Oh, wait. I missed one!

I forgot that in that same speech, Palin also said this:

“If you lose that foundation, John Adams was implicitly warning us, then we will not follow our constitution, there will be no reason to follow our constitution because it is a moral and religious people who understand that there is something greater than self, we are to live selflessly, and we are to be held accountable by our creator, so that is what our constitution is based on, so those revisionists, those in the lamestream media, especially, who would want to ignore what our founders actually thought, felt and wrote about in our charters of liberty – well, that’s why I call them the lamestream media,” Palin said.

Really?

We are to live selflessly?

I'm not saying that's wrong, but. . . um, you do know that that flies directly in the face of the entire conservative philosophy, right?
I mean, Ayn Rand would spit in your eye for saying such a thing!

I Am So Sick Of This Argument

I don't know why I keep hearing this argument:

Health Care Is Not a Right

By Leonard Peikoff, Ph.D.

. . . Now our only rights, the American viewpoint continues, are the rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. That's all. According to the Founding Fathers, we are not born with a right to a trip to Disneyland, or a meal at Mcdonald's, or a kidney dialysis (nor with the 18th-century equivalent of these things).

(This particular example is from a paper given in opposition to the Clinton Healthcare plan in 1993 Interesting that he added the right to "property" which was actually edited out of the final Declaration of Independence because the Founding Fathers knew it would make them look kinda like greedy dicks, and the Declaration was nothing if not a PR move. But I digress)

Health Care is not a right

By: Iain Murray and Roger Abbott
Washington Examiner
11/17/09 5:10 PM EST

Health Care is NOT a Right
By Jake Towne

Jake Towne is running for U.S. Congress in eastern Pennsylvania's 15th district in 2010.

Anyway, you get the point. I keep hearing people say "healthcare is not a right, and blah,blah,blah. . ." and it's driving me crazy.

First off, who says it's not a right? I think that's probably a point on which reasonable people might be able to disagree, but if you have the right to LIFE, why not health? How much life are you going to have if you can't get to a doctor when you're sick? How much pursuing of happiness are you going to be able to do?

But, for the sake of argument, let's say that healthcare isn't a right. Who fucking cares? Do you think there's a Constitutional right to paved roads? No, but no one objects to the government providing paved roads (except maybe the nihilist wankers at the Ayn Rand Institute)
Is there any guarantee of the right to public libraries? Or mail delivery? Why don't the teabaggers decry the Postal Service as an at6tack on our basic liberties? Why isn't the library being picketed by rednecks in tri-corner hats shouting about Communazis and death camps? I think it's because once people get used to a government-supplied service, they realize that they like it. It may even occur to them that paving roads is a good use of their tax dollars and not something which they could really pull off themselves.
What the "not a right" freaks either don't understand, or ignore, is that in a Democratic system, the job of the government is to do whatever we decide we fucking want it to do. Libertarian types like to prattle on about how the job of the government is to provide police and an army and maybe a couple of other things, but anything they don't like is "not the job of the government." Bullshit! The government works for us, we can tell it to do whatever we want (within Constitutional limits, but even the Constitution can be amended.) If the majority of Americans want the government to give out ice cream cones and puppies to all the good little boys and girls, then that, by God, becomes the job of the government. And if a majority want the government to stop paving roads and delivering the mail, then those services would no longer be the government's job. I know, it's a little more complicated than that, because we're a republic, not a democracy, but that's basically how it works. And all the screaming, wailing and teabagging in the world won't change that.

Going Galt

All across the nation, literally dozens of angry, misinformed dimwits are staging "tea parties" to protest policies which they don't understand. These differ from the original Boston Tea Party in that the colonists who staged the original protest boarded British ships under cover of darkness to destroy British cargo, denying tax dollars to the English monarchy, knowing that they risked their freedom, if not their lives, by displaying defiance in the face of the British Empire, while modern "teabaggers"* buy bags of Liptonat the supermarket and then throw them into trashcans.

Um, I don't think that word means what you think it means.

One of the most popular activities at these "tea parties" is threatening to "go Galt" This refers to the fictional character John Galt from the book Atlas Shrugged. Look, guys, I read the book, and if someone were to edit out about 100 pages of repetition, it would be a decent work of fiction. But Ayn Rand is like the Jimmy Stewart character in "Rope." Her ideas may be fun to bandy about at cocktail parties, but you don't try to actually put them into practice. (In the case of the character from Rope, because you will end up in jail for committing murder. In the case of Ayn Rand, because her ideas are stupid.
Since most of you teabaggers have apparently not read it, let me explain something to you. John Galt was an titan of industry who bestrode the world like a colossus. You, on the other hand, are, um, not. Honestly, if you "went Galt," if you stopped producing out of spite, no one would notice - except your kids who would ask why there is no money for food.

No. You are not. Really.

The people who would, theoretically, be in a position to "go Galt" um, they're in Wahington begging for government handouts.

And if anyof you don't feel like slogging through all 1084 pages of Ayn Rand's diatribe, lhere's how it ends. John Galt and the other wealthy industrialists all move to a deserted valley in Colorado and start their own society, building new railroads, factories, etc. Does that sound like something you could do?

You are not Atlas. If you shrug, the world will shrug back. Unless you are really going to drop out of society and start your own country, just shut up and go back to work.

Oh, and do a google search for the term "teabagging." You'll be glad you did.



*I swear to God, this is really how they refer to themselves.