Revisiting Obamacare, Massively Unpopular Yet Still Shoved Down Our Throats: We Get the "Big Brother" We Vote For

With the election right around the corner, I thought now would be a good time to take a look back on Obamacare, when it was first being introduced, and revisit my thoughts about it from the pages of my journal.  This is from over two years ago, in July of 2010:

I tell you Winston, that reality is not external.  Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.  Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the party, which is collective and immortal.  Whatever the party holds to be truth, is truth.  It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.

                                - From 1984 by George Orwell

     The more I keep hearing about or reading up on the Obama administration – the way they operate and their agendas and the massive and massively deceptive bills they try to pass quickly so nobody will have a chance to question them, and the far left values they stand for, and how they react to any dissent or opposition – it makes me stop and ask the question:  Has anyone else seen the glaring similarities to futuristic, dystopian novels like 1984 by George Orwell or Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury?  I see the Obama administration’s actions, and reactions, and then I can’t get the plots and characters and eye-opening quotes from these novels out of my head!  …Orwell and Bradbury were quite the visionaries, and I can’t let go of their nightmarish visions, because the words and actions of the Obama administration keep calling them to mind!

All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers. 

                                - from 1984

      First off, there’s the health care bill itself.  Anyone who does any research on it at all will find that, as with the stimulus package, there are all kinds of hidden agendas in there among the hundreds and hundreds of wordy pages designed to exhaust the mind.  Fred Thompson recently interviewed Dr. Betsy McCaughey, the Chairman of the Committee to Reduce Infectious Death.  She has been nice enough to read the entire document for us, since most of us don’t have the time to read the entire monstrosity.  There are some shocking things in there!  On page 425, Dr. McCaughey tells us that elderly patients would have to endure a mandatory counseling session every four or five years with government healthcare workers.  It is not a stretch of the imagination to think that these government workers, trying to save a buck or two of medical insurance, will tell the elderly how they can end their life sooner to save themselves and their loved ones the trouble of keeping them alive.  Have you ever seen the movie Soylent Green?  After all, everybody knows that it’s the elderly that are creating such a drain on our healthcare resources; the liberal democrats can eliminate the problem by eliminating the elderly!  … Obama will finally be able to save us all some money, and the only cost will be our aging parents’ lives.  Cal Thomas’ recent article “What Lies Beneath” (cool title) states, “Our decisions regarding who will get help and who won’t are about more than bean-counting bureaucrats deciding if your drugs or operation will cost more than you are contributing to the U.S. Treasury.”  I'm thinking of an episode of Star Trek: Voyager called “Critical Care” in which that ship’s doctor found himself in a hospital where only patients who were deemed the worthiest in society got treatment.  These patients were given medication for unneeded, frivolous cosmetic purposes, while that same rare medicine was denied to people deemed of less worth, and who were allowed to die.  And it’s about to happen for real!  This is socialized healthcare, like what we are seeing right now in England and Canada and the Michael Moore “documentary” Sicko, and this Obamacare bill will only bring about more of the same.  Mike Huckabee and all the other conservative radio and TV voices have covered this on their shows.  It’s not us going to England and Canada for care.  Instead, they come here, and even with all its problems and faults, it’s still the best healthcare system in the world.  That’s why people from other countries come here rather than the other way around!  Do you think they’ll be coming here if this bill gets passed, and our country starts to look like theirs?

     Chuck Norris’ article “Dirty Secret No. 1 in Obamacare”, which, like all the articles I mention here, can be found on Townhall.com, explains how they have also included within the bill, somewhere after page 800, government programs that would allow them to enter your house and tell you how to raise your children - in conjunction with their ideals and agendas, no doubt.

            But even scarier than the bill itself is their reaction to the people who question it. 

We must all be alike.  Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal.  Each man the image of every other; then all are happy, for there are no mountains to make them cower, to judge themselves against.

                - From Fahrenheit 451

     Wouldn’t Obama and the Democrats in charge love to be able to make that happen!   And now Washington, coming scarily close to Big Brother from Orwell’s 1984, wants you to rat on your neighbors!  From Lorie Byrd’s article “The Democrat’s Credibility Gap on Free Speech” she writes, “The White House is concerned that their health care plan is not being accurately characterized.  They have even encouraged Americans who read or hear their friends and neighbors saying anything ‘fishy’ to report them to flag@whitehouse.gov.”  Doesn’t that just send a chill down your spine?

