You might as well read through Jule's post here and find the cartoon. Aside from this item, it's one of very few intelligent things I'm finding from the Right on the Web today.
Useful idiot David Brooks takes first prize for stupidity. He'd rather poke and lecture Republicans who have no real power in DC just now and starts by suggesting, The Democratic response to the economic crisis has its problems.
Has it's problems? It's not an economic response, it's a willful economic and social re-engineering of America and this allegedly conservative moron thinks it "has problems"?
If Brooks had any character at all the least he would do is stop aligning himself with the Right.
And unfortunately, Ed at Hot Air has to take runner up for the stupidest nonsense of the day for continuing to play footsie with his "friend Jazz Shaw":
Catholic churches own these hospitals, and they can choose at any time to close their businesses, just as anyone else can close their business when it no longer makes a profit or when other costs become too high. Just as with the farmers, all the government can do is negotiate with them to find ways to keep them in business, but government has no right to force a private business to remain open — or to offer services to which the proprietor objects. If government action threatens to force Catholics to choose between their faith and their hospitals, then government needs to determine whether they’d rather the hospitals stay open or force a showdown.
Don’t worry; Jazz does better on Card Check.
If someone needs to be instructed on the former at such length, I couldn't care less what they think on the latter, as their appreciation for the fundamental tenets of our secular democracy is so flawed as to be dangerous, or dumb - and more likely both. It's so lame that elevating their platform can only be a mistake. Evidently Shaw is an Assistant Editor at the long mis-named Moderate Voice.
If the Catholic Church feels that its moral superiority outweighs the secular, lawfully elected government of the United States to the degree that they can unilaterally shut down hundreds of hospitals across the nation, then it is drunk with power.
America is still a nation with a tradition of separation of church and state as well as the ability of the majority’s elected representatives to pass the laws of the land. Leaving so much of our critical health care in the hands of those who would blackmail us with their religious dogma is equally as foolish and dangerous as remaining dependent on the Middle East and Venezuela for our nation’s energy supply.
There's about as much ignorance and ultimately anti-American dumb crammed into Shaw's post as I've ever read anywhere this side of DailyKos. If a prominent and supposedly conservative blogger believes the right of government to dis-possess any Church of its property and business for the good of the state is a subject in need of intelligent debate, you've already ceded so much ground as to have lost the war. Consequently, there's about as much intelligence as there is principle in that side of the argument, too. And that's not very damned much, I'm afraid.
Via email - Stacy McCain with more on Brooks.
The next time I hear from John Hawkins on one of his Right-side blog temperature checks, I'm going to write back and ask him where it is one might actually find such a thing. More often than not I find myself thinking it doesn't even exist to any significant degree.
"then government needs to determine whether they’d rather the hospitals stay open or force a showdown."
catholic hospital are about 18% of the hospital market.
Posted by: mark l. | Tuesday, March 10, 2009 at 02:11 PM
18%
They ARE hospital services in many if not most urban centers. And it isn't clear another provider would even want that business. I can only imagine what all this might cost taxpayers.
Posted by: Dan Riehl | Tuesday, March 10, 2009 at 02:22 PM
OK, I'm probably setting myself up to be smacked around, but, I'll do something I rarely ever do, and pimp a post which I think is intelligent. http://www.thepiratescove.us/2009/03/10/obama-exhaustion-watch-someone-answer-the-phone-hes-sleeping/
Not much too it, mostly cut and paste, but, I don't see anyone else covering it.
Also, people with Wordpress might want to change their internal time, with the time change Sunday and all.
Posted by: William Teach | Tuesday, March 10, 2009 at 09:46 PM
"then government needs to determine whether they’d rather the hospitals stay open or force a showdown."
catholic hospital are about 18% of the hospital market.
Posted by: Will | Thursday, March 26, 2009 at 12:20 PM