The Moral Relativism of the Left

It doesn’t matter whether the Left is our own gang or Germany’s—they carefully are insisting that their hate groups are legitimate while those claiming to be on the right are terrible.  And they distort the facts while they’re about it, so lost in their own bigotry are they.

This cynical distortion is from Deutsche Welle (the author of the piece didn’t have the courage to sign his name to it, as do other authors of DW articles):

In his comments, Trump also appeared to show sympathy for the white nationalists’ efforts to preserve Confederate monuments—the issue that had started the confrontations, as a monument depicting Civil War General Robert E Lee was being removed in Charlottesville.

Of course, DW knows this is false.  The ones trying to preserve the Confederate monuments were folks who view them as symbols of a heritage of courage and loyalty.  The white nationalists and white supremacists who were present have nothing to do with that and were there only to assert their own twisted ideology, usurping an entirely separate protest altogether.

There’s also German Justice Minister Heiko Maas:

It is intolerable how Trump is now glossing over the violence of the right-wing hordes from Charlottesville.

Because the Antifa gang, whose goal it is to physically attack those with whom they disagree, who attacked the protesters—who had the city’s permits to engage in their protest—is entirely justifiable.  This is shocking from a man who sits on a judge’s bench.

On our side of the water, there’s ex-Vice President Joe Biden (D) tweeting

There is only one side.

He’s right about, but not in the way he thinks.

Never mind that neo-Nazis; KKK, neo- and otherwise; white supremacists; et al., have nothing to do with the right (beyond the “alt-right” of the NLMSM’s fetid imagination).  It’s wrong to condemn the Left’s Antifa, BLM, New Black Panther Party, CAIR, La Raza, et al., for the violence, vandalism, and other crimes they committed during the Charlottesville riots last weekend.

Those thugs and their bigotry, their hatred of all who disagree with them, their attacks on those of whose speech they disapprove, their criminality can’t possibly be on the same plane as those who usurped a peaceful pro-Confederate flag protest by inserting their Nazi spew into the protest.  Mm, mm.

The Left’s hatred is better than the hatred they attribute to the right.

That’s crap.  Hate groups aren’t part of the right or the left, they’re just part of Hate.  They’re on only one side—their own, the side Biden accidentally called out.

It’s interesting that the Left enthusiastically embraces its hate groups while the right openly and just as enthusiastically reject the hate groups that claim they’re on the right—as the right condemns all hate groups.  Just as President Donald Trump condemned all hate groups in Charlottesville.  There are no moral differences among hate groups.

The Left doesn’t get that.  Or doesn’t care.

Right Idea, Wrong Target

Charlottesville, VA, Mayor Mike Signer (D):

I’m not going to make any bones about it.  I place the blame for a lot of what you’re seeing in America today right at the doorstep of the White House and the people around the president.

True enough; that is where last weekend’s sorry events began.  The identity politics of the last eight years by the White House of ex-President Barack Obama (D) and by his mentee, Democratic Party White House hopeful Hillary Clinton, and those associated with the two created the conditions that caused the rioting in Charlottesville last Friday and Saturday.

After all, those who disagreed with Obama were unpatriotic, were terrorists, were hostage takers, were racists.  Those who weren’t in that White House’s chosen groups were contemptuously dismissed as Bible-clinging, gun-toting residents of flyover country.  Those who disagreed with the policies of the Democrats’ favored groups were slandered as irredeemably deplorable racists (repeatedly racist), homophobes, Islamophobes, any _phobe Democrats could think of.

The police were stupid when they weren’t being racist—never mind any of the facts of the situations.  The Left gleefully calling Tea Partiers “teabaggers.”  Democratic Congressmen, on the Capital Building steps in the aftermath of Obamacare’s passage, falsely claiming racist slurs coming from the protestors that greeted them on those steps.

Signer needs to check his sight picture.

Bullies

Recall how Google, last week, outed a Conservative employee and his critique of Google personnel practices, then bullied him with public opprobrium, then fired him.

Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai was going to have an all-hands town hall this week to address the matter, but then, after employees expressed concerns

about their safety and worried they may be “outed” publicly for asking a question in the Town Hall[,]

he cancelled the whole affair.  The company put the original teapot tempest into the public’s eye, but when allegedly faced with the same outcome for themselves, they skittered back into their baseboard holes in the walls.

Aside from the breathtaking hypocrisy of this sorry charade, this illustrates an old maxim: bullies are cowards, and Google management and Google’s Precious Ones employees are just the same.

A Bit More on Health Care Coverage

Senator Susan Collins (R, ME) is worried about health care plan availability to our poor, which she thinks would be endangered were President Donald Trump to act on his thoughts regarding cutting off the funds the Feds pay to health coverage plan providers to get them to charge (artificially) lower deductibles and copays from the poor.

It really would be detrimental to some of the most vulnerable citizens if those payments were cut off. They’re paid to the insurance companies, but the people that they benefit are people who make between 100% and 250% of the poverty rate.

Couple things about this. One is that folks making more than the poverty rate…aren’t poverty-stricken.

The other is that, if the money really is intended to help folks pay for health care coverage plans, the money should go directly to those folks and not to the insurance companies. That way there would be no loss to internal friction in the middlemen of health care plan providers—a friction loss extant even in the most honest and well-intended of providers.

And one more: these aren’t insurance companies selling insurance policies.  It isn’t insurance when risks are transferred by Government fiat and at fees that bear no relation to the risks being transferred.

Collins knows these things full well.

Obamacare and Choice

There are 3,142 counties and equivalents (Louisiana has parishes, Alaska has boroughs, three States each have an independent city, Virginia has 38 of them, and State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations does things entirely differently) in the US.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services expects that 40 of those counties will have no health care coverage plan providers at all in 2018, and 1,332 of those counties—over 40% of them—will have only one such provider.

Not to put too fine a point on the matter, but this is not choice.  This also drives home the lie of “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor; if you like your insurance plan, you can keep your insurance plan.”

Obamacare’s implosion is in full swing, it’s happening rapidly, and Republicans are fiddling.  They can bleat that it’s all Progressive-Democrats’ fault, that the Progressive-Democratic Party owns Obamacare to their heart’s content.  It’s irrelevant.  The Republican Party has been running on repeal and replace for the last four election cycles, and they now have majorities in both houses of Congress, and they have the White House.  The Republicans own repeal and replace—and they own the failure to make even the first syllable of progress toward that worthy end.

Timid Republicans need to find their courage and get on with the business.  Along these lines, others who demand that it all be done at once—both right damn now and in a single bill—need to recall the lessons of Obamacare as a single, all-at-once, almost right damn now bill, and they need to keep in mind political realities: Republicans in the Senate don’t have the filibuster-proof majority the Progressive-Democrats had for most of the time they were putting together their bill.

Repeal and replace can’t, won’t, and shouldn’t happen in a single bill.  It’ll need to occur as a series of bills, although those bills need to be passed in quick succession as politics go: over the course of a couple of Congressional sessions, or at most over two Congresses.

Senators Susan Collins (R, ME) and John McCain (R, AZ) are desperate to return to “regular order,” to negotiate with Progressive-Democrats and to hold hearings.  Fine.  Do that.  Those hearings need not take longer than a couple of weeks—especially if the Senate (read: Republicans) get rid of the ridiculous 2-hour per day limit on hearings—and the negotiations can be done similarly quickly, particularly since the Progressive-Democrats have shown they won’t seriously negotiate.

But get after it.  Republicans need to stop dithering, stop playing with their…fiddles…and get on with the business.  They have their own choice to make regarding their place in Government and in the nation.