Teddy is laughing over this letter printed in the Times Daily today:
Fascinating. Seven years after quoting Theodore Roosevelt here in my vain attempt to alert readers to an abomination of tyranny (i.e. the Bush administration), someone uses the same quote in reference to Barack Obama and health care reform.
Oddly, Roosevelt was the first president to tackle the health insurance industry; in fact, he was an advocate of Canadian-style single-payer. Even in 1915, the same corporate entities evoked the same scare-words to defeat reform.
Invoking his name to declare federal regulation of health insurance corporations (not doctors, or hospitals) “unconstitutional” is just silly.
What was constitutional about aggressive war? Torture? Warrantless wiretapping? Letting an American city drown? Outsourcing war and disaster to unaccountable mercenaries? Halliburton losing $100 billion in the desert?
Massive new deficits while cutting taxes on the richest Americans?
Regulatory failures and bailouts? Polar ice caps melting so fast our satellites are recording the meltdown in real-time?
Come on, folks. Which of the above is constitutional?
But now that our president is a Democrat addressing massive failures of free market gospel, the same people who excused those things worry aloud about their eroding freedom.
Modern conservatism has a basic credibility problem: It has ruined the nation. They are out of ideas and left with nothing but interests. They no longer reason, but rationalize an intellectual sheen onto the predatory corporations, idiots and religious extremists they favor.
The wreckage caused by modern conservatism lies all around us, and speaks for itself. If conservatism isn’t dead, it deserves to be.
