This Year’s Greatest Television Moment: a most unexpected denunciation of ObamaCare

NewsReal Blog ^ | August 14, 2009 | John Perazzo

[HorowitzianConservative]

Credit must be given where it’s due. Earlier this week MSNBC’s Ed Schultz treated his viewers to two of the finest minutes of television that anyone, anywhere, has seen in years. Not, mind you, because of anything Schultz said, but because of what one of his guests said to him. It was one of those deeply satisfying moments when we got to see a knee-jerk Obama lapdog like Schultz spend several minutes spewing his trademark leftist claptrap, only to be dramatically ambushed by a guest who Schultz thought was going to do nothing more than dutifully rubber-stamp everything he had just said.

The segment began with Schultz deriding ”Christian political operatives” for having failed, thus far, to speak out in favor of the Democrat/Obama plan for government-run healthcare. He looked earnestly at the camera and demanded that “the four most influential Christian leaders in this country” — he named, specifically, Rick Warren, Joel Osteen, Franklin Graham, and James Dobson — “step up and speak up.” ”These Christian leaders,” said Schultz, “need to get engaged and support a Christian president on the public option of providing healthcare for all Americans. Isn’t it the Christian thing to do? Their silence [so far] is deafening.”

Schultz then proceeded to explain that these ministers’ failure to publicly endorse socialized medicine constituted a betrayal of Christ’s message:

[Political Junkie Too]

I watched this earlier, and had some time to think about it. Here's my reply to Ed Schultz:

The reason the religious leaders Schultz cites are silent is because the Church has been in this business for a long time and were driven out of the public policy sector by secularists during the past several decades under the banner of "separation of church and state." Schultz shouldn't be surprised that they're not there now to comment.

I'm sure that Schultz actually isn't surprised, but rather, he's using the Alinsky rule of using their rules against them. He's trying to shame the religious leaders by holding them up to a standard he purports that they live by, but aren't now.

Didn't the church used to host medical clinics for the poor? Didn't the church used to host food banks for the poor? Weren't those clinics and kitchens funded by charitable donations from their parishioners and philanthropists?

What was Schultz' position when George W. Bush proposed "faith-based" initiatives to help the poor?

No, Schultz instead supports government handouts taken from confiscatory taxes, in the name of "morality."

True morality came from local organizations accepting local donations from local residents to help the local poor and down-on-their-luck neighbors in their local communities.

But local people helping their own to improve their situations doesn't fit the Left's agenda of consolidating power and centrally ruling everyone.

-PJ