Millions of Americans have lost the liberty to select their own type of health insurance, purchased on their own volition to best match their own assessments of their particular needs. Obamacare — the federal government’s redistributive effort to equalize health care for all — sought to destroy the liberty of many millions in order to ensure a state-directed sameness in care for all.Similarly, years before most of you were born, Americans were unilaterally stripped of their freedom to dispose of sewage in their own way. No more just throwing your shit into the river, or on your lawn; fascist protObamas enforced a wearying state-directed sameness of sewer pipes, and thus our liberty was flushed forever!
Also mentioned in the lengthy ululation: "mandated equality," "Sidwell Friends," Obama's "Malibu supporters," "the French Revolution’s grandees, the Soviet nomenklatura, and the EU elite." Plus Hanson compares California to "the Soviet Union and the captive nations of Eastern Europe."
I'm beginning to think the old gasbag is hipper than he looks, and composes these things from cut-up pieces a la Burroughs.
Get back to me when his cut-up technique produces something that sounds more like Talking Heads than an extended Jonah Goldberg 3-shart harmony.
ReplyDeleteHanson delenda est.
ReplyDeleteThen: "Brian Gison let the mice in."
ReplyDeleteNow: "Davis Hanson takes 'em dancin.'"
"What did you do in the war against Obamacare, daddy?"
ReplyDelete"I bravely let a chipped tooth become a life-threatening abscess that bankrupted me by the time I finally crawled to the ER. Now pass the creamed pork."
The exchanges are all about choosing your own health care. The only right people have been stripped of is the "right" to buy insurance so shitty it's more scam than anything, and the resultant right to become a burden on the state if worst comes to worst.
ReplyDeleteDulce et decorum est pro insurance company's profits mori
ReplyDeleteWhatever. I hear in the free states you're not limited to plain old water. You can get it licorice flavored or have it as a flaming drink.
ReplyDelete"An ecstasy of fumbling" is Victor Davis Wilfred Owen Hanson looking for a metaphor.
ReplyDeleteIt's been downhill ever since Truman and Eisenhower fluoridated our water, stripping us of our freedom to have rotten teeth.
ReplyDeleteAt some point, you start thinking that all of them are actually performance artists.
ReplyDeleteAlas, they're for real....
And Eisenhower also crammed polio vaccine down our throats. He was worse than Hitler.
ReplyDeleteThe paleofascists who invented agriculture doomed us to a village-directed sameness of grains and milk and destroyed our liberty to choose which berries we forage on our own volition.
ReplyDeleteRedistributive insurance! O brave new world!
ReplyDeletesought to destroy the liberty of many millions in order to ensure a state-directed sameness in care for all
The Zhdanovites in the Ministry of Death are crushing America's insurance artists.
I've moved from wondering how they can manage lying so much, and how they can refuse to ever learn anything from being 180 degrees wrong about absolutely everything, to wondering how they can stand to write the same thing over and over again. If you can't get any brighter, can you at least get bored once in a while?
ReplyDeleteWe hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created unequal,
ReplyDeletethat they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,
that among these are the right to be shot by a moron with a gun, the right to be poisoned by a corporation, and the right to die from a preventable disease. Also, thou shalt not steal my chainsaw.
I just want to applaud protObama...
ReplyDeletecomposes these things from cut-up pieces a la Burroughs.
ReplyDeleteI've got it--he's kidnapped rational thought, and threatens to chainsaw it to death (once he gets a new, secured chainsaw), and this is his ransom note.
I was struck by this little nugget:
ReplyDeletepromoting the suppression of interest rates by the Federal Reserve to
reward the many who owe money and punish the fewer who saved some
Wait, I thought it was the conservatives that hated inflation with a burning passion. Inflation meant that lucrative investments were easy to find: certificates of deposit that paid 5%. I used to have a savings account that paid 3.5%, for crying out loud. Inflation lets the debtor watch his debt erode; when my parents paid off their house, the principal was smaller than my last used-car loan.
This is the most egregious black-is-white argument I've ever seen Hanson make. It's a refutation of Reaganomics. It's...words fail me. At this point, Hanson might as well just be flinging his own turds. Lord knows those aren't filled with self-refuting logic.
