How do you spell “B-A-C-K-F-I-R-E”? I spell it “F-I-S-H-Y.” Or maybe D-o-u–g-l-a-s-s, L-i-n-d-a. Bad move, guys, asking people to tell the government if they know anyone who is now, or who ever has been, opposed to Obama’s health care “reforms.”
This will be a big one. Obama really put his foot in it with GatesGate, accusing the Cambridge police of “acting stupidly” when Sgt. Jimmy Crowley arrested “Eminent Professor” Henry Louis Gates of Harvard — Harvard! — for disorderly conduct and then seeking to weasel out of the ensuing mess with a disingenuous piece of equivocation followed by beers all around at the White House. If that was a “teachable moment,” you would have thought the Obama administration would have learned something about how to respond to criticism.
Doesn’t look that way. Opposition to the Democrats’ proposal to have the government swallow up health care, impose rationing, limit treatment for seniors, extend waiting time for everyone, expense another trillion or so dollars, and then tax everyone in sight to pay for a health care plan that they themselves will be exempt from is not, to put it mildly, going down well. Grassroots protests are breaking out all over the country.
How can this be? Why don’t these slobs get in line and realize we’re doing this to help them? Dissent is patriotic when practiced by left-wingers, but when ordinary citizens who are conservative express their unhappiness it’s mob rule. Of course, the White House is not concerned about such protests — no siree. When you have a mandate from heaven, you don’t worry about a few well-dressed conservative trouble makers.
You don’t worry about ’em. But you do keep tabs on them. And you ask their friends and neighbors to keep tabs on them, too. And what do you suppose people think about that?
They don’t like it, Linda. Here’s a letter that the distinguished historian and co-founder of FIRE sent to the White House (and to many others)
Dear Big Brother/Big Sister:
The link below is more than “fishy”. . . . it is an intrusion upon the privacy of American citizens, of our right to dissent without records being compiled by political power, and of our foundational civil liberties:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Facts-Are-Stubborn-Things/
I trust that now I have made your “something fishy” list in the files of executive power, too. If so, it is a privilege to be there.
Sincerely,
Alan Charles
Kors Professor of History
And here’s the popular internet commentator Neal Boortz:
The Democrats seem to getting really frustrated over the fact that Americans aren’t down on their knees begging them for healthcare reform. So now, the White House wants to know if you talk to anyone or read anything about healthcare reform that seems “fishy”.
Boortz has an excellent idea: I urge my readers to act on it: “Take the web address for Linda Douglass’ little speech and send IT to the White House. You can hardly sound more fishy than that.” Indeed. Here’s the email address for the Thought Police:
And here, again, is the link to Linda Douglass’s noxious effort to intimidate people:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Facts-Are-Stubborn-Things/
Mail her today. Then reflect on David Hume’s observation that “It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.” That sentence stands as an epigraph to to Friedrich Hayek’s book The Road to Serfdom. It is as pertinent today as when Hayek set it down in 1944.
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