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

[Morton K. Brussel]

I'm always amazed at your duplicity, Carl.  A one payer system, which  
Swanson advocates, as do I, would be a government run system. It has  
nothing, get it, nothing, to do with your imagined "obamacare". Hence,  
your third paragraph is utterly debased, having nothing to do with  
what I, or Swanson, would advocate.  I am also surprised that you,  
with Wayne, are against such a single payer U.S. healthcare system.

  --mkb


On Aug 24, 2009, at 4:52 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:

> 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.

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