Democrat Likens Obamacare to 'National Security Attack'

Well yes, I can see how it would appear that way. Xavier Becerra, California Democrat congressman, makes a fool of himself during a segment with Chris Wallace of Fox News:

WALLACE: If I may sir, when the healthcare law says it will begin after December 31, 2013, isn’t that pretty specific?

BECERRA: It WILL begin after December 2013.

WALLACE: Yeah but, now it’s 2016!

BECERRA: Well the president said we’ll start it after 2013, but we’re going to make sure it works well for small businesses. And the fact is — what he’s trying to do is make things work. When Congress can’t pass bills, when Congress shuts down the government, the president can’t just sit there! What he’s saying is –

WALLACE: Well, yeah. That’s the way the Constitution’s written. The president’s just supposed to sit there.

BECERRA: No, he — is just supposed to sit there? If we have an emergency the president is just supposed to sit there? If we’re under national security attack –

WALLACE: Well, we’re not talking about an emergency with Obamacare.

BECERRA: But you never know if something might happen, if we just sort of –

WALLACE: We’re not talking about a foreign threat here, sir.

BECERRA: I would hope that we would never have a chief executive who would twiddle his thumbs because Congress can’t get its act together. We need to move! We need to move.

Dial those amps up to 11 — we need to move!!!!!!!! As Thomas Sowell once said, intellectuals cannot operate at room temperature; and the slow-motion train wreck of Obamacare will require additional train wrecks for Mr. Obama to “repair,” until all of the cars and locomotives have been run off the tracks. But Becerra isn’t the first to (inadverently) compare the implementation of  socialism (aka, the Gleichschaltung) to a national security attack. In his recent book, The New School, Glenn Reynolds noted:

In 1983 – three decades ago – the report A Nation at Risk was published by President Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education and famously observed, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” Since then, things have, if anything, gotten worse. But in the essentials, not much has changed.

And 15 years ago, in  The Abolition of Britain, Peter Hitchens similarly wrote:

The novelist Kingsley Amis, deeply depressed by the collapse of knowledge and good judgement in the literary and  political worlds, wrote a withering satire on the decay of national culture at the end of the 1970s (Russian Hide and Seek, 1980). Just as Evelyn Waugh had once suggested that the Labour government of 1945 was similar to living under foreign occupation, Amis suggested that the trashing of our culture and literacy were so severe that only a ruthless foreign invader could possibly make them worse.

So I can certainly understand why an effort to destroy America’s health care industry could similarly look like a national security attack, as Becerra inadvertently claimed in his spectacular Kinsley-esque gaffe.

Update: Heh, indeed:™

Dem Panic. It looks like this => Dem likens #Obamacare disaster to ‘national security attack’ http://t.co/409WsTU3U1 #NCsen #LASen #COSen

— LL1885 – A.P. Dillon (@LadyLiberty1885) February 17, 2014