Saturday, August 4, 2012

Don't take my guns! Take my healthcare protection instead!

Right wingers are terrified that the Negro in the White House will take away their guns, leaving them defenseless. Yet they're also terrified that the Negro in the White House will give them healthcare protection, leaving them defended if they get sick enough so their healthcare insurer no longer makes a profit off them (even if it did make a profit from them for 40 years).

They want to be defended against physical, violent attack that most of us will never experience in our entire adult lives. Yet they want to not be defended from going bankrupt because they can't get health insurance if they get sick and their insurer denies their claims on some legalistic pretext and they lose their home and go bankrupt trying to get the care they need--and that does happen to a great many middle class people--people who felt fine until they didn't.

This is a pattern. Right wingers want to strip government of health inspectors and the laws to back them up; safe workplace inspectors and the laws to back them up; bank regulators and the laws to back them up; IRS inspectors who might find some of the trillion plus dollars rich people have squirreled away offshore to evade taxes...and the laws to back them up.

Everything that might protect the private citizen from being cheated and exploited by rich, powerful people you have zero chance of suing and winning even if you try...right wingers want to be defenseless in front of, because they believe rich people are saintly public benefactors, just like they tell you they are.

Once upon a time conservatives believed in law and order. Now they're government-hating anarchists. Amazing that what was conservative is now unthinkable, and what was purely the province of kooks is mainstream conservative thought.

As one real conservative after another is standing up and saying, in various ways, from Jeb Bush to Judge Posner to David Frum, that their beloved party has gone nuts. These people have not become liberals. They just aren't nuts.



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