Category Archives: morality

Iran’s Nuclear Weapons

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The US has agreed to extend “negotiations” over Iran’s nuclear weapons program into June.

Iran is expected to continue receiving some $700 million in oil export revenues that has been stuck overseas because of US sanctions.

Yet Iran gave nothing in return for the extension. Regarding those $700 million, the US gets nothing; Iran gets that for free, and they are free to use the money to expand its centrifuge program, continue its plutonium reactor program, develop its missile delivery program, and so on.

John Kerry’s Crocodile Tears

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Motorboat skipper, accuser of the American military as war criminals, and Secretary of State John Kerry had this to say about the recent Palestinian terrorist attack on an Israeli synagogue in Jerusalem:

“Innocent people who had come to worship died in the sanctuary of a synagogue,” Kerry said, his voice quavering [quavering!]. “They were hatcheted, hacked and murdered in that holy place in an act of pure terror and senseless brutality and murder. I call on Palestinians at every single level of leadership to condemn this in the most powerful terms.

He had these things, though, just prior to, and during the Israelis’ defense against the Palestinians’ terror war last summer. First, his…suggestion…that Israel was flirting with apartheid:

…a unitary state winds up either being an apartheid state with second-class citizens—or it ends up being a state that destroys the capacity of Israel to be a Jewish state.

Then his “peace” proposal for that war, presented as a fait accompli to Israel, had this:

The document recognized Hamas’ position in the Gaza Strip, promised the organization billions in donation funds and demanded no dismantling of rockets, tunnels or other heavy weaponry at Hamas’ disposal.

And his “negotiations” kept putting those Palestinian terrorists on the same moral plain as an Israel defending itself against those terrorists.

Kerry is Grubering us. And in a most shameful way, that makes Jonathan Gruber look like an altar boy.

To Gruber

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We’ve seen now a number of instances where Jonathon Gruber, MIT economist and Obamacare architect, is on record as having said we Americans are too stupid to understand Democrat policies and that it’s entirely appropriate for Democrats to lie to us in order to get their policies enacted.

We’ve seen Gruber express regret over his choice of words while explicitly, in a Ronan Farrow interview, standing by his underlying principles: we’re dumb, and it’s OK to lie to us in the furtherance of the greater Liberal good.

We’ve also seen the Democratic Party leadership—indeed, nearly all Democrat politicians—be utterly silent on the matter. By their broad, steadfast silence, they demonstrate that not only do these Democrats condone Gruber’s characterizations and view of lying, they consider these two things, the stupidity of Americans and the propriety of lying to us, to be core principles of the Democratic Party.

Their silence, though, isn’t quite universal. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) has come out to deny knowing Jonathon Gruber.

She claimed she doesn’t know who he is, and that he didn’t help write the law. “Let’s put him aside[.]”

Never mind that then-Majority Leader Pelosi extensively cited Gruber’s pseudo-analysis of Obamacare while it was being developed.

Never mind that then-Majority Leader Pelosi cited Gruber by name as well as cited his “analysis” in a press conference she held while Obamacare was being developed.

In short, the Democratic Party, through their national spokesman, Congressman Pelosi, are Grubering the whole sordid affair.

Democratic Party Principle

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A couple days ago, one of Obamacare’s primary architects, Jonathan Gruber, said this about the need for the tactics used in order to get the thing passed.

This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. Okay, so it’s written to do that. In terms of risk-rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in—you made explicit healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed…. Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass…. Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.

Despicable as that is, though, what really bothers me are two other things.

In a subsequent interview with MSNBC‘s Ronan Farrow, Gruber had this exchange with Farrow regarding those remarks:

“Do you stand by the comments in that video?,” MSNBC host Ronan Farrow asked Gruber, referring to a video of Gruber explaining how a lack of transparency helped Obamacare pass into law.

“The comments in the video were made at an academic conference,” Gruber said. “I was speaking off the cuff and I basically spoke inappropriately and I regret having made those comments.”

Notice that: Gruber regrets the remarks, but he does not at all regret the underlying principle he espoused. He stands by his claim that Americans are too stupid to understand the issues at hand, and he stands by his claim that it’s entirely appropriate to lie to us in order to get his way.

The other thing that bothers me is the lack of senior Democratic Party officials’ repudiation of Gruber’s underlying principle. I’ve not seen even any rank and file Democrat repudiating it. Apparently, this is a principle of the Democratic Party at large—we’re dumb, and it’s OK to lie to us to get past the impediment to their policy enactment that our dumbness presents.