By DEXTER DUGGAN
Those who urge that the new Republican majority Congress should concentrate on modest, bipartisan measures and avoid getting in fights with Barack Obama are rejecting the message of last November’s “wave” election.
The majority of voters, disgusted with Democrat Obama’s lawless agenda, empowered the GOP to fight for them, not to have deceptive garden parties on the White House lawn where politicians blur essential differences and put off decisive reforms forever.
That would be more of the smoke and mirrors that left the voters choking in outrage.
To give one example, the new Republican Congress should have a bill on Obama’s desk by the beginning of February that repeals the staggeringly awful Obamacare.
Of course he would veto any attempt to end his monstrosity. But that would emphasize the point of who wants to keep this crushing burden imposed upon Americans, and who wants to lift it off them.
After Obama’s veto, Congress should send him the bill again and again until Americans rise up forcefully against White House callousness, demanding an end to their suffering under Obama’s arrogance.
As the new year began, a headline in USA Today summed up some of the pain that lying Obama’s nationalized medical program inflicts: “Dilemma over deductibles: Costs crippling middle class — Rather than pay so much out-of-pocket, many skip checkups, scrimp on care.”
A feeble bipartisan congressional bill could make only some small change in Obamacare that the president might even sign, falsely suggesting he’s a cooperative guy who wants reform, and winning praise from his many media sycophants. But the smoke and mirrors would go on forever.
The liberal Washington Post posted an analysis on January 3 that would encourage only more futility for the GOP and game-playing by Obama. “After years of sparring with the White House,” the Post claimed, “Republicans are eager to demonstrate productivity and some level of bipartisan cooperation with Obama and the Democrats.”
So much needs to be reformed and corrected by the GOP that the lists could be almost endless. However, because “war on women” is a topic that left-wing Democrats liked for a while, Republicans could throw it back on them by showing how Obama policies disadvantage and even imperil women.
That extends to forced population-control programs that endanger women around the world. Promoting coercive international population control is standard U.S. government policy, ramped up under Planned Parenthood’s ardent acolyte Obama.
However, before looking overseas, consider how intensive and invasive Obama’s views are at every level, beginning at home. Literally, at home.
Obama’s words didn’t create an eruption in the dominant media, which suppressed the embarrassing angle, but conservative blogs took note when Obama said on October 31 that “we” don’t want U.S. women to leave the workforce if they want to care for their children.
So much for the myth of “pro-choice” freedom to decide by family-planner-in-chief Obama. No surprise, Obama’s dominating big-government agenda extends into every family’s life.
Promoting more government programs for youngsters in a Rhode Island speech, Obama said, “Sometimes, someone, usually Mom, leaves the workplace to stay home with the kids, which then leaves her earning a lower wage for the rest of her life as a result. That’s not a choice we want Americans to make.”
Among a number of observers, blogger Kemberlee Kaye commented: “Beyond perpetuating modern ‘feminist’ myths is an even nastier issue with the president’s poorly worded statements: Are we really in a place culturally where it’s acceptable to demonize a woman’s choice to stay at home as ‘not a choice we want Americans to make’? Evidently so.”
Veteran conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly said: “Barack Obama has suddenly made himself the leader of a new war on women. . . . [H]e repudiated the principle of giving choices about careers to women.”
In her December Phyllis Schlafly Report, she asked: “Who gave Obama the right to decide what career choice women will be allowed to make? What kind of a country do we live in?. . .
“That one statement confirms so much that is obnoxious about Obama. He is a committed, doctrinaire feminist, and he claims the right to use the iron hand of government to force us to conform to that warped ideology,” said Schlafly, who went on to quote pioneering French radical feminist Simone de Beauvoir as saying:
“No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children . . . precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.”
An even nastier aspect of Obama’s worldview came to public attention when a new round of women’s deaths was reported due to botched sterilizations in India.
The November 14 Wall Street Journal headlined, “Indian Deaths Spotlight Sterilization.” The story said that 13 women had just died in a population-control campaign featuring “mass sterilization,” with rushed, assembly-line procedures. Dozens of other women reportedly were harmed at the same time.
A chart titled “Family Planning” that accompanied the Journal story illustrated high rates of sterilization in ten countries including the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Brazil, and China.
India long has been a prime target of population controllers. Indeed, back in the 1970s, Democratic President Jimmy Carter’s mother, “Miss Lillian,” a nurse, recalled her own role in providing forced sterilizations there.
Shaming Women
Meanwhile, FrontLines, published by the Virginia-based pro-life organization Human Life International, reported once again in its fall/winter issue about damage from coercive population-control programs, this time in Tanzania and Uganda.
“Women are being treated like cattle — sterilized by hacks and left to fend for themselves,” the article proclaimed.
If a woman is bleeding non-stop or has lost her libido as a result of a population-control procedure, FrontLines reported, her husband “often kicks her out or shacks up with another woman, and the whole village knows it.
“The woman is shamed,” the article continued, “and if she can’t work — as work is the sole way of measuring a woman’s value in many of these places — she is further shamed as a drag on the family and the village….
“Here’s the point: The method is given free of charge — the treatment [for subsequent difficulties] is not,” FrontLines reported.
On a different topic, conservative columnist Mona Charen reminded readers as the new year began that economist Jonathan Gruber, a major architect of intentionally dishonest Obamacare, had written favorably of permissive abortion as a way to eliminate potential criminals from growing up.
Obamacare is designed to promote permissive abortion.
Charen noted the progressives’ illogic of wanting to spare grown-up, convicted criminals from serious punishment, even while cheering the death sentence for babies who haven’t been born yet, much less have shown they intend to serious commit crimes years from now.
“Gruber’s thesis that abortion caused America’s crime drop is almost certainly false. But what’s more revealing is the casual readiness to calculate lost lives as so many numbers on a balance sheet,” Charen wrote. “If it makes you uncomfortable that such a person helped design Obamacare, you’re not alone.”
The new GOP Congress has many tough tasks to confront, of which Obama’s malignant meddling in family matters is only one.
It may be in Obama’s interest to portray himself falsely as a reasonable guy who wants to work with the GOP in 2015.
However, it’s neither in the GOP’s interest nor the nation’s for Republican leaders to show dispiriting weakness by suggesting that Obama might be a guy they can work with meaningfully after all. Obama would bite off any hand of friendship extended and mount it in his trophy room of suckers.
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