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A Nation of Julias (Ask not what you can do for your country; ask what your country can do for you)
National Review ^ | 05/04/2012 | Rich Lowry

Posted on 05/04/2012 6:24:37 AM PDT by SeekAndFind

In the competition for the creepiest campaign material of 2012, we may already have a winner. It is “The Life of Julia,” the Obama reelection team’s cartoon chronicle of a fictional woman who is dependent on government at every step of her life.

The phrase “cradle-to-grave welfare state” originated with Clement Attlee’s socialist government in post–World War II Britain. Back then, it was meant as a boastful description of a new age of government activism. Subsequently, it became a term of derision for critics of an overweening government. In the spirit of Attlee, the Obama campaign revives the concept of “cradle to grave” as it highlights Obama-supported programs that take care of Julia from age 3 to her retirement at age 67.

Julia begins her interaction with the welfare state as a little tot through the pre-kindergarten program Head Start. She then proceeds through all of life’s important phases, not Shakespeare’s progression from “mewling and puking” infant to “second childishness and mere oblivion,” but the Health and Human Services and Education Departments version: a Pell grant (age 18), surgery on insurance coverage guaranteed by Obamacare (22), a job where she can sue her employers for more pay thanks to the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (23), free contraception (27), a Small Business Administration loan (42) and, finally, Medicare (65) and Social Security (67). (In a sci-fi touch, these entitlements are presumed to be blissfully unchanged sometime off in the 2070s.)

No doubt, the creators of Julia — imagine a dour and featureless version of Dora the Explorer who grows old through the years — weren’t seeking to make a major philosophical statement. But they inadvertently captured something important about the progressive vision.

Julia’s central relationship is to the state. It is her educator, banker, health-care provider, venture capitalist, and retirement fund. And she is, fundamentally, a taker. Every benefit she gets is cut-rate or free. She apparently doesn’t worry about paying taxes. It doesn’t enter her mind that the programs supporting her might add to the debt or might have unintended consequences. She has no moral qualms about forcing others to pay for her contraception, and her sense of patriotic duty is limited to getting as much government help as she can.

The alleged benefits to Julia are exaggerated or nonexistent. Pity the poor thing if she depends on Head Start for her launch into the world. A study by the Department of Health and Human Services last year found that positive educational effects tend to wear off by the first grade. The government assistance she gets for financing college feeds into the maw of inexorable tuition increases. The chances that the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act is going to boost her pay, as a web designer, are essentially nil. Julia is getting punked.

Her life is framed to show that she gets more from President Barack Obama than from Republicans. The same contrast could be achieved differently. She could lose her web-design job and go on unemployment, which President Obama always wants to extend despite Republican objections. With her family’s income dropping, she could resort to the food-stamp program, which has expanded massively under President Obama despite Republicans’ inveighing against the trend. These examples don’t suit the campaign’s purposes, though. They show government to be a poor substitute for the robust recovery that President Obama hasn’t delivered even as he has endeavored to make Julia’s birth-control pills free.

The point of view of “The Life of Julia” is profoundly condescending. It assumes that giving people things will distract them from larger considerations of the public weal — the economy, debt, the health of the culture. This view’s infantilizing tendency is captured by Obamacare’s insistence that, for purposes of health insurance, young adults are children who belong on their parents’ policies until the age of 26. It devalues self-reliance and looks at us less as independent citizens than as drab Julias, bereft without the succor of our life partner and minder, the state.

No thanks.

— Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review.


TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Culture/Society; Government; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: welfare

1 posted on 05/04/2012 6:24:42 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
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To: SeekAndFind
Here's Romney, being surprisingly blunt, putting a "Julia type" in her place.
BTW, I remember a show back in the 60's called Julia. It starred Diahann Carroll, one of the first TV shows to star a Black person. Interesting coincidence.
2 posted on 05/04/2012 6:51:36 AM PDT by Impala64ssa (You call me an islamophobe like it's a bad thing.)
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To: SeekAndFind

This, in a nutshell, illustrates the #1 overriding issue in each and every European election.

And that’s where we’re headed.


3 posted on 05/04/2012 6:52:02 AM PDT by Buckeye McFrog
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To: SeekAndFind

Where are Julia’s parents?
Where is Julia’s father?
Where is Julia’s husband?

Nowhere. They are irrelevant. Uncle Sucker will take care of her.

See Julia.
Come. Come and see!
See Julia take.
Take, Julia, Take!


4 posted on 05/04/2012 6:59:19 AM PDT by servo1969
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To: SeekAndFind
I'm very surprised they didn't show Julia's Momma living in government housing her entire life, Julia being born and raised in government housing, and Julia's 12 children by unknown and absent fathers being raised in one room in the same government housing. That's the way real-world government dependency works.

Government-supplied housing is so uplifting for the soul...

5 posted on 05/04/2012 7:01:48 AM PDT by ProtectOurFreedom
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To: ProtectOurFreedom

Julia was the “heroine” in Orwell’s 1984. Eventually she gave up her independent streak and returned to the protection of “Big Brother” The current Marxist administration is hiding NOTHING about their plans for AmeriKa.


6 posted on 05/04/2012 7:05:57 AM PDT by Don Corleone ("Oil the gun..eat the cannoli. Take it to the Mattress.")
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To: ProtectOurFreedom

From the National Review:

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/298859/julia-kevin-d-williamson

Alas, Team Obama has omitted a few milestones from the life of Julia:

4 months: Julia’s mother decides that giving birth will be hard on her figure. She kills Julia. Under Barack Obama, her right to do so is absolutely nonnegotiable.

