[StBernard] Conservative Review - Sunday's Socialist Triumph

[Westley Annis]

THE CONSERVATIVE REVIEW - March 26, 2010

Sunday's Socialist Triumph
by Tony Blankley

Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Sunday launched the Democrats' 
argument for the health care bill, claiming, "This is 
an American proposal that honors the traditions of 
our country." Does that suggest that opposition is un-
American? And what are the traditions that are American 
that this law fulfills? The Democrats argue that the 
bill fulfills the "right" of all Americans to government-
assured health care services. The congressional Democrats 
claim many other things that a majority of the country 
believes to be inconsistent with truth and reality. 

So, considering the rhetorical onslaught that is about to 
be unleashed on the public, to paraphrase (and with the 
deepest apologies to) Winston Churchill on the occasion 
of the fall of France in June 1940: 

What House Minority Leader John A. Boehner has called the 
Battle of Capitol Hill is over. I expect that the Battle 
of the Electorate is about to begin. Upon this battle 
depends the survival of a nonsocialist America. Upon it 
depends our own American way of life and the long 
continuity of our institutions and our history. The whole 
fury and might of the media and the Democratic Party must 
very soon be trained on the electorate. 

If they can stand up to the coming propaganda, America may 
be free, and the life of the wider free world may move 
forward into broad, sunlit uplands. 

But if the voters succumb to those seven months of blandish-
ments and deceptions, then free America -- including all 
that we have known and cared for -- will sink into the 
abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps 
more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. 

Let the public therefore brace itself to its duties, and 
so concentrate its mind on the true facts, that if the 
American spirit of freedom and dignity last for a thousand 
years, men will still say, "This was the American voters' 
finest hour." 

As I said, apologies to Winston Churchill for borrowing 
and abusing his immortal words on the fall of France and 
the beginning of the Battle of Britain. 

And yet, for us, now and here is where we must battle for 
our freedom. Not, pray God, with bullets, but with words 
and ideas. 

This battle will not be fought in the skies over London, 
but on the Internet and airwaves over America. The target 
is not the homes and factories of the people, but the 
minds and judgments of the voters. But the power of a 
mind confused and misused is every bit as threatening to 
freedom as is the power of bombs and bullets. 

The path to Sunday's catastrophic vote was paved with 
cynical blandishments by the Democratic Party's congress-
ional leaders to their members. The votes were induced 
by the assurance that in the seven remaining months before 
the election, the true facts of their legislation, which 
led to overwhelming public opposition to the bill when 
passed -- can be undone in the minds of the voters by 
remorselessly repeating misconceptions to the public. 

The most mendacious, cruel and destructive proposition put 
forth by the Democratic congressional leadership -- and 
soon by almost all its ranks and files -- is, of course, 
the outlandish claim that the bill will reduce the deficit.

The uncontrolled growth of the annual deficits and total 
public debt is at the crux of the public's slack-jawed 
horror of Washington policy these past 18 months. 
Washington is placing our grandchildren's prosperity on 
a slow boat to China. 

Everything that more than 200 years of American invention, 
investment, labor, suffering and triumph, war and victory 
has created is being sold off to the world's lowest bidders 
in a matter of months. 

So far, the public has not been fooled by the claim that a 
new entitlement for 30 million people is being created -- 
and it will cost less. 

But now the Democrats have the Congressional Budget 
Office's (CBO) official accounting -- and they plan to 
use it as a shield and a sword as they wade into the 
public debate. 

Of course, every informed person understands why the CBO 
calculation is an honest measure of a dishonest bill. 
Republican Rep. Paul Ryan at the health care summit, former 
CBO Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, in last Sunday's New York 
Times, and hundreds of commentators have all laid out the 
lamentable, indisputable and undisputed fact that the CBO 
methodology has been gamed by the congressional Democrats 
to turn what will be more than a trillion dollars in 
further public deficit and debt into a fantasy savings of 
$140 billion. 

While Medicare is at about $30 trillion in unfunded 
liability by 2070, the bill preposterously claims it is 
going to cut Medicare by half a trillion dollars a decade. 
The quarter- to half-trillion dollars per 10 years that 
it will cost to pay Medicare doctors enough to keep them 
providing services has simply been put in another bill. 
The mendacities go on and on. They are not merely small, 
politically useful little deceptions. They are of a 
dimension that may destroy the republic. 

The Democratic congressional leadership seems to have a 
stunningly insulting view of their potential voters' 
intelligence. But on such a basis is the battle for the 
minds of the voters joined. 

Never will the wisdom and common sense of the American 
public have been put to a more fateful test. The organized 
opposition to the bill must do its best. But, as fitting 
to a constitutional republic, the fate of American freedom 
lies with the people.