Democrats' 'Bait and Switch'

Barack Obama won the presidency under the persona of healer. He promised to unify a divided nation and said how he would do this.

He'd put ideology aside and solve problems. And he'd bring new open, bipartisan governing to Washington, devoid of special interests.

Rather than temperatures dropping, they have steadily risen to their current fever pitch.

According to the Pew Research Center, the gap between approval rates for the president from Democrats (85 percent) and Republicans (19 percent) is now 66 points. For George W. Bush at about the same time in his presidency, this gap was 51 points. For Bill Clinton it was 45, George H.W. Bush 38, Reagan 46, Carter 25, and Nixon 29.

It's not just Republicans. The gap between the president's approval from Democrats and from independents has expanded from 25 points last February to 37 points today.

Listen to remarks (posted on You Tube) by Rep. Tom Price, a Republican from Georgia, to Democratic committee chairman George Miller, during mark-up several weeks ago of the health care bill.

Here's an excerpt: "...we would have loved to have worked with you on this...but you know there was no opportunity to do that...Speaker Pelosi told a member of your conference that if you talk with Republicans about this, you'll be shut out of the room...you know that this hasn't been a bi-partisan effort."

Price, a soft spoken physician who practiced medicine for over 25 years, brandished the thousand page bill and went on about what the government takeover of medicine will do to health care in this country. The sheer arrogance of trying to re-write the rules for almost one fifth of the American economy, more than $2.5 trillion dollars in annual expenditures, with a few weeks of deliberation is without precedent. How can such an effort be done openly or responsibly?

Now we learn that the pharmaceutical industry's support for this initiative has been bought by the administration with promises that, in exchange, there will be no government meddling in the pricing of drugs.

Soon we'll see glowing TV ads extolling the virtues of the Democrats' health care plan, probably talking about the special interests trying to stop it, being paid for by those special interests. Report is that PhRMA, the pharmaceutical industry trade association, is kicking in $150 million.

The head of PhRMA, Billy Tauzin, who negotiated with the administration on behalf of his member drug companies, is a Washington insider poster child. He was a congressman from Louisiana for 25 years who then parlayed his accumulated contacts and influence to get hired to head PhRMA for a reported $2.5 million in compensation.

This is the new way we do business in Washington? How we reform health care? How Washington operators tirelessly protect the interests of citizens and work to preserve a great country? Six months into this Democrat administration, we find that Americans have been duped by a great bait and switch.

We were sold promises of a sparkling new era, stripped down of ideology and influence peddling. What we have gotten is a hyper-ambitious government take over of our economy, driven by left wing ideology, carried out using the most cynical business-as-usual inside Washington influence peddling. And to lend irony to it all, when outraged citizens grasp what is happening and protest, they are accused of disrupting democracy and racism.

To recall the words of economist Herbert Stein, "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." Hopefully this will stop before we'll need history books to recall the once American dream of freedom and prosperity.

Citizens need to keep their eyes focused on the principle involved, not on the various ruses put forth to make an end run.

And, those who engage in this battle of ideas must elevate the debate to the point where the media cannot distort it as being just "ignorance" (as Katie Couric claimed). The Gibbs, Axelrod and congressional talking points cannot trump the forcefulness and truth of the words of America's Founders on liberty vs. tyranny.

Edmund Burke, in his Speech on Conciliation to the British Parliament way back in March 1775, observed the colonists' fierce "spirit of liberty." He said:

"In other countries the people . . . judge of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance; here they anticipate the evil and judge of the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle." He said Americans could detect "misgovernment at a distance and sniff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze."

James Madison put it this way, "The freemen of America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle. We revere this lesson too much, soo to forget it."

Any Republicans or Democrats who "compromise" for the sake of popularity now on this important principle involving future generations should be recalled at the next election cycle!

This is not about a frivolous question of which provisions are acceptable and which are unacceptable. This is about a power struggle between the principles the founding generation were willing to stake their "lives, property, and sacred honor" for, and those who, throughout the history of civilization have arrogated unto themselves power over other people's lives.

The current "issue" called "health care reform," or its equally obnoxious semantic twin "health insurance reform," is just the invasion of liberty by arrogant elected officials which has finally aroused citizens who, heretofore, ignored the decades-long power grab by those who were supposed to protect "We, the People's" constitutional principles.

Now, citizens are seeing that it is a matter of "principle," not an issue of semantics over wording.

They should not allow their elected representatives to be coopted by "blue dogs" or any other "wolf in sheep's clothing" that would allow what may turn out to be the most important watershed moment in the history of American liberty to be further threatened. Now, Conrad and Sebelius, and others, sensing the voter mood are throwing out "compromise" talk this weekend, all to punt for better position down the road. Seize the moment for the sake of posterity and just say, "no"!

A word from the author of our Declaration of Independence regarding citizens and oppressive government might give some backbone to today's citizens:

"The most effectual means of preventing the perversion of power into tyranny are to illuminate . . . the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts which history exhibits, that they may. . . know ambition under all its shapes, and . . . exert their natural power to defeat its purposes." - Thomas Jefferson

And, for more wisdom from the same source:

" . . . this is a tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second, that second for a third, and so on, till the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sin and suffering. Then begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia, which some philosophers. . . have mistaken it for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man. And the forehorse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follws that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression."- Thomas Jefferson

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