[Peace-discuss] When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder?

[C. G. Estabrook]

Did you read the post from David Swanson, called "More Democrat perfidy" here?

Obamacare is a contradictory to what is obviously needed, roughly Medicare for 
all.  Obamacare recognizes the fundamental requirement of elite politics in 
America: before you do anything at all, rich people must be paid off.  Obama 
understands that very well.

Your contempt for those Americans who think the federal government is working in 
the interests of a very few rather than those of the vast majority does you no 
credit.  It's hardly surprising that the debasement of political discussion in 
the neoliberal era has left a lot of bad ideas out there.

And you don't win the prize.  --CGE


Morton K. Brussel wrote:
> À bas les gens progressifs!
> 
> Down with government managed health care!
> 
>  I have no idea who your guy(?) is, but I don't think much of the drivel 
> he(?) writes here.
> 
> --mkb
> 
> On Aug 24, 2009, at 12:55 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> 
>> Ah, yes, the great mass of progressives...
>>
>> And what's the price of admission to that unnumbered throng?  
>> Unquestioning fealty to the assertion that theological thinking is 
>> irrational?
>>
>> Uh, if you're considering broadening the membership requirements at 
>> all, you might like the new book by the Marxist critic Terry Eagleton, 
>> "Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate" (The 
>> 2008 Terry Lectures -- delivered at, of all places, Yale).
>>
>> +++
>>
>> And now, for Today's Prize (to be announced along with the winner), 
>> name the Former Progressive -- now, sadly, apparently no longer a 
>> member of the Great Mass -- who recently wrote the following (no 
>> googling!):
>>
>>  "But what is a conservative meant to think? Since the major 
>> preoccupation of liberals for 30 years has been the right to kill 
>> embryos, why should they not be suspect in their intentions toward 
>> those gasping in the thin air of senility? There is a strong eugenic 
>> thread to American progressivism, most horribly expressed in its very 
>> successful campaign across much of the twentieth century to sterilize 
>> “imbeciles.” Abortion is now widening in its function as a eugenic 
>> device. Women in their 40s take fertility drugs, then abort the 
>> inconvenient twins, triplets or quadruplets when they show up on the 
>> scan.
>>
>>  "In 1972, a year before the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision 
>> legalized abortion on demand nationwide, virtually all children with 
>> trisomy 21, or Down syndrome, were born. Less than a decade later, 
>> with the widespread availability of pre-natal genetic testing, as many 
>> as 90 percent of women whose babies were pre-natally diagnosed with 
>> the genetic condition chose to abort the child.
>>
>>  "One survey of 499 primary care physicians treating women carrying 
>> these babies, however, indicated that only 4 percent actively 
>> encourage women to bring Down syndrome babies to term. A story on the 
>> CNS News Service last year quoted Dr. Will Johnston, president of 
>> Canadian Physicians for Life, reacted to the American College of 
>> Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) pre-natal testing endorsement 
>> as another step toward eugenics.“The progress of eugenic abortion into 
>> the heart of our society is a classic example of “mission creep,’ ” 
>> Johnson said. “In the 1960s, we were told that legal abortion would be 
>> a rare tragic act in cases of exceptional hardship. In the ’70s 
>> abortion began to be both decried and accepted as birth control. In 
>> the ’80s respected geneticists pointed out that it was cheaper to hunt 
>> for and abort Down’s babies than to raise them. By the ’90s that 
>> observation had been widely put into action. Now we are refining and 
>> extending our eugenic vision, with new tests and abortion as our 
>> central tools.”
>>
>>  "So if we have mission creep  in the opening round, what’s to 
>> persuade people that there won’t be mission creep at the other and the 
>> kindly official discussing living wills won’t tiptoe out of the ward 
>> and tell the hospital that the old fellow he’s just conferred with is 
>> ripe to meet his maker. The author of the provision – now dropped – in 
>> the health bill before Congress – for  “end of life” counseling was 
>> Democratic Rep Earl Blumenauer of Oregon. Blumenauer has denounced the 
>> “death panel” description as a  “terrible falsehood.” Maybe so. But 
>> Blumenauer is hot for “death with dignity”, as a speech he made in 
>> Congress in 2000 makes clear: “A major concern [in an attempted 
>> revision of the Balanced Budget Act]is a provision that would 
>> criminalize decisions doctors make on pain management for the most 
>> seriously ill and overturn Oregon's Death with Dignity Act. Oregonians 
>> have twice voted to support the assisted suicide law. H.R. 2614 not 
>> only is an attack on the Democratic process, but also threatens to 
>> pain management. There is evidence that doctors are increasingly 
>> hesitant to prescribe pain medications to terminally ill patients for 
>> fear of being accused of unlawfully assisting a suicide. The on-going 
>> attempts by Congress to criminalize the doctor-patient relationship 
>> are a threat to pain management in all fifty states.”
>>
>>  "For forty years, every American president has deprecated the powers 
>> of government to improve the public weal. Why now should Americans 
>> believe that any government-backed “health reform” will do them any 
>> good, as opposed to assigning them the appropriate lifespan, relative 
>> to their income and contributions to the corporate bottom line, which 
>> is what the present system amounts to?"
>>
>> --CGE (who likes the title of this thread)
>>
>>
>> Morton K. Brussel wrote:
>>> This statement is what makes it so difficult to strengthen the 
>>> anti-war movement.
>>> Wayne's (and others') ideas about abortion and what the state should 
>>> or should not do about it will never be accepted by a great mass of 
>>> progressives. It's one of the destructive/divisive aspects of 
>>> theological,
>>> i.e., irrational, thinking. --mkb
>>> On Aug 24, 2009, at 11:52 AM, E. Wayne Johnson wrote:
>>>> It's pretty hard to imagine that one ought to trust the beneficent
>>>> benevolent care of the poor to a coercive government that promotes and
>>>> funds abortion, imperialism, endless war, corporate malfeasance, and
>>>> financial fraud.
>>>> The new covenant message is that people would be internally 
>>>> motivated to
>>>> care for one another.  It's been effective where people dare to 
>>>> apply it.