It's Not A Crisis

Jesse Taylor points out Bill Kristol and the neocons considered Saddam Hussein nuking America a threat worth spending trillions of dollars on because Americans might die. The chance of Americans dying from lack of health care coverage however isn't worth a single f'ckin dime to these slimeballs.

So, on the eve of what’s predicted to be a potential epidemic of swine flu, increasing unemployment, rising numbers of uninsured, underinsured and medical bankruptcies, Bill Kristol has pissy-pants over the fact that Obama didn’t call Congress together to go to war.

So President Obama invited himself into our living rooms tonight...why? Not to address questions of war and peace—even though we are fighting two wars overseas, and even though an avowed enemy and terror sponsor is rushing towards nuclear weapons. Not to address the economy—even though unemployment continues to rise, the deficit is at an all-time high, and we face a truly worrisome debt burden in the years ahead. And not to rally the nation in the face of some other crisis.

But isn’t health care a crisis? No.

Indeed, the president acknowledged it isn’t: “But we did not come here just to clean up crises. We came to build a future. So tonight, I return to speak to all of you about an issue that is central to that future—and that is the issue of health care.” In other words, health care—unlike, say, the financial system a few months ago—is not in a state of crisis.

Besides the fact that Bill Kristol cannot read, and cannot understand the simple idea that we don’t just mop things up but build systems to ensure the problem doesn’t happen again, it strikes me as...let’s say ironic that a man who vehemently supported a war of choice in a sovereign nation when we were already fighting another war thinks he has room to lecture other people on what is and isn’t a crisis. The population of Iraq is around 28,000,000. The population of uninsured and underinsured Americans is at least twice that. The idea that those Americans may die early and in destitution from a wholly preventable phenomenon that almost every other major industrialized country on Earth dealt with decades ago isn’t a crisis, but failing to find Saddam Hussein eating Doritos in a hole could have very well killed all of your babies twice over.

Iraqi lives (and oil) are still far more important than American ones, apparently. Dirt poor Iraqis need American intervention worth trillions. Americans who can't afford health care? Screw em. There's no crisis.