10 years: Trapped in a failing and dangerous public school, Julia (another Julia, not the dead one) is terrified and miserable. Under the Obama administration, protecting the government education monopoly from competition and accountability is almost as sacrosanct as abortion. School-choice programs are severely constrained or eliminated. Julia falls behind.

21 years: After barely completing her high-school degree in her god-awful school, Julia goes looking for a job. There aren’t many, especially for people without college degrees. Julia kicks around the food-service and hospitality industries for a while, and ends up getting a job as a bartender. Even at her relatively low level of income, she pays a host of direct and indirect taxes to help subsidize Obama donors and supporters at politically connected businesses. She can’t quite figure out why President Obama’s pet millionaires and billionaires need her money more than she does.

22 years: After working in the bar for a while, Julia decides she likes it and wants to open her own place. But she’ll need capital to get that done. Under Obama, there is little or no credit available to small entrepreneurs, because we never got around to fixing the problems in the banking system, instead choosing to futz around with things like the disclosures on credit-card offers and micromanaging swipe fees and grandstanding about bonuses. Julia does not open her new business, and she doesn’t hire any other Julias to build, decorate, supply, or staff it.

23 years: Being a bartender, Julia works late at night. Under Obama, the federal government supports laws that make it difficult or impossible for a private citizen to own a gun in many places. Leaving her bar one night, the defenseless Julia is killed in the street. Ironically, the gun used to kill her was sold to a Mexican drug cartel under a program run by President Obama’s Department of Justice.

57 years: Julia (different Julia, not one of the dead ones) has been paying very high taxes for most of her life, mainly to support three federal programs: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. In fact, the payroll tax diverts about 12 percent of her income — income she might have saved — into the entitlements. Under President Obama, stubborn refusal to reform these unsustainable entitlements means that the programs have to be radically cut or entirely eliminated, and Julia and her whole generation get hosed in spite of the fact that they have been taxed for decades under the phony promise that they were “paying into” the programs. The only alternative to massive cuts was an 88 percent increase in all federal taxes, which already have been rising to offset costs from Obamacare, which were wildly underestimated.

88 years: Julia (different Julia) passes away in 2022. And she got out just in time: Policies adopted by the Obama administration sent the national debt to $71,000 per person and climbing.


7 posted on 05/04/2012 7:06:30 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
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To: SeekAndFind

Half of what 0bama says is meaningless
But he said it just to reach you,
Julia

Julia, Julia, socialism-child, calls me
So I sing a song of dependency, Julia
Julia, empty eyes, welfare smile, calls me
So I sing a song of dependency, Julia

- with apologies to the Beatles


8 posted on 05/04/2012 7:10:50 AM PDT by allmendream (Tea Party did not send GOP to DC to negotiate the terms of our surrender to socialism)
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To: SeekAndFind
22 years: After working in the bar for a while, Julia decides she likes it and wants to open her own place.... Julia does not open her new business, and she doesn’t hire any other Julias to build, decorate, supply, or staff it.

Add this:

22 1/2 years: After griping publicly about how the government red tape and regulations make it impossible for one to build their own business, Julia is arrested under the Barack Act (a 'night and fog' decree), and swept off to a special facility where she is taught respect for the government and her leaders, absolute obedience, patriotism, and the virtue of hard work. After six months of 12 hour labor days in a rock quarry on 800 calories per day she has learned her lesson. But she collapses and dies nonetheless. The facility commander, Capt. Shabazz, sends a letter of regret to her family stating that she died of natural causes and includes a bill for nine cents, the cost of one bullet.

9 posted on 05/04/2012 7:34:49 AM PDT by 17th Miss Regt
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To: ProtectOurFreedom
Or like this from "the Matrix."


10 posted on 05/04/2012 7:35:02 AM PDT by FreeAtlanta (Liberty and Justice for ALL)
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To: SeekAndFind
Add this:
66 years: Julia becomes sick with lung cancer but was misdiagnosed for years because she never smoked and always ate according to latest dictates from government. There is a new drug shown to cure lung cancer (developed in the most advanced country at the time, India) but it is too costly, the government will not pay for it. She is told to go home and take an aspirin. She believes she has no other option because her whole life she has depended on the government for everything. She can't possibly think for herself. She has no idea that she could buy the drug herself. That might require some financial sacrifice, but that concept is foreign to her. She dies before she can collect her fair share of “Social Security.”
11 posted on 05/04/2012 7:55:59 AM PDT by GrannyAnn
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To: SeekAndFind

The Life of Julia suggests Obama will never leave office.
Instead of passing away, Under Obama’s presidency Julia will be denied life saving treatment and ordered to be terminated by the Death Board.


12 posted on 05/04/2012 7:59:55 AM PDT by TopDeadCenter
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To: TopDeadCenter; GrannyAnn; FreeAtlanta; 17th Miss Regt; allmendream; SeekAndFind; Don Corleone; ...

I'm NOT 'Julia'!

13 posted on 05/04/2012 8:05:44 AM PDT by Baynative (Please check this out - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFIcZkEzc8I)
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To: GrannyAnn
She dies before she can collect her fair share of “Social Security.” ... The government nanny is ecstatic to be through with yet another useless eater.
14 posted on 05/04/2012 5:58:16 PM PDT by ProtectOurFreedom
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