Posts in "government healthcare"

By Jared Fuller at 6:47AM

Jul 22, 2010

America on Trial: Socrates, Obama, and Why They Are Opposites

*Disclaimer: If you’ve not read any of Plato’s works, this rebuttal may not make much of any sense. For further reference, see Plato’s Apology, Republic, and my personal favorite, Phaedo.

I have to ask Brandon Griefe who recently wrote an opinion piece entitled Obama: A pupil of Socrates a sincere question:

Are you serious?!

You cannot honestly believe you’re the only person to have ever trivialized the greatest philosopher known to modern society. You may, however, be the only person who has written an opinion piece on Obama and Socrates being similar.

Politics does make for strange bedfellows as the saying goes, but you are making a big stretch by putting Obama and Socrates even on the same page.

Let me be straight: Obama is the polar opposite of Socrates. While the failings of President Obama are many and clearly obvious to a lot of us, I will take particular contention with your opinions on Socrates and Plato in regards to government driven society.

Mark Steyn: The new permanent statist society

H/t Hotair.com:

The last two paragraphs are the best:

Cross the River, Burn the Bridge
Obamacare is the fast-track to a permanent left-of-center political culture.

My Republican friends often seem to miss the point in this debate: The so-called “public option” is not Page 3,079, Section (f), Clause VII. The entire bill is a public option — because that’s where it leads, remorselessly. The so-called “death panel” is not Page 2,721, Paragraph 19, Sub-section (d), but again the entire bill — because it inserts the power of the state between you and your doctor, and in effect assumes jurisdiction over your body. As the savvier Dems have always known, once you’ve crossed the Rubicon, you can endlessly re-reform your health reform until the end of time, and all the stuff you didn’t get this go-round will fall into place, and very quickly.

As I’ve been saying for over a year now, “health care” is the fast-track to a permanent left-of-center political culture. The unlovely Democrats on public display in the week before Christmas may seem like just a bunch of jelly-spined opportunists, grubby wardheelers and rapacious kleptocrats, but the smarter ones are showing great strategic clarity. Alas for the rest of us, Euro-style government on a Harry Reid/Chris Dodd/Ben Nelson scale will lead to ruin.

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