     In Fahrenheit 451, Guy Montag, the protagonist, is a fireman whose job it is to burn books.  In this future setting, firemen don’t put out fires anymore – they start them!  Their job is to burn books.  Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which paper burns.  When they go out on a call, they are following up on a tip by some random citizen; they raid houses, find the illegal books…and burn them… Becoming curious, Montag starts to collect and read some of the books he was supposed to burn, and then makes the mistake of reading the poem “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold to his wife and her frivolous friends as they try to watch television.  His wife Mildred is embarrassed, and tells them this is the firemen’s way of showing others how useless books really are, but the other women are so appalled (and programmed) that they leave immediately to report him.  Likewise, a little later in the story, Mildred also turns in her husband for concealing the wretched literature, and Montag becomes a fugitive.  On the run, Montag happens to see a television report about him:

“Police suggest entire population in the Elm Terrace area do as follows: Everyone in every house in every street open a front or rear door or look from the windows.  The fugitive cannot escape if everyone in the next minute looks from his house.  Ready!”    

Of course!  Why hadn’t they done it before!  Why, in all the years, hadn’t this game been tried!  Everyone up, everyone out!  He couldn’t be missed!  The only man running alone in the night city, the only man proving his legs!

     And just like the society in that novel, we, too, are being called upon by those in charge, the very kinds of people who thought the McCarthy hearings were such an unspeakable tragedy, to report on the “wrong,” independent thinking of our neighbors!  This whole issue has turned from a concern about health care and what deceptive agendas are actually in the colossal bill to a debate on free speech and freedom!  Byrd continues:  “It is equally ridiculous to hear those on the angry left discredit and ridicule those American citizens – Republicans, Libertarians, and independent-minded Democrats – who have legitimate concerns over the inaccurately named stimulus plan, bailouts and the attempt to put the American health care system under government control.  Many in the media have joined in, labeling these concerned citizens as “angry mobs,” or, if reporting from MSNBC, as ‘tea baggers.’”  Leave it to the liberal media to refer to an alarmed populace attending nationwide “tea parties” as “tea baggers”, a reference to a gay sex act!  Does no one else see the obvious allusions to Fahrenheit 451?  In the novel, a large, futuristic mechanical “Hound” is dispatched to catch him, and Montag envisions his capture:

Would he have time for a speech?  As the Hound seized him, in view of ten or twenty or thirty million people, mightn’t he sum up his entire life in the last week in one single phrase or a word that would stay with them long after the Hound had turned, clenching him in its metal-plier jaws, and trotted off in the darkness… What could he say in a single word, a few words, that would sear their faces and wake them up?

                - From Fahrenheit 451

     Aren’t we just trying to do the same thing with our “tea parties” and questions?  WAKE UP PEOPLE!  THINK!  Don’t you realize they have an agenda, and that they won’t stop until they’re Government hands are as far into everything as they can possibly make them go?  They’re dream is to make you as brainwashed and as moldable as the characters in these futuristic novels!  That would solve all their problems!

     In the novel, Montag does manage to get away, yet the authorities and media completely forged his capture to make their indoctrinated populous believe whatever they want them to believe, as another character explains to Montag:  “They're faking. You threw them off at the river. They can't admit it. They know they can hold their audience only so long. The show's got to have a snap ending, quick! If they started searching the whole damn river it might take all night. So they're sniffing for a scape-goat to end things with a bang. Watch. They'll catch Montag in the next five minutes!”  Likewise, the liberal media is trying to discredit and downplay any dissenters to Obama’s great Healthcare Package, as Lorie Byrd explains later in the same article:  “When hundreds of thousands of average Americans showed up at over 800 ‘tea parties’ held in over 800 cities, and in every state in the country, on April 15, 2009, those in the media yawned.  Compared to the media attention Cindy Sheehan…garnered when opposing the war in Iraq, those hundreds of thousands of Americans were ignored.  Worse yet, some in the media even ridiculed them.”  In fact, this is just the tip of the iceberg in what is, in reality, a downright hatefest going on over on the liberal left, and one that the predominately liberal media wants to spread like wildfire…

The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in.  Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary.  A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s own will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic.  And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.

