"If This Doesn't Scare You, Nothing Will"
Part One of Two

By Dave Andrusko

Part Two revisits one of the great (if unintentionally) pro-life moments on television which, when many people first received it as Part Two yesterday, was garbled. Please send comments on Part One and/or Part Two to daveandrusko@gmail.com. If you'd like, follow me at www.twitter.com/daveha.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell

I'm not so innocent as to believe that facts always "speak for themselves." There can be an honest difference of opinion about the meaning of the facts, or important information omitted/unavailable, or great uncertainty about the "unanticipated consequences," to mention just three reasons some things might not be as obvious as a first read of the "facts" would suggest.

But there are other occasions when the truth of a proposition is so straightforward that it all but jumps up and smacks you in the face. When that is in the context of a growing threat to our liberties, we ignore it at our peril.

I offer the courageous and prophetic remarks of Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell which you can watch at www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6rY3rxb60k When I sent this out to friends yesterday, I added this introduction: "If this doesn't scare you, nothing will."

There is no more consistent or articulate defender of the First Amendment in the Senate than McConnell. McConnell was on the floor of the Senate denouncing an action that was as outrageous as it was chilling.

As the publication Roll Call put it this morning, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus "asked Jonathan Blum, acting director of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' Center for Drug and Health Plan Choice and a former Baucus Medicaid policy aide, to investigate a mailer by the insurance giant Humana that was critical of Baucus' health care reform bill. Blum sent Humana a letter warning them to stop sending out the critical mailers and said the agency is investigating the company's activities."

McConnell put it plainly and bluntly. "We cannot allow government officials to target individuals or companies because they do not like what they have to say." He went on (almost plaintively), "Is this what we believe as a Senate -- that this body should debate a trillion-dollar health care bill that affects every American while using the powerful arm of government to shut down speech?"

So what was it that so upset Sen. Baucus? According to the Washington Post, "The federal government has ordered health insurers to stop telling Medicare beneficiaries that proposed health reform legislation could hurt seniors and jeopardize their benefits. The government might take enforcement action against insurers that have tried to mobilize opposition to the legislation by sending their enrollees 'misleading and confusing' messages, a senior official of the Department of Health and Human Services said in a memo Monday. The mailings in question urge enrollees to contact their congressional representatives and protest the legislation, the memo said."

So, eight months into the presidency of Barack Obama we have come to this. The chairman of one of the most powerful committees dealing with health care "reform" has unleashed one of his minions in the federal bureaucracy to threaten Humana on the grounds that the insurance company is sending out "misleading and confusing" messages. Okay, what were they?

According to the Post, the "HHS crackdown" on "the big insurer Humana" was triggered "by a letter to Medicare enrollees claiming that health reform proposals could hurt 'millions of seniors and disabled individuals' who 'could lose many of the important benefits and services that make Medicare Advantage plans so valuable.'" [Medicare Advantage is an alternative to traditional fee-for-service Medicare offered to Medicare recipients that has proven to be very popular.]

Pro-abortion President Barack Obama and pro-abortion Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi

But this shall not stand, says Sen. Baucus. "It is wholly unacceptable for insurance companies to mislead seniors," he said in a news release earlier this week. "The health care reform bill we released last week strengthens Medicare and does not cut benefits under the Medicare program -- and seniors need to know that."

Two things. First, as the Wall Street Journal editorialized this morning, "Maybe Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus should put a gag order on Douglas Elmendorf too. On Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office director told Mr. Baucus's committee that its plan to cut $123 billion from Medicare Advantage--the program that gives almost one-fourth of seniors private health-insurance options--will result in lower benefits and some 2.7 million people losing this coverage." This is not the first time that a representative of non-partisan government agencies has spoken truth to power, showing in the process that the airy reassurances of Obama and his gang are transparently false.

Second, whatever happened to the right to disagree with the federal government? Although TN&V is just one blog, I write about disagreements NRLC has with health care "reform" almost every day. Will I get a letter soon? What will they threaten me--or NRLC--with?

The attack on Humana is part and parcel of something much larger and more 1984-esque: The unrelenting determination by the Congressional Democratic leadership to squelch opposing viewpoints by hook or by crook. That runs the gamut from verbally assaulting people as swastika-carrying "evil-mongers" to labeling them "racists" for daring to question the agenda of Obama and his cohorts running Congress.

I learned 40 years ago that THE most intolerant people on the face of the planet are those who boast about how tolerant they are. How can that be?

In a real sense because their public espousal of everyone's right to disagree is not predicated on a genuine respect for differences of opinion, but instead reflects a private assumption that no one of intelligence and good will could possibly have an opinion different than theirs.

Last thought, and the scariest of them all. Nancy Pelosi is reputedly the most powerful Speaker of the House in generations. She is also an out-and-out, I-couldn't-care-less demagogue.

She hints darkly that today's opponents of the larger Democratic agenda are linear descendants of yesteryear. "I saw this myself in the late seventies in San Francisco," she said recently. "This kind of rhetoric was very frightening and it gave -- it created a climate in which violence took place."

What, I ask you, is a devoted public servant like Pelosi to do? Sit idly by or take "preventive" action?
Send your comments to daveandrusko@gmail.com

Part Two