By DEXTER DUGGAN
In Washington’s current maelstrom of speculation about who’s spying on whom, the questions go even deeper.
When a victim of spying said “Yes” on the phone, did he really mean “No” but intended to conceal his meaning from possible interception? Or did he really mean “Yes” when he said “Yes,” but hoped to mislead the eavesdropping spy into thinking he actually meant “No”?
Collecting information covertly means not only preparing transcripts but also analyzing them for elusive significance, to extract the pearl within the ugly, resistant shell.
And we’re not even talking about the Neil Gorsuch public hearings for the Supreme Court, where leftist senators hoped to mind-read hidden, evil thoughts into the openly stated ideas of the apparently conservative, well-meaning jurist from Colorado.
mGovernments routinely snoop on each other, even if their diplomats put on cheery faces at garden parties with foes. If spying isn’t the oldest profession, covert action is at least as old as when Cain tried to mislead God that he wasn’t keeping tabs on Abel’s whereabouts.
In recent months, was electronic evidence left behind demonstrating that a surreptitious contact was done by Russian spies? Or was that actually Chinese spies leaving behind an intentionally confusing trail to make themselves seem to be Russians?
In addition to all the eavesdropping and snooping in the shadows, there’s another arena for duplicity and misdirection — the public forum where news conferences and news releases hope to turn political results in one direction or another.
If one politician lauds another, is this really done to enhance the second guy’s standing, or perhaps instead undertaken to put the second guy off his guard, for when the first politician plans to undermine him later?
Such District of Columbia questions about where’s the reality in what we seem to see through the smoke and mirrors took on greater importance as Donald Trump threw his weight behind an apparently highly flawed health-care bill to correct the errors of onerous Obamacare.
Very possibly at stake were not only Trump’s future but also Republican Party power and the medical welfare of many millions of innocent victims of Barack Obama’s 2010 Democratic Party federal trashing of health care.
Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R., Wis.) correctly reminded voters recently that GOP campaigners in 2016 had promised to repeal and replace Obamacare.
However, the jerry-rigged legislation sometimes called Ryancare, which GOP leaders suddenly thrust on Congress on March 6, didn’t strike many people, including assorted conservative health-care experts, as the right medicine.
When Trump needed as much unity and cooperation as he could get to deliver for the U.S. voter, he seemed to have chosen the opposite course, splintering support as he issued threats against Republicans who opposed this questionable bill.
Conservative Arizona pundit Chris Buskirk told listeners on Phoenix-based KKNT Radio (960 AM) on March 22 that this was a bill by people who just want to pass something. People who stand for nothing will fall for anything, Buskirk said.
It was as if voters who’d been promised GOP birthday cake were told now that they have to eat a moldy half loaf of white bread that no one wanted to buy.
Contrasting the troubled health-care bill with Trump’s impressive selection of Gorsuch for the Supreme Court, Buskirk said the administration had reached out to conservative groups for advice on choosing a High-Court nominee, but didn’t include House and Senate conservatives when the American Health Care Act (AHCA) was drafted.
Buskirk predicted that the U.S. House vote scheduled for the following day, March 23, on the AHCA would get postponed for some changes. This hardcopy issue of The Wanderer went to press on March 23.
The evening of March 22, the Washington Examiner reported that the administration still was hard at work to make the AHCA more acceptable to conservatives.
It seemed to show last-minute desperation that easily could have been avoided with better management skills.
Regardless of the outcome of that vote, some hard work is needed to birth true health reform, to bury the diseased corpse of Obamacare.
One fascinating item of chatter going around was that if the AHCA wasn’t approved, the rest of the administration’s agenda was imperiled, including significant tax cuts and immigration improvement.
Were these other conservative priorities to be held hostage to obtaining approval of a potentially disastrous government medical “reform”?
The liberal Washington Monthly site posted on March 15: “In any case, the narrative is going around that Trump’s entire agenda will be imperiled if the congressional GOP doesn’t stop squabbling and get on with stripping health insurance from 24 million people.”
Somehow, liberals who didn’t care in 2010 how many hundreds of millions of people would suffer from the imposition of ham-fisted Obamacare now express concern that amputating this gangrenous limb would be damaging.
The conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, based in the state capital of Austin, is one of the influential groups critical of the AHCA. The foundation released a list, “Top ten conservative concerns with the American Health Care Act.”
They included “doesn’t improve care,” “raises insurance premiums,” “creates new entitlement,” “federally controlled, not patient-centered,” and “inadequate verification.”
The Wanderer contacted Drew White, senior federal policy analyst at the Texas foundation, asking “why you think the Trump administration is putting so much on the line for such a poorly prepared health-care bill.”