There was a time when a man was free to wander until he found himself and his family a nice, warm cave and occupy it until a bigger, stronger, meaner guy came along to kill him and take over his cave and rape his women. Now that's liberty!
ReplyDeleteSimilarly, years before most of you were born, Americans were
ReplyDeleteunilaterally stripped of their freedom to dispose of sewage in their own
way. No more just throwing your shit into the river, or on your lawn;
fascist protObamas enforced a wearying state-directed sameness of sewer
pipes, and thus our liberty was flushed forever!
If there was a "Shutup of the Day Award", this would win it.
If I, like Hanson, ever decide to make a career out of abusing the corpses of classical figures "Weekend at Bernie's-style" by dressing and posing them and putting words in their mouths for my own low purposes - just shoot me in the head. You'll be doing me, the world, the discipline of inductive logic and the idea of decency a huge favor.
ReplyDeleteIt's frankly disturbing to watch a supposed classics professor turn de Tocqueville's idea of the equality of conditions on it's head in order to smugly attack Obama. Isn't there some professorial code of ethics this transgresses? Yes, deT did warn in one isolated quote against the pursuit of equality becoming a societal race to the bottom, a pursuit of the lowest common denominator in order to satisfy the ideal of equality among individuals. Yet it's merely an afterthought, a footnote to the body of his articulation on why it is vitally important for all people in an democracy to have equal political power and very similar if not equal economic equality. He'd been a witness to the social milieu of pre-Revolutionary France and seen how wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a few corrupts and turns them toward oppressing their fellows in order to retain said wealth and power.
DeT observes that for democracy to be successful every individual has to have an equal voice in politics - which flies in the face of the notion that we are a "republic" and not a democracy ideologues like Hanson are usually championing, by the way. What happens if everyone doesn't have an equal say in running things? DeT says that it creates a feeling of "indignity" that pushes the less influential individual further and further from power and social interaction until they're left more or less isolated, and forced to satisfy themselves with "crass materialism."
So I have a question for Professor Victor Professorial Victim: do I have as much political power as the Kochs brothers? As much influence despite my relative lack of wealth? Do African-Americans in southern states have as much voice in the political process as Haley Barbour? As much as any typical white? Are women, being fifty percent of the population, represented equally in Congress? In statehouses? On city councils? Does any minority group stand on equal footing with the majority of white males, politically or economically?
If the answer to any of these questions is "no" and if His Solmenity Vicious Dayglow Handjob isn't working toward rectifying the lack of equality giving rise to this indignity and oppression then he's dishonoring de Tocqueville by abusing his legacy for propaganda purposes as much as if he'd dug up his corpse and fucked it onstage to the delight and amusement of a smug, Republican audience.
He's right, you know. I live in California, and just last night a friend of mine was dragged from his house by Jerry Brown's stasi. Seems he'd tweeted a paean to moms and apple pie. We'd hoped the recent budget surplus would be disbursed to the state's most deserving citizens in the form of Freedom Vouchers for use at any Applebees, but no -- it all got dumped straight into expanding the Napa-Sonoma Gulag. No doubt my friend is already languishing in the brutal winter of wine country. (Oh, yeah -- I'm told no news gets out, so maybe you guys haven't heard: in keeping with our Soviet nature, it now snows forever all over the state. Pretty grim, if you ask me, but this is why us Democrats opposed Global Warming!)
ReplyDeleteVicious Dayglow Handjob
ReplyDeleteI think we've found our Gigi.
"did i ever tell you about the columnist who taught his asshole to talk?"
ReplyDeleteSome call it "cut-up," some call it sloth, some call it reuse. I wouldn't necessarily call it "hip."
ReplyDeleteActually, the reason we are in a drought is that all the big precipitation conglomerates have pulled out of the state due to the excessive regulatory burden, and rain formerly supplied to California is now being repackaged as snow and delivered to other markets to the east. That'll teach us!
ReplyDelete... crammed polio vaccine down our throats...
ReplyDeleteAnd did it to children with sugar cubes!! How evil is that?
Also too, from that same 'graph:
ReplyDeleteObamacare — the federal government’s redistributive effort to equalize
health care for all — sought to destroy the liberty of many millions in
order to ensure a state-directed sameness in care for all.
