that matter) is not discussed openly and fully because liberals and progressives are so hypersensitive to criticism or perceived criticism that risk aversion when dealing with these issues has become the modus operandi. However, I don’t believe we need a conversation on race anyway – people from all ethnic groups, religions, and creeds work, marry, socialize, and fight side by side as equals. This is a result of our continuous dialogue on race since the inception of this country. What Eric Holder, and indirectly Barack Obama, are doing is taking race grieving to a new level. Why was it Holder’s place to even comment on these things anyway? I thought this guy was hired to fight crime, not lecture Americans on the state of racial affairs.
Bob–you’re right that most Jews are liberals, and liberals generally condescend to blacks; I try not to miss an opportunity to point out to my liberal friends that they’re inherently “racist;” though it’s a term I find useless, liberals wield it constantly, and hate the thought. This isn’t at odds with my point, though: Jews, because of their own experience transcending “racism” and all manner of social and economic disability, without affirmative action and without being treated as effectively wards of the state, should be reluctant to buy into liberal nostrums and attitudes as they bear on the condition of blacks. It’s hard not to see in Jewish attitudes a sense that blacks simply aren’t up to the program that served Jews so well.
Forty years ago, when I was a medical student, there was a young black girl who worked in the medical bookstore. We used to visit sometimes when the place was slow and, in my innocence perhaps, I used to tell her about black history. For example, she did not know that Alexander Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers and Count of Monte Cristo, was black. His father was a Marshall of the French Army during the revolution and was a mulatto. Dumas grandmother was a freed slave who his grandfather married.
I would not think of having such a conversation now. Holder has created some of the very rules that make such conversations dangerous to whites.
It’s not often I’d say something like this, but on this issue I defer to one of my favorite actors, Morgan Freeman, who said the only way to get rid of racism is to stop talking about it. And what was the name of that guy who used to talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations?
There’s really a show on CNN called “Campbell Brown: No Bias, No Bull”? No bull?
The bias, etc., speak for themselves regardless of the creative show title.
You have to see this for what it is. With obama essentially saying that those who didn’t deserve home loans in the first place (given to them by dint of the shakedown and threats of boycots/racism charges against banks, by none other than ACORN), are now to be given affordable mortgages for those homes to be paid for by those who busted their asses their whole lives to start a business or study their way through medical school, this practice will now have a rationale. Holder is simply setting everyone one for integration of all neighborhoods, regardless of income. Welcome to the new America. Oh, and for all those well-to-do liberals that live in exclusive suburbs, now you can finally practice what you preach.
Left-wing media shills and conservative pundits aren’t the only ones confused about President Obama. Everybody seems to be, including the man himself.
Barack Obama is not Black, although he never seems to tire of saying he is. He’s barely even Brown. He’s a latte colored Mulatto who keeps his hair closely cropped so that nobody will notice he doesn’t have an afro. His father was (mostly) Black and his mother was White, but does anybody refer to him as White or even as racially mixed?
Apparently it’s very important that he be perceived as Black. Why is that important, other than as a means for one group to gain preferential treatment at the expense of another?
At the height of segregation in this country, racially diverse “Negroes” usually didn’t have a problem describing themselves as Brown and commenting on their mixed heritage. Prominent educated figures like Alex Haley and Jim Brown commented on the hypocrisy of White bigotry towards Americans of mixed White and Black heritage.
Today, people like Obama and Holder display the same sort of bigotry when they deny part of their heritage and slander White Americans as racists.
The only cowards I see are the moderates and conservatives who go along with the grievance industry’s false narrative of Blacks as victims and Whites as oppressors. An entire month dedicated only to Blacks is referred to as history, and who has the courage to call it what it is?