Seventeen Million

With rhetorical flourish Mr. Obama appears to have solved the insurance problems of some seventeen million people.  How'd he do it?  He simply said so.  Now that's power.  In paragraph eight of his speech Wednesday evening the number of uninsured plummeted 28%, and the only thing the government had to do (In this case the chief executive) was--to Quote Captain Jean-Luc Picard--"to make it so."  Has something of an imperious connotation does it not?

'There are more than thirty million American Citizens who cannot get coverage.'

Poof!  Fourty-seven million becomes thirty and seventeen million people in this country can now get or are covered.  Nice trick that.  I suspect its kind of like the 2,3,4 million jobs saved or created thanks to the Stimulus.  They were all going to be government jobs paid for by taxpayers dwindling resources but let's not dicker too much over specifics.  Nor shall we belabour the point that we have fewer jobs now than any time in decades--which coincidentally contradicts Mr. Obama's opening claims last night to having a hand in pulling us back from the economic brink.  This from a man who is comfortable ignoring his blaring contradictions while blaming others for whatever brush strokes might mar the canvass of his historical portrait.

The point of all this, if I must have one, is that the President always leaves out the governments complicity for the current state of affairs the way a cluelss parent makes excuses for the troublesome  behavior of their own child. 

Mr. Obama for his part, wants to be above the fray, something of a spokesman, a lens through which the power of government shall be focused to achieve the liberal utopia.   And it is here where we see the arrogance.  He does not believe the light of government power should shine upwards from the people, reflected by their representatives to ends which secure and protect their sovereign rights and those of their respective states against the actions of a repressive federal government.  He views Government as the  source of its own power, so that he and congress are free to focus that light upon whatever chimeras they can conjure to justify their successive grasps for power.

There is no room for a constitution in any of this, and that is quite obvious from his disregard for its limitations.  The founders, whatever their manifold flaws, saw Obama coming, and to be honest most of his recent predecessors with but a few excpetions.

There are plenty of viable solutions that include less government meddling, but only government can bring that change.  Change could include less government, could it not?

The speech is not exceptional except in that he is still making them, hoping that we will finally buy his snake oil and accept his premise that we are servants to the government and not the other way around.

But perhaps another week will see yet another 17 million freed from the island of the misfit uninsured.  Stranger things have happened. 

Plenty of speech to evaluate--more to follow the coming days.