Life's Confusing Beyond the Bubble.

This guy's good.  The sense of entitlement exhibited by, mostly, leftist politicians has been brought into blinding focus during the August recess.  Politicians from several states have chastised, ignored, ridiculed and insulted their constitutents who attend the Town Hall meetings to voice their opinions and concerns regarding the massive government takeover of the Health Care industry.  Mr. Pruden explains this disturbing trend in greater detail below.

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Russ

Via The Washington Times

By Wesley Pruden

Congressmen (and women), with due apologies to F. Scott Fitzgerald, are different from you and me. Privilege makes them soft where life teaches the prudent to be hard, cynical where their constituents must be trustful.

The congressional entitlement to privilege, wrought not by talent or inheritance but by legislation, explains the typical congressman's blindness to tint and deafness to tone, revealed in the angry "town hall" confrontations over health care legislation. Instead of reassuring frightened constituents, Democratic congressmen (and women) denounce the voters who sent them to Washington as Nazis, Brown Shirts and the "un-American." Harry Reid, the leader of the Senate Democrats, calls the critics "evil-mongers." Congress is dead to anything outside the bubble it has created for itself.

Sens. Kent Conrad of North Dakota and Chris Dodd of Connecticut, for scandalous example, are under investigation by ethics committees for taking sweetheart mortgages from Countrywide Financial Corp., the sort of sweetheart deals mere citizens could never get. To hear the senators tell it, the deals were merely rewards for their charm and enchanting ways. The fact that Mr. Conrad is chairman of the Senate Budget Committee and Mr. Dodd is chairman of the Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee had nothing to do with anything.

"I thought this was like a frequent-flier program," Mr. Conrad says. "I thought nothing of it." No doubt. Mr. Dodd says he was told by an official of Countrywide that his VIP status was "nothing more than courtesy stuff."

If you're an account executive at a large banking and financial corporation, you learn quickly to extend "courtesy stuff" to senators who influence make-or-break banking legislation. If senators want frequent-flier miles, you make sure they get them, even if they travel by streetcar.

But it's not just Messrs Conrad or Dodd, who only seem uniquely clueless to the reality of the world the rest of us live in. Congress has established a system of frequent automatic pay raises so members never even have to vote for them, enjoys a platinum-plated health care program designed by congressmen just for congressmen. Would they give it up to join a health care plan they're about to impose on anyone else? Uh, ah, er, umm. (Probably not. We should change the subject.)

The rage at the town halls is particularly irksome because congressmen are not accustomed to anyone talking back to them. They live in the bubble where aides and flunkies tend every need, pop every pimple and hide every hickey, even accompanying members to the members-only dining room to cut their roast beef and dab a napkin at their mouths if need be.

When their constituents raise concerns about what's in the thousand pages of the House health care legislation -- the working version of Obamacare, which few members have read, but aides are even now stumbling over the words of two or more syllables -- the reaction is often irritation bordering on anger, anger crossing over into rage: The elderly and the soon to be elderly are foolish to be concerned about legislation mandating "voluntary" conversations about when and how the elderly should die.

President Obama jokes that these are concerns about "pulling the plug on Grandma," but it's no joke for Grandma. Grandma remembers how Mr. Obama so easily denounced his own white grandma as a racist bigot in his explanation of why and how he chose the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to tutor his family in the moral teachings of the church.

Mr. Obama's acolytes on the Op-Ed pages and the television screens, right on cue, pile on: Only wingnuts, hicks and rednecks could imagine Official U.S. Government bureaucrats guilty of arrogance and hubris. Curiously, these acolytes easily imagine the worst kind of wickedness in other departments of big government. (See Iraq, war in; Bush, George W.)

Occasionally, a lonely voice will spill the beans, or at least the black-eyed peas. Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, a physician in real life, says it's not "outrageous" at all to fear government "death panels" who would decide who gets well and who doesn't. He has offered three amendments to whatever emerges as Obamacare to be "an absolute prohibition" on rationing based the comparative effectiveness of treatments, as judged by the government.

"Why would you not want an absolute prohibition," he asks. "Because you ultimately plan to ration care. Their plan is to control costs by limiting options."

Just so. Sometimes trust is the refuge of fools.

Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.

Sleeping with the Enemy

 By Russ Cote

There’s a schism in the GOP today pitting Conservatives, (I’ll call them ‘Traditionalists’), vs. Republicans, (I’ll call them ‘Moderators’). Almost as clearly drawn as the battle lines between the GOP and the Democrats, the Traditionalist/Moderator war is as much one for the future of the United States as the other. Full disclosure, yours truly falls squarely on the Traditionalist side of the aisle.

Here’s what I can’t understand about the Moderators; do any of the folks on that side, be they pundits or elected officials, honestly believe that tacking to the left or adopting some of their policies will endear the GOP to either Democrats or the amorphous ‘independent’ voter? I must be really missing something, because the vitriol that spews forth on a daily basis from the left is as unequivocal as you can get. The GOP, and in particular Traditionalists, are racist, sexist, elitist, mouth-breathing Neanderthals whom the world has long since passed by and are irrelevant in today’s progressive utopia.

Our elected GOP Moderators use the word ‘colleague’ often when lecturing as to why they need to work with the Democrats in Congress. Forgive me, but any GOP congressman who thinks that Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, the dreadful Chris Dodd or the contemptible Barney Frank are even remotely interested in working with Republicans toward a common goal concerning the well-being of our Country are willfully blind, breathtakingly stupid or some combination of both. It is high past the time when a shared love for the exceptionalism of the United States bound together lawmakers of each party who differed only on method and means, rather than the end. Today the ‘goal’ of the President and the Congressional powers in the Democratic Party is qualitatively different than it was in the not so distant past. It is no longer a desire to preserve the people’s innate liberty so that they may pursue happiness according to their own values, ambition and effort; it is a lust for the power to dictate and control the means, manner and ultimately the outcome of the entire populace.

There can be no moderating between these two extremes. To finish Walter’s thought; I’m talking about a line in the sand here Dude. Across this line, you do not cross. Pick a side.