Health Care and Robert Gibbs

Let’s start today with a few insights on health care. A few days in the hospital gives a thinking person an entirely new perspective on health care, especially on health care as a right. The men who wrote the Constitution were brilliant in limiting the number of rights we have because besides the obvious canard about rights implying responsibilities, every right implies the requirement that someone else deliver that right. So, we all have a basic right to liberty and that right is delivered by thousands of military volunteers who insure that right against foreign threat and by people working within our legal system to insure that right domestically. 

 

Translating that idea to health care means we each have a right to have someone else clean up our vomit, wipe our behinds and bandage our oozing wounds. That is insanity!

 

In many places around the world if you want either of the first two, you better have a family member available to perform them because no one else will. Everyone in the United States gets basic health care not as a right, but as a defining gift and gesture of who we are as a people. We care enough about each other as human beings that we take upon ourselves the tax burden to provide a basic level of care for everyone.

 

My stay was in a publicly funded hospital as a paying patient. Were I a non-paying patient I would have enjoyed the same surgeon’s skills, the same medications, the same post-operative care in the same kind of room with the same food and the same nursing care and I would not have paid a penny for any of it. As a paying patient my out of pocket expenses will be higher than absolutely necessary to make that happen

 

Nothing inspires true gratitude as having a total stranger hold the bucket while one vomits all over one’s self as well and over the room and, when the eruption ends that same stranger helps clean up the whole mess and does it with kindness and a smile.  The magic words we all should have learned as children – “please”, “thank you” and “you’re welcome” – brought beaming smiles to the faces of  nurses, housekeepers, lab technicians, therapists and dietary staff because they hear them so seldom from their patients. Instead, these good and decent people are treated as servile staff whose duty it is to deliver what some self-centered idiot believes to be a “right”.

 

And now for something completely different….. Yesterday, Robert Gibbs took time during a White House press briefing to mock Sarah Palin’s hand notes. Let that sink in for a moment! The President’s Press Secretary sat down at his desk and, in the midst of his boss’ meteoric free fall, took time to script an adolescent comedic stunt to ridicule Ms. Palin.

 

Why is this pathetic?   Let us count the ways!

 

Our nation’s administration is led by a man, and staffed with other people, who are insecure and adolescent. Gibbs’ gesture is a spectacular exhibit of the shallowness, pettiness and amateurishness of the entire administration. Can anyone imagine any of the effective Press Secretaries of adult administrations doing that? Can anyone picture Marvin Kalb, Jim Brady, Marvin Fitzwater, Ron Nessen, Clinton’s guy Mike Whatever, Ari Fleischer, Tony Snow or even the hapless Scott McClellan diminishing their professional stature by acting like a fifth grade class clown before their peers?

 

Gibbs’ behavior reflects what the president feels and believes. He is Obama’s empath. Obama is incapable of shrugging off criticism or ignoring competition.  Every narcissist is insecure and Obama is no different. Sarah Palin scares him to death.

 

Just like every other narcissist, Obama seeks approval from sycophants. It is all just so “high school”. This administration is like a any typical high school clique that is built around the attractive, popular  but incompetent leader. The leader provides status. The followers provide reassurance. Their job is to provide the Greek chorus of praise. The chorus serves two purposes. One is to reassure the narcissist. The other is to drown out any other voices.

 

 Obama’s chorus of media sycophants shout that Sarah Palin is an unqualified, ignorant and incompetent light weight who is scorned and rejected so badly that she has no hope of ever holding national office. They denounce her as every form of “phobe” or “ist” imaginable who draws her support from a fringe of troglodytes who are too ignorant, unwashed and uneducated to count for anything.

 

If the White House, starting with the President himself, really believed that to be true they would ignore Palin and the Tea Party movement. But, when all alone and when the chorus is off duty, every narcissist knows the truth and lives in terror that someone else will discover it.

 

Obama is scared to death of Sarah Palin. That is the truth. Her life story exposes the artificiality of Obama’s. Her humility exposes his arrogance. Her faith exposes his emptiness. Her self confidence exposes his insecurity. Her patriotism exposes his scorn for all things American. Her sense of humor exposes his anger. Her simplicity exposes his duplicity. Just like the leader in the high school clique, Obama knows what is at stake. He must destroy the new and popular kid who is a threat. And, just like the clique leader, Obama will overplay his hand and self-destruct instead.

 

Obama’s chorus is focused on destroying any chance Sarah Palin will be president, but she does not need to run for the Presidency to destroy Barak Obama. She just needs to be herself and Obama knows that, too.

 

Comments

[Milton]

I guess Palin does not understand satire and she complains about telaprompter, what a hypocrite. Palin’s hand job just shows all of us what kind of dullard we are up against, I have not seen this since junior high. WOW and some call her a leader….please.

[Milton]

I guess Palin does not understand satire and she complains about telaprompter, what a hypocrite. Palin’s hand job just shows all of us what kind of dullard we are up against, I have not seen this since junior high. WOW and some call her a leader….please.