Cheap shots and doublethinks

Socialists claim Welles, too, Have they no mercy?

Stop Presses!

The latest Obamacare martyr is a celebrity case: none other than Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-MN) who has lost her coverage as well as that of her frail husband and all 27 children or however many it is because of the so-called Affordable Care Act:

Bachmann and Democratic strategist Paul Begala battled over the Affordable Care Act on CNN’s “The Situation Room” on Thursday. But Bachmann made quite the admission when asked by host Wolf Blitzer if she was going to sign up for the health insurance exchanges.

“Are you kidding? I’m not gonna waste an hour on that thing!” the Minnesota Republican said. But Bachmann then added, “I lost my health insurance under Obamacare.”

She went on to explain her husband had very serious health issues and they need health insurance, but said she wasn’t going to waste her time on a website that doesn’t work. (RedAlert Politics)

I'm like oh the humanity. But does Bachmann seriously not realize that she lost her coverage not because of anything in Obama's proposals but because of Republican sabotage, in Senator Grassley's successful effort to kill the traditional Office of Personnel Management program and requiring all members of Congress and their staffs to buy coverage on the exchange? Star Tribune tried to remind her a couple of months ago, but did Michele pay attention?

Orwell that ends well

The Political Commentator "from inside the walls of a liberal enclave on Long Island, New York!" (does that mean his house, or office, is a liberal enclave? exclamation point in the original), did a post that he shared at the Sulia site on the Obamian propensity for "Doublespeak", which doesn't mean exactly what it did to George Orwell or, as [jump]the Commentator has it, to "Orson Wells" (is that a double fault, when you misspell the name of somebody you misidentify?):

That sounded vaguely familiar to his statements about the Benghazi, IRS and NSA scandals where the President vowed to get to the bottom of things and hold people accountable but never quite seemed to get around to it.

Will it be more of the same with Obamacare? Sadly, you bet your ass it will!

In any event I found this cartoon today that examines a few examples of what Barack Obama has said with the actual translation provided by Orson Wells.

Originally from Daily Paul.

Gobsmacked beyond anything by the idea of Orwell (or Welles) being especially upset over the Bretton Woods system that took the world off the gold standard, and retroactionarily blaming Obama for it to boot.

An awful lot of conservatives believe that Orwell was really a conservative who called himself a socialist out of some kind of odd Tory whimsy (maybe in the way our great American aristocrat Henry Adams called himself a "conservative Christian anarchist" though he was pretty obviously none of the above). This includes much better educated people than our cartoonist here, like Russell Kirk as quoted by The Imaginative Conservative:

Orwell’s socialism, then, scarcely can be called a position at all, but only an agonized leap in the dark, away from the pain of consolidated, uniform, industrialized modern existence. Orwell was acutely and miserably class-conscious, as perhaps only a poor and puzzled Englishmen can be, to a degree most Americans find difficult to understand; he thought of himself always as distinctly middle-class, and he wished he were nothing of the sort. So the best solution which occurred to his mind was the merging of all orders of society into a vast inchoate proletarian body.

(Then again you might apply a precise mirror argument to Kirk, the conservative who voted for Norman Thomas and Eugene McCarthy in the 1944 and 1976 presidential elections. While David Brooks and Andrew Sullivan of course light a candle at Kirk's altar every time they go to church, he's way too subtle and quirky for most of the tribe.)

That's a more respectable way of putting it than the hosts who quote the 1948 letter from Orwell to Malcolm Muggeridge—

The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians. 

—and retroactionarily assume that means Big Government and Small Government. As we have been learning over the past few years, Libertarianism as a movement pretends to advocate universal freedom but in practice calls for freedom for those who already have power, by virtue of their portfolios, penises, skin color, or marketable skills; the freedom to oppress (and shriek about "political correctness" when you're criticized). Universal liberty is a socialist idea, conditional on equality, as Orwell understood very well and expressed very clearly (no agonized leaps or poverty and puzzlement in the following):

And the Flat Earth Society is just like the NAACP!

(Hey, for reals: President Bush never went to any of their conferences, did he?)

The president of a museum which teaches that dinosaurs walked the Earth at the same time as humans said this week that San Diego was “like Selma, Alabama in the 1950s” because his ministry was denied a seat on the local museum council....

“I’m afraid we are being opposed for nothing more than the old prejudice against God,” Cantor lamented....

“It’s like we’re in Selma, Alabama in the 1950s and I want to have a museum on black Americans,” Cantor said. “Do you think I’ll be accepted by the council of museums in Selma, Alabama?” (Raw Story)

I actually asked the Old Nobodaddy for his views, but he didn't bite:

.@TheTweetOfGod I notice you never address "the old prejudice against God". http://t.co/rPiQRHKPhg Has it affected your life or career?
— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) November 14, 2013

"The bad news: God doesn't exist. The good news: You don't need one." Genoa 2009, photo from Wikipedia.

If anybody wants to know, incidentally, why I haven't written anything about Junior G-Man James O'Keefe's latest fund-raiser video, just tell 'em it's the fault of Scott Clevenger at World O'Keefe I mean World O' Crap, who has made me throw my draft away by saying almost everything I would have liked to say only a lot funnier.