This goes to something that doesn't get bandied about much. The idea, born of the rightwing zero-summish worldview, that more good things for people they don't like automatically means less for them. As fate--or the Big Ol' Goofy World Principle--would have it, this time...are you ready?...they're actually right! Holy Moly.
Yeah, the thing is, the US actually has way too few Physicians for its population, and probably too few hospitals as well. So, yeah, more previously uninsured (and certainly undeserving!) people will be filling up *their* waiting and operating rooms And why should that be? Because almost everything about Physicians, from how much they're paid all the way down to how many there are, is decided by...the Physicians. Drum, I think, has done some articles on this, and it's probably at least as important to our healthcare situation today as Obamacare is, but it's not something the media seem overly interested in pursuing. It's the kind of thing 60 Minutes could do a good job on, if they weren't so busy with their snipe Benghazi hunt...
The top-rated comment over there is a guy complaining about reparations.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to thank Rich Lowry yet again. We've all been wondering if National Review drew the same readers now as it did back when...let's say you could be more open about certain groups of people. Thanks for answering.
Wow. Millions of Americans have lost the liberty to be turned down by their own choice of insurance provider.
ReplyDeleteRight, because insurance policies, like mouthwash and shampoo, are specially formulated to be just as you like it, to fit your individual lifestyle! What kind of dreary world will it be when people are no longer able to express their own individual personalities by they specially selected features of their health insurance policy?
ReplyDeleteI used to think that guys like Hanson and Charles Krauthammer (who also tries periodically to run this scam) were actually pretty smart guys who, when they yammered on about "redistributive" insurance, actually understood how this whole "insurance" thingy works...i.e. taking in money from a large number of people, many of whom will pay in more that they take out, and redistributing it to people who need it... and were just taking it for granted that their readers were too stupid to breathe, let alone realize that their arguments were total bullshit. I am now , after all these years of experiencing the cement headed density of Hanson's writing, that he probably IS actually that stupid.
ReplyDeleteor an orgasm.
ReplyDeleteI miss the sweet, personal, approach that I used to enjoy when the HR person at my husband's employer used to forward those notes describing the rising premiums and the falling benefits. Man, that was something really intimate and special.
ReplyDeleteI hope you'll consider copy and pasting this comment over there. The NatRev comments section sure could use the help.
ReplyDeleteExactly. I am paralyzed by the fear that if I select the wrong health insurance I will be scorned and ostracized by polite society. How fortunate that we have such erudite exemplars as VDH to protect us from the Agenda 21 One World scourge of single payer.
ReplyDeleteIt's his devolution into full-blown Teabaggerhood, in which he finds a handy whipping boy for the failure of his 401K to turn him into a millionaire. (If that vineyard of his is any size at all and goes for typical California real estate prices, he probably is anyway, but he's going by the ancient philosophical principle of mo' money.)
ReplyDeleteThey were cruel to be kind, I'm sure.
ReplyDeleteHe even has to throw in an anti-gun-control bit. Nice timing, ace.
ReplyDeleteI mostly get pissed off at these morons for recycling the same old tired lies decade after decade. Doesn't anyone else remember the traitor Reagan's Medicare=Slavery bullshit?
ReplyDeleteI have been enslaved by the car insurance requirements in Washington State!!!11!!!
ReplyDeleteOr to pay too much for a crappy policy. And, in the Era of Crap, this is a sacrilege.
ReplyDeleteWell thank you. As I have no "Off" button and am not prone to civil discourse when discussing issues of social justice I'm afraid if I wade into that cesspool I won't leave until my sword is not only bloody, but worn down to a nub with the dull edge of a butter knife. That's actually part of why I started coming to Roy's blog: it's part of my court-ordered rage management therapy.
ReplyDeleteMy comments are open source and public domain, though, so by all means feel free to head over there and cause trouble with them. I encourage it.
Okay, I only get my VDH in small, digestible bites, but has he ever said how he gets his health insurance? All of his sources of employ (NRO, WSJ, Hoover Inst., small farm) seem either too part-time or too small to provide it. Does he have it through a spouse's employment, individual market, or just do without?
ReplyDeleteIn the right measure.
