SINCE WHEN DID AMERICANS WANT TO SHUT OUT DISSENTERS?

I Thought ‘Dissent Is Patriotic’
By Dennis Prager
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Living in liberal Los Angeles, I am surrounded by people — and bumper stickers — I do not agree with.

One of the more popular liberal bumper stickers of the last decade tells us "Dissent is Patriotic." Now, as it happens, it is impossible to truly disagree with that phrase, not because it is self-evidently true, but because it is self-evidently meaningless. As are most left-wing bumper stickers.

For example, another popular liberal bumper sticker proclaims, "War Is not the Answer." It, too, is completely meaningless. If the question is, "What is the square root of 8?" war is not the answer. But if the question is "How do you stop genocidal regimes?" war probably is the answer.

As concerns "Dissent is Patriotic," the fact is that dissent is neither patriotic nor unpatriotic. Sometimes it is one, sometimes the other, sometimes it has nothing to do with patriotism. The right to dissent is a basic American value. But that is not what the bumper sticker says.

Those who dissented when Alabama schools were racially integrated were not acting patriotically. Those who dissented against British rule in North America are considered our greatest patriots. Those who dissent against the doctrine that global warming caused by human beings is leading to worldwide catastrophe are courageous and probably right, but their dissent is neither patriotic nor unpatriotic.

The worst part of the liberal mantra, "Dissent is Patriotic," however, is not that is meaningless. It is that it is apparently meant solely to defend liberal and left dissent. Dissent against the right is inherently patriotic.

Dissent against the left is another matter. To Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and to the New York Times Paul Krugman and every other left-wing commentator I have read on the issue, those who dissent against the Obama/Democratic Party health care plan are not only not patriotic; they are Nazis, mobs, white racists (according to Krugman's non-sequitur thesis) and are always organized. They are activists sent by health insurance companies, the Republican Party, or by some other nefarious right-wing organization.

To the left, it is almost inconceivable that normal "hardworking" Americans, even Democrats, might find the idea of an immense increase in government intrusion into our lives frightening.

I wonder how Paul Krugman and Nancy Pelosi would explain my physician, Dr. Michael Richman. He is a thoracic-cardio surgeon in Santa Monica, Calif. who is liberal, who voted for Barack Obama, and who has disdain for most health insurance companies. Yet, he came on my radio show last week to announce that he deeply regrets having voted for Obama in light of the damage the president's plan would do to American medicine.

Now, if Dr. Richman attends a Democratic congressman's town hall meeting to protest the congressman's support for the government taking over about 16 percent of the gross domestic product, will he, too, be dismissed as a neo-Nazi or health insurance company stooge?

The answer is, probably yes. In fact, that is exactly what happened — and captured on local Atlanta TV — in Georgia's 13th Congressional District this past weekend. A local physician, Dr. Brian Hill, a urologist, went to a town hall meeting organized by Democratic Congressman David Scott. When Dr. Hill asked in a calm voice why the Congressman would support a government health plan in light of the failing government health plan in Massachusetts, Rep. Scott began yelling at him about people from outside the district coming to "hijack this event" and that those at his town hall meeting raising the health care issue should have had "the decency" to call the congressman's office to set up a meeting to discuss the issue and not take over the town hall meeting.

As reported by WXIA-TV News, the local NBC affiliate, however, Dr. Hill does live and vote in the congressman's district, had called the congressman's office numerous times and got no response, and is not a Republican.

But such people as Dr. Richman in California and Dr. Hill in Georgia don't exist in the Democratic Party's or in Paul Krugman's mind. Like most of the left since Marx, the American left today has created an image of the world to which reality is subservient. Left-wing theories define reality, not vice versa. And in that closed world, left-wing dissent is patriotic, while dissent against the left is fascistic at worst, or paid for by the greedy at best.
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Jewish World Review August 11, 2009 / 21 Menachem-Av 5769

‘Conservatives, Shut Up and Step Aside’

By David Limbaugh

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | The hubris, arrogance and deceit of President Barack Obama and the Democratic leadership are breathtaking. In their maniacal frenzy to assume control over every aspect of our lives through socialized medicine, they are behaving like the thuggish autocrats they have proved themselves to be.