                - From 1984  

     How long before the liberal left becomes unhinged and starts treating ordinary, concerned citizens the same way Jessica Lange treated George W. Bush?  “The hubris, arrogance, and deceit of President Barak Obama and the Democratic leadership are breathtaking,” states David Limbaugh in his article “Conservatives, Shut Up and Step Aside”.  Shades of Big Brother abound!  “As increasing public awareness has translated into increasing grass-roots opposition to the bill, Democrats have ratcheted up their bullying tactics and deceit.  Our self-styled bipartisan president is telling his critics to shut up, while his partners in crime, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her colleagues are calling them un-American and Nazis.”  Are these legitimate protests from government watchdogs as envisioned by the founding fathers, and conducted by, as Limbaugh describes them, an “increasingly informed, vigilant, politically engaged and liberty-loving citizenry”, or is it instead a hateful campaign waged by backwoods “un-American Nazis” as envisioned by Nancy Pelosi?  You be the judge (while you still can). 

Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling.  Everything will be dead inside you.  Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity.  You will be hollow.  We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.

                - From 1984

     This would be Nancy Pelosi’s dream come true!  She and her friends on the far left have already proven that they have no love for unborn infants, and this Obamacare package shows how they are just itching to wage war on the elderly to boot!  And their reaction to the grass-roots “tea parties” of some of their own citizens shows quite clearly they would much rather have empty human minds to fill rather than the unwanted opposition they are rightfully encountering. 

     In an op-ed piece in USA Today, along with House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, Pelosi called this opposition “an ugly campaign… not merely to misrepresent the health insurance reform legislation, but to disrupt public meetings and prevent members of Congress and constituents from conducting civil dialogue.”  Well, don’t her words sound so very carefully chosen, and all so that she can be painted by the liberal media who loves her as the sane one?  …The more I get a glimpse of her true agendas, the more she gives me the willies!  Why are they so against opposition and genuine decent?  Could it be they have something to hide?  Could it be that this thing is just a nightmare waiting to happen, and most free-thinking people in society can smell the stink a mile away?  Trust me, this predominately democratic government would rather have an indoctrinated public, a citizenry that will take what they give it and love it, or learn to love it.

Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year.  Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information.  Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving.  And they’ll be happy because facts of that sort don’t change.  Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with.  That way lies melancholy.

                - From Fahrenheit 451

Like true politicians, their language is, first and foremost, deceptive and misleading.  So are their ideas, twisted so far out of proportion it’s hard to see what they really look like sometimes.  Is it healthcare reform, or a complete overhaul and socialization of the entire system?  And as with the stimulus package, they are making it massive and trying to rush it through Congress ASAP so no one will have pause to consider what this thing really is.  This lends the administration a tone of deceptiveness and, a concept straight out of 1984:  “Doublespeak”.

     Limbaugh continues:  “The bill would not allow Americans to keep their plans.  It would crowd out and eventually eliminate private care; enormously reduce choice, as well as the quantity and quality of care; and be a fiscal nightmare, as verified by Congressional Budget Office projections.  Worst of all, it would further destroy our liberties… Pelosi and Hoyer’s most laughable claim is that their plan ‘will stand up to any and all critics.’”  If that’s true, why are they trying to silence their critics by calling them “un-American Nazis”?  That’s some rather brutal name-calling, without really taking into account or answering any of our real concerns!

     I get the feeling Nancy Pelosi would like nothing more than to come down hard on and silence people for “thought crime” against her ideas.  Out of one side of her mouth, she and this administration welcome questions and criticism, but their actions and words betray them.  In truth, they want no such thing. 

Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference.  The Thought Police would get him just the same.  He had committed – would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper – the essential crime that contained all others in itself.  Thoughtcrime, they call it.  Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever.

                - From 1984

     They are taking a page from the radical homosexuals’ and the Global Warming alarmists’ playbooks:  In the USA Today article, they state, “These disruptions are occurring because opponents are afraid [italics are mine] not of just differing views – but of the facts themselves.  Drowning out opposing views is simply un-American.”  Is it un-American to question the ideas and actions of our government?  I thought that kind of questioning was actually un-Russian, not un-American.  It’s the very same thing the militant gays and the extreme environmentalists have resorted to in the past:  Calling any who oppose them and their ideals “afraid” and “intolerant” (and “un-American…Nazis”).

     Perhaps we ARE afraid, but not of differing views.  We’re afraid of what this country is going to be like once Nancy Pelosi, Barak Obama, and the far left liberals get done with it.  But the scariest thing is that they would like nothing more than for the nation to put down their loudspeakers and magnifying glasses and accept them and their agenda unquestioningly.  It would actually bring tears of joy to Nancy Pelosi’s eyes.

But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished.  He had won the victory over himself.  He loved Big Brother.

                - From 1984