ReplyDeleteI'll never hear "Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!" the same way again.
ReplyDeleteWhat happens if everyone doesn't have an equal say in running things? DeT says that it creates a feeling of "indignity" that pushes the less influential individual further and further from power and social interaction until they're left more or less isolated, and forced to satisfy themselves with "crass materialism."
ReplyDeleteDamn. It's as if he knew me personally.
Not while the Kaiser can deploy the dreaded Jonahgoldbergmachin.
ReplyDeleteI've always wanted to ask: Are you the trex? Formerly of FDL? Resident of the Paris of the South?
ReplyDelete"Hold on a goddam minute before I fade to black! Do you
ReplyDeleteknow who I am? I am Victor Davis Hanson, a person whose
job it is to keep you from forgetting people in the past,
like me, for instance."
I'm guessing he's on Medicare. (At least I hope he's that old.)
ReplyDeleteNaaah, he's not real, but an experiment in Comnputer AI like ELIZA, which is why he just keeps reguritating the same old shit in slightly different containers.
ReplyDelete"So tell me why you think Obamacare is the old Stalinist Regime writ large?"
That's not me, although that question has been asked more than once and I think he understandably winces at the comparison, given my proclivity towards generous incivility with trolls. He the famous one, along with being smarter and more mannered and probably more good-looking, I don't know.
ReplyDeleteI'm the trex who hung out at Washington Monthly for years relieving politically-induced stress by beating up on visiting wingnuts, although he frequented that community as well. A good litmus test to identify us is if you're reading something that's measured and thoughtful and erudite - he probably wrote it.
Plus he capitalizes the "T."
Also, billmon reacts via Twitter. In other news, I had no idea that billmon was back in any form.
ReplyDeleteYes, the conviction that THERE IS NOT ENOUGH FOR EVERYONE. There is, but the rich have gobbled it all up. They feel they earned it and deserve it. I suppose bank robbers feel that way about their loot.
ReplyDeleteThe Gazoogle indicates that "grandees" is one of VDH's favourite words. It appears to have no particular meaning for him (other than conveying disapprobation and resentment about 'people thinking they're better than us'), leaving him free to shoehorn it into all conceivable combinations -- "liberal grandees", "Silicon Valley grandees", "wealthy Wall Street grandees", "Muslim Brotherhood grandees" (!), "military grandees" [i.e. non-maverick, non-VDH-approved generals], "Senate grandees",...
ReplyDelete"Aristocratic grandees" has been turning up regularly in his output -- despite the tautology -- at least since 2002. But even in his glass-bead-game of words as empty place-holders, "French Revolution's grandees" should have triggered that little mental flag that warns of internal contradictions.
I'll go with the theory that like Brian O'Blivion, the original VDH died of a brain tumour years ago, leaving a huge warehouse of videotapes which his loyal followers splice and shuffle into new combinations.
De Tocqueville was a smart cookie.
ReplyDeleteIn academic circles it's "self-plagiarism".
ReplyDeleteThe Libertarian Garden of Eden.
ReplyDeleteWhy would VDH look for a metaphor? He already has at least two in his arsenal.
ReplyDeleteGee, that's not too disturbing, especially considering it could very well be taken as an analogy for attaining male maturity.
ReplyDeleteThis is Burroughs, so that's a big yes on both the "anal" and the "logy" bits.
ReplyDeleteOn that note, has anyone plugged a given VDH column into one of those on-line plagiarism detectors to see how many other VDH columns it is indistinguishable from?
ReplyDeleteYou hear this complaint about 'sameness' from conservatives a lot these days. They're free spirits, man! They can't be tied down! Then you hear their unreconstructed bile for everyone who doesn't look, think, pray, shop, and vote like an upper-middle-class white businessman, and the hippie scent begins to vanish.
ReplyDeleteHanson probably thinks 'Nothing But Flowers' is a secret warning against Al Gore.
ReplyDeleteIf you can imagine the ELIZA software implemented on a large aviary as hardware, with each trained bird representing a specific word or phrase, a la the Theaetetus.
ReplyDeleteHanson lives in California. I guess he's one of those political prisoners who's allowed to post on the internet as much as he likes. The Brownian Stasi must have been feeling generous that day.
