Taking Refuge in Ignorance- Part I
March 12, 2007
I am truly underwhelmed especially by two Democratic candidates for President. The leading candidate, thus far, has only two outstanding qualities distinguishing her from President Bush. She is a woman and she is intelligent. Apart from being somewhat more liberal, Hillary seems to share the President’s penchant for remaining ignorant and being very proud of it.
Mrs. Clinton almost single-handedly destroyed healthcare in the ‘90s, gladly listening to lobbyists for insurance companies, lawyers and various business interests without any counsel from health care providers. Her response to Al Gore’s people totally screwing up the Presidential election was to blame it on the Electoral College and suggesting that we destroy it. She claims that she believed there were WMDs in Iraq because President Bush and V.P. Cheney said so. Ha! Ha! She even claims that this was confirmed by her husband’s advisors. To my knowledge, Bill has never had an advisor, a secretary or a janitor in his employ that stupid, thank you very much. Noone, except someone pandering to mentally challenged but patriotic constituents, could believe this unfunny burlesque duo. To this day, she still brags about her ignorance. A vote for Hillary, unfortunately, is not a vote for Bill.
Mr. Edwards has one thing right, at least. The single most important issue, in the next few years, is not Iraq. It is health care. This is fortunate for Mr. Edwards because he has totally screwed up on the War in Iraq. (Were Senators Edwards and Clinton too young to remember Mr. Bush’s father warning that total invasion of Iraq was a certain path to enormous civil war and acts of genocide??). Unfortunately, Mr. Edwards, like Mrs. Clinton, has represented one of the major problems with health care, not one of the solutions, during both his legal and political careers. Mr. Edwards’ legal fame (1) making a few hundred million dollars by raping physicians and insurance companies, mostly for birth defects that, we now know, are not due to physicians, but to “nature,” and (2) suing vaccine makers, that save millions of lives, for excessive amounts in punitive damages for predictable side effects (that should, by right, involve predictable settlements). This would not seem to endear him to most Americans as he talks about his rise from poverty to fantastic wealth on the shoulders of a few guilty and hundreds of innocent victims.
Mr. Edwards’ political career, one of backing and supporting (like Hillary) his Democratic colleagues’ rape and pillage of the Medicare system, with its total lack of competitive bidding, is best termed “disgusting.” Durable goods prices 3-10 times market value and lab costs up to 10 times market value, may cost the government and millions of people on fixed incomes 200-300 billion dollars a year in over payments (literally blood money).
Where were Mr. Edwards and Mrs. Clinton, both attorneys, when Tom Delay had the drug companies propose his Part D- Medicare Plan, unconstitutionally denying the right to competitive bidding on drugs? Were they both afraid that if they invoked the law that they would have to allow competitive bidding for laboratory and durable goods- thus disappointing those wonderful Democratic loyalist lobbies? Have they, like the ACLU, really slow readers, not yet read past the 1st Amendment, not reached the 14th Amendment yet? That pesky Amendment granting due process under the law even to Medicare recipients??? Or will they plead even more ignorance, the attorney’s private refuge from the law- a privilege- hopefully a retirement home- not granted to the rest of us, by the way.
Allen Finkelstein, D.O.