Okay, I'll admit it, E.J. Dionne is now my mark.

Here we go again with this rank stupidity and paragraph to paragraph hypocrisy.

The gist of E.J.'s latest tour de absurdite is that "ideological pigeonholing...distort our debates over health care in particular and Government's role in American life more broadly." What?

The problem is that this Country hasn't spent nearly enough time and energy debating which 'ideological pigeonhole' is right for far too long. As a result, we've done nothing but slowly slide toward tyranny under the guise of modern "centrist" liberalism. So now we find ourselves in a quagmire where everything from student loans to health care can seriously be considered a proper "role" for government in American life.

E.J. Dionne, despite his incessant pleas for 'centrism', is either a dyed-in-the-wool Leftist or too stupid to know that he promotes nothing but textbook collectivism. Either way, his idiotic "venture" that "middle-of-the-road Americans prefer that their tax money go toward education rather than to padding the profits of financial firms" is a non-sequitur.

(Incidentally, notice how E.J. doesn't even pretend to lump liberal "ideological pigeonholing" in with the Conservative argument? This is because idiot liberals like E.J. assume, wrongly, that liberal ideology is "mainstream" or "middle-of-the-road". I honestly can't tell whether E.J. is just too dumb to know this or whether he consciously distorts the facts.)

Anyway, I'd venture to say that middle-of-the-road Americans, to the extent any of them are actually left, would prefer that their tax money not go toward either education or padding the profits of financial firms.

We should have had this debate 100, 75, 50, 25 and 10 years ago and it should have been explicitly ideological. Because it wasn't, we're now stuck with morons like E.J. Dionne and his idols in Government debating over what programs, with any of which Government has no legitimate business, gets our tax dollars. Because we haven't had that debate, E.J. Dionne can say 'hey, Government's already in that business so what's the difference if they just get a little more involved?' 

This is the slow road to serfdom about which F.A. Hayek warned us more than 75 years ago. E.J. Dionne chooses not to understand.

Of course, no liberal op-ed would be complete without the obligatory tie-in to ObamaCare; a truism to which E.J. dutifully submits. After his proclamation that Government's takeover, yes takeover, of the student loan industry is a good thing because it's, get this, "more efficient", E.J. moves seamlessly into a diatribe on why his thesis applies to ObamaCare.

Let's all dither with Dionne, shall we?

Opponents of a public insurance option don't want to talk about what it actually is -- one alternative that would expand choice in the insurance marketplace. Instead, they pretend that it would amount to (that phrase again) a "government takeover" of health care.

Now, this has so thoroughly been debunked that it's pointless to do so again here. A 'public option' is not "one alternative that would expand choice in the insurance marketplace". This is so incredibly stupid that it takes either wilful blindness or several million non-functioning brain cells to countenance. There can be no legitimate competition between the private sector and the federal government when one side both makes the rules and calls the fouls and there's nothing the other side can do about it. Once again, you decide whether E.J. is too stupid or too dishonest.

Make no mistake about it; there is no other place for a public option to lead but to total government control of the U.S. health care industry. There is no other option (pun intended).

But that would be true only [that the public option would lead to a government takeover] if individuals themselves freely chose the public plan in overwhelming numbers, and the public plan has already been so hemmed in that its share of the market will be limited.

This is a flat out lie. Heritage and other organizations have analyzed the numbers on the effect of a public option and the evidence is overwhelming that there would remain only a whisper of privately insured individuals, whether through their employers or on their own. Consider this from IBD:

The proposed legislation would penalize an employer whose health plan doesn't fit the government's idea of qualified coverage. Upgrading to a better plan would be more expensive. The owner must decide if he can afford it, or whether to pay the penalty and provide no health benefits. Small-business owners already have enough difficulty shopping for insurance, Rys says. There's nothing in the draft legislation to suggest that insurance will become easier to purchase, or less costly. "My hunch is that what will be mandated will be more expensive than what insurers are currently offering," Rys said.

E.J. Dionne is as bad a liar as the President. This is also why it is completely nonsensical to submit, as Nancy Pelosi and so many others have, that offering a public 'option' will increase competition. No. It won't. Period. Only if 'competition' means that everyone has to play by the Government's rules at the threat of fines and sanctions that would cripple small business does the Speaker's bizarro version of 'competition' make any sense.

And finally there's this:

But all of the health bills on offer, even the supposedly "liberal" House bill, are already centrist compromises built on a private health insurance market and entailing less government spending than many liberals think is necessary. Why is Snowe almost alone in her party in acknowledging this?

So in E.J.'s world, the unprecedented government takeover of 1/6th of the nation's economy is a "centrist compromise" built on a private insurance market entailing less spending than liberals think is necessary.

I'll give you a minute to absorb to colossal insanity of that statement.

E.J. Dionne not only finds the authority for such tyranny in the Constitution, he also thinks that the Baucus Bill as presently constituted represents a "centrist compromise". It is this kind of warped thinking that allows people like Dionne to call the million or so of us who showed up in Washington to say "enough", a "fringe" right-wing movement.

E.J. Dionne has completely lost his mind. Make no mistake about it ladies and gentlemen, those of us in the clear majority (56% as of today) that oppose ObamaCare for so many reasons represent the "center" if that phrase is to have any meaning in the history of the United States. And when we shift the goal posts back to their rightful place on the American ideological spectrum, we can see just how far left the truly "fringe" ideologues have gone and words like "socialist" and "fascist" don't  seem all that crazy anymore.

Tune in the next time E.J. Dionne says something stupid. Which will be the next time he puts his pen down on paper.

Russ