ReplyDeleteOh, to return to those halcyon days before we ruined it all by organizing those freedom-killing things called "societies."
ReplyDeleteChildren's icecream, Mandrake!
ReplyDeleteIt's true. I hear that AXE was building a line of low-cost Body Insurance, mostly covering hair loss/graying, until Obummercare passed.
ReplyDeleteHe's very good at Twitter, although the most anti-Twitter thing I can think of is that if it didn't exist as an outlet, The Whiskey Bar would still exist. Billmon's one of the bloggers of whom I regularly think, "man, I wish there was a Billmon post about this."
ReplyDeleteIncidentally, what Billmon is referring to is this, in re the NYT's coverage of a guy being shot for texting in a movie theater: "'The New York Times notes that the killing has "underscored the increased debate about when to use smartphones in public.'"
ReplyDeleteThat line has apparently been disappeared, though this remains: "Cinema executives acknowledged during a trade conference last year that they debated whether to accommodate younger viewers by allowing text messages during some movies."
It's almost like something from the Onion, if the Onion were both much more subtle and slightly more tasteless.
You're far too humble.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad it was you.
ReplyDelete...and the complaint that liberals are trying to force Diversity down their throats.
ReplyDelete"...and the complaint that liberals are trying to force Diversity down their throats."
ReplyDeleteWell, what did you expect? First, they took away their right to discriminate by race. Next, they forced equality down their throats. And now diversity! Under conditions like that, is there anything worth saving in the US? Might as well take what you can, and get out.
Remember, it was the noise from the text messaging which so bothered the fellow he needed to open fire. What noise is that, a slight beep when a letter is struck?
ReplyDeleteI'm curious if this is what he's like in his day-to-day life: going to Albertson's and complaining about the parking lot grandees, the cereal grandees, the cashier grandees...
ReplyDeleteIsn't there a German word for "a face which deserves a fist"?
ReplyDeleteIt's really an Internet invention... Germans have gratefully accepted it, but it's far more common in English.
ReplyDeleteHe is, however entirely within the parameters of the German noun "Schiesskopf".
ReplyDeleteIt was the vegetables. The god damned vegetables.
ReplyDeleteNo, there is a German word for "a face that deserves to be slapped", i. e. Backpfeifengesicht.
ReplyDelete"Scheisskopf", schiessen means shooting.
ReplyDeleteShooting the shit, maybe...
ReplyDeleteWith the constant splodeyness of the modern movie, how the hell could you hear that, anyway?
ReplyDeleteBillmon still does the occasional diary at Kos. Nothing like regular, tho.
ReplyDeleteI'm so grateful to him for maintaining what tattered shreds of sanity I have left during the run-up to the Iraq war that I don't begrudge his absence. He was saying what seemed obvious to me but I wasn't hearing elsewhere.
ReplyDeleteIt's hopeless over there.
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteSENEX IRATUS OTDWhat's Latin for "shouts at clouds"?
Is that how it was done in NZ? We got it on sugar cubes.
ReplyDeleteOK, I recently died and was restored to life by the 3-minute response time of the Newton, MA fire department and about a million dollars worth of Medicare and Medigap insurance payments. That's the plan I'd choose for everybody, although if Victor Davis Erectus Maximus Hansen wants to die in the gutter somewhere, well, fine!
ReplyDeleteHe can't be a man cause he doesn't have the same deductible as me
ReplyDeleteIf we keep Tocqueville’s advice in mind, we can appreciate why and how the present war against personal liberty in service to mandated equality may become the greatest danger of the 21st century.
ReplyDeleteInstead of "danger" he originally wrote "cash cow for people like me." But for a quick and judicious application of Wite-Out he might have given the whole game away.
I assume you're not speaking in the voice of VDH (accent on the VD) himself. He definitely strikes me as someone who believes sacrifice is for lesser mortals.
ReplyDeleteIt's a very good sign.
ReplyDeleteI got the set of three Salk shots the year they became available, when I was 5. My sister-in-law's a year older than me. She got polio. She seemed to have recovered completely until that nerve die-off thing started about 12 years ago. Now she walks with a cane.
ReplyDeleteIt means that I love you.