The jig is up on their designs, evidenced by the very contents of the health bill they're promoting. As increasing public awareness has translated into increasing grass-roots opposition to the bill, the Democrats have ratcheted up their bullying tactics and deceit.

Our self-styled bipartisan president is telling his critics to shut up, while his partners in crime, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her colleagues, are calling them un-American and Nazis.

Understand this: The people who are showing up in droves with righteous anger befitting a body politic steeped in a unique liberty tradition are exercising the very type of bottom-up citizen protest and government watchdogging our Founding Fathers envisioned. They are not the artificially driven "AstroTurf" phonies the Democrats are depicting them to be. No, such activities are the province of Alinsky/Obama-type "street organizers" and union thugs enlisted by the administration to discredit these legitimate protests.

It wasn't enough for Pelosi to call us Nazis. She also co-wrote, with House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, an op-ed in USA Today calling us un-American and projecting her own nefarious tactics onto her opposition.

Pelosi and Hoyer accuse the protesters of engaging in "an ugly campaign … not merely to misrepresent the health insurance reform legislation, but to disrupt public meetings and prevent members of Congress and constituents from conducting a civil dialogue."

They say: "The first fact is that health insurance reform will mean more patient choice. It will allow every American who likes his or her current plan to keep it. And it will free doctors and patients to make the health decisions that make the most sense, not the most profits for insurance companies."

How can these government propaganda ministers sleep at night? They are the ones misrepresenting the legislation and closing their meetings to genuine dissent.

In the first place, it is not "health insurance reform." It is an effort to fundamentally transform the entire health care industry and how decisions are made. Their recent move to euphemize this monstrosity as "insurance reform" is part of their strategy to demonize insurance companies in their ruthless quest to shove this down our throats.

The bill would not allow Americans to keep their plans. It would crowd out and eventually eliminate private care; enormously reduce choice, as well as the quantity and quality of care; and be a fiscal nightmare, as verified by Congressional Budget Office projections. Worst of all, it would further destroy our liberties.

And by Obama's own words, it would decrease doctors' prerogatives over the type of care they provide. He admits he'd control doctors by making their "bundled payments" conditional on their meeting quality standards imposed by an omniscient, omnipotent government, not doctors and their patients.

Pelosi and Hoyer's most laughable claim is that their plan "will stand up to any and all critics."

If that's so, why don't they tell the truth about what's in the bill and truly answer legitimate questions and concerns about it instead of resorting to name-calling and intimidation? If that's so, why is Obama sending out his hired mouthpiece, Linda Douglass, to deny what Obama most clearly said? She protests that his statements promoting a single-payer system were taken out of context and then gives us absolutely no evidence they were. We are just supposed to disbelieve our lying eyes and ears.

It's also disingenuous to argue that in any event, Obama's earlier statements are irrelevant because he says he does not favor a single-payer system today and would protect our right to private care. Again, we have the bill itself, which would phase out private care — mandatorily — so the denials are self-evident lies.

Obama isn't delegating all the dirty work to his surrogates. Our pseudo-cool leader himself has become conspicuously unglued. About opponents of his outlandishly reckless agenda, he said that he doesn't "want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking"; he wants "them just to get out of the way so (Democrats) can clean up the mess." He went on, "I don't mind cleaning up after them, but don't do a lot of talking."

He obviously thinks that he has the unilateral right as president, with 53 percent of the vote, to use our money to impoverish and enslave us and destroy our health care and that we have no right even to object. We only get to speak every two years.

Well, this president — with a faux-messianic wind boomeranging in his face — has now met his match: an increasingly informed, vigilant, politically engaged and liberty-loving citizenry. And none too soon.

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David Limbaugh, a columnist and attorney practicing in Cape Girardeau, Mo. Comment by clicking here.