White declined to theorize on reasons for people’s actions, but offered the following observations in an email the afternoon of March 22.
“Obamacare is comprised of costly subsidies, onerous federal insurance regulations and mandates, and an expensive and highly flawed Medicaid expansion. The House GOP bill creates a new costly subsidy in the form of a refundable tax credit, maintains almost all of the onerous federal insurance regulations and mandates, and keeps most of the expensive and highly flawed Medicaid expansion intact,” White said.
“If that doesn’t sound like full repeal — it’s because it’s obviously not. It’s not even close,” he said.
“From a policy perspective, this bill effectively replaces Obamacare with Obamacare. Premiums will continue to skyrocket in the near term because all of the regulations are being left intact,” White said. “Quality of care will continue to diminish as the federal government maintains its control over the supply and demand of health care. And patients will continue to be left with fewer and less affordable options.
“Congress still has an opportunity to get this right. But that is going to require pumping the brakes and starting over with a bill that actually focuses on fully repealing Obamacare,” he said.
On March 21, a political strategist who asked not to be named because of his work told The Wanderer that Trump voters hadn’t been paying attention to where his loyalties lie.
The Wanderer asked if experienced help at the White House didn’t see the difficulties with passing this bill.
The strategist replied, “As far as experienced help, I’m not sure he has much other than (Vice President Mike) Pence. But I’m surprised that the supposed revolutionary types like (leading adviser) Steve Bannon are watching yet another core campaign promise get broken in the first few months of the administration.
“The experienced folks are on the Hill, but Trump’s personality is such that if they were trying to make him do something he didn’t want to do, he’d fight them. He actually wants this bill. What will be interesting will be how his base responds to that realization,” the strategist said.
He also said: “Trump has threatened conservatives that if they don’t back a repeal bill, they will pay a price at the ballot box. The implication is that he will support challengers to GOP members who vote no. The problem is that they aren’t debating a repeal bill. They aren’t even debating a replace bill. They’re tweaking Obamacare and leaving it largely in place.
“Trump is correct that the conservatives promised to repeal and replace, and they need to keep that promise. But Trump made the same promise and has no apparent intention of keeping it,” the strategist said. “That’s why Ezekiel Emanuel (Rahm’s brother!) is working with Trump on the tweaking plan. The same liberal Democrat who helped write Obamacare in the first place!”
Emanuel, a key adviser to Obama on developing care-restricting Obamacare, later said he thought that living to age 75 should be long enough for people.
Barnyard Animals
Coincidentally, restricting people’s lives happened to be a topic that High Court nominee Gorsuch condemned when he wrote against euthanasia in 2006, just over a decade before Trump selected him.
Sometimes Supreme Court nominees’ views are cloaked in mystery before confirmation, but Gorsuch had gone on the record expressing a pro-life philosophy in The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia (Princeton University Press).
A description by the Princeton publisher said: “After assessing the strengths and weaknesses of arguments for assisted suicide and euthanasia, Gorsuch builds a nuanced, novel, and powerful moral and legal argument against legalization, one based on a principle that, surprisingly, has largely been overlooked in the debate — the idea that human life is intrinsically valuable and that intentional killing is always wrong.
“At the same time,” the description continued, “the argument Gorsuch develops leaves wide latitude for individual patient autonomy and the refusal of unwanted medical treatment and life-sustaining care, permitting intervention only in cases where an intention to kill is present.”
Noting this book in a column published in his newspaper on March 20, Wall Street Journal editorial writer Sohrab Ahmari wrote that Gorsuch “draws heavily on the writings of euthanasia proponents to show that what starts as a call for greater choice and self-determination inevitably blurs into invidious discrimination against the disabled and elderly — and even eugenics.”
Ahmari writes that Gorsuch traced the euthanasia movement’s history to the social Darwinism that swept America beginning in the late 19th century, but encountered a temporary setback after the Nazis’ medical atrocities were exposed.
Indeed, once people are regarded as barnyard animals to be bred — among her eugenicist enthusiasms, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger wanted to “create a race of thoroughbreds” of humans — there’s a demonic explanation for the National Socialists’ race to get there.
Although leftists never tire of cataloguing the sins of white people from 500 or 1,000 years ago, they show a curious ignorance of what their fellow progressives were up to less than a century ago in forcing “racial improvement” upon targeted victims.
Gorsuch’s patient, gentle, knowledgeable demeanor before hostile Democratic senators questioning him during the hearings on his Supreme Court nomination could teach Trump a thing or three about being prepared, and how to conduct oneself.
Indeed, it seemed hard to believe that the same administration capable of finding the talented Gorsuch to nominate could have, at almost the same time, blundered and stumbled through its March shambles of “health reform.”
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