ReplyDeleteBaaaaaaaby
(other than conveying disapprobation and resentment about 'people thinking they're better than us'),
ReplyDeleteAs that wise old knight Yoda would put it, Both ways you can have it not. You can isolate yourself Coriolanus-like on your gentleman farm and pen broadsides about the evils of equality, or you can point at every real and imaginary elite and sputter "You think you're better than me?" Try to do both and you're giving incoherence a bad name.
I just watched an episode of Elvis Costello's Spectacle that featured Nick Lowe --- along with Richard Thompson, Allen Toussaint, and Levon Helm. It was divine.
ReplyDeleteThis all happened BEFORE the movie started. I half expect that state lege to ban texting in movie theaters.
ReplyDeleteSo the shooter wanted to hear every word of the Coke commercial they show before coming attractions?
ReplyDeleteIn all seriousness, it sounds like he had no reason beyond, "You can't stop me."
Also he's probably retromingent.
ReplyDeleteGo Newton! Go MA! Go Tom Parmenter!
ReplyDeleteI regret that I have but one nose to give to thy country .......
ReplyDeleteand the damn vegetables are still not finished with their commie brainwashing techniques - http://youtu.be/KmK0bZl4ILM if you dare.
ReplyDeleteI liked the first translation I saw for it, which was "a face in search of a fist." Joe Lieberman's picture is next to it in the dictionary, but really, that's too limiting.
ReplyDeleteDibs on Björk.
ReplyDeleteHanson's underlying and recurring refrain is that "equality is being forced on us -- by the elites". Those $OUTGROUP Grandees are conspiring with helots and untermenschen, to bring them up to your level -- and probably make you pay them reparations.
ReplyDeleteIt's a twofer! You get to fear and resent two imaginary groups for the price of one!
I want to take a long walk in the rain with this comment. Or maybe sleep with it in the desert tonight.
ReplyDeleteTo this day, small children instinctively recognize them as instruments of oppression.
ReplyDeleteMaybe you can't tie them down, but they sure as fuck can tie you down.
ReplyDelete"Grandees", huh? I truly didn't know till now that Spartans could be such drama queens.
ReplyDeleteTo be fair, I'd say that this is more or less accurate. I just don't see what's so wrong about it. I mean, a strong group being prevented from walking all over a weaker group by an even stronger group? Anyone who thinks that that's inherently evil must have a problem with law enforcement, for starters... :P
ReplyDeleteOld V.D. is the V.I. Lenin Professor of Classics at Fresno State University.
ReplyDeleteWhat about millions of Californians' liberty not to support fatuous baffoons?
Mandated, marinated, what's the difference?
ReplyDelete"Erectus Maximus?" How about "Flaccidus Minimis?"
ReplyDeleteBetween a Phobia list I got all the words I need.
ReplyDeleteGiven the cheery persona VDH projects to the world, I'm guessing his body will be found about four months after his spirit leaves it. Most likely by a thief looking to strip his house of copper wire.
ReplyDeleteVDH is a tenured professor and an employee of the California higher education system. As a result, he pays less than $200/month for pretty much gold-plated coverage including vision and dental. I don't know if he has dependents or not, but that figure will cover at least two of 'em. Of course he deserves this. If anyone else gets it, they're some kind of moocher.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.fresnostate.edu/artshum/mcll/faculty-staff/hanson.html
ReplyDeleteI knew he was at Fresno State (Go, Bulldogs!) but assumed he held some sort of part-time lecturership, since he seemed to have so many other things going on.
So he is not only a tenured professor but an Emeritus professor. An, since he got his AB from Santa Cruz (Go, Banana Slugs!) in 1975, he's likely only 59-60 years old. "Classical Studies" must be a more physically demanding field than I realized.
Are you sure your not confusing it with LSD?
ReplyDeleteIn early '60s San Diego I was given it in a small Dixie cup with a sugary-water concoction.
(True story: The song A Spoonfull of Sugar Helps the Medicine Go Down) was inspired by the Salk vaccine!)
Millions of Americans have lost the liberty to select their own type of health insurance, purchased on their own volition to best match their own assessments of their particular needs.
ReplyDeleteNot having the resources to actually purchase decent healthcare hardly equals "volition".