Having otherwise-intelligent liberal friends still hawking past-expiration-date Obama campaign Kool-Aid makes it easy to find the spin being put out by the administration and the media.  So-called “health care reform” is the next big attack looming over American freedoms and it was with interest I read a article sent to impress me and my friend’s other correspondents with the “efforts” of the current Chicago politicians holding Americans hostage from Washington.

These are some excerpts from the rather long article that ought to make everyone with common sense shudder: 

Rather than laying out an intricate plan and then trying to sell it on the Hill, as Clinton did, Obama’s strategy seems to be exactly the opposite — to sell himself to Congress first and worry about the details later.  As Emanuel likes to tell his West Wing staff: “The only nonnegotiable principle here is success. Everything else is negotiable.”

Obama’s aggressive courtship of Congress is plotted and directed by Emanuel…[and he] has taken an unusually personal role in handling Congress. One of the first things he did as chief of staff was to give out his cellphone number to every Democratic senator (and some Republicans too)…his social calendar is taken up by dinners with former House colleagues on both sides of the aisle, often at one of the trendy downtown restaurants he favors.

The second tenet of Emanuel’s theory is that the White House itself comes with strategic assets you can put to good use, if you allocate them properly. There’s the White House theater, where guests can watch movies and sporting events; formal state dinners; smaller gatherings in the first family’s residence, which spouses can join; tickets to the Easter-egg roll for kids; tickets to the White House tours that members like to give out to their constituents. …in Obama’s nascent administration, they are considered carefully and accounted for obsessively. Emanuel holds a daily legislative meeting at which aides discuss the status of pending legislation, and often they go over the distribution of White House assets during those sessions. “We have a tracking system,” Emanuel told me. “Who came to watch the football game? Who came to watch the basketball game?”

…friction between House and Senate Democrats now seems to have reached a point where they might want to build their own virtual fence down the middle of the rotunda.  [Obama] simply encourages the House to go wild, and then he relies on centrists in the Senate to do the unpleasant work of scaling back the legislation, which yields a more politically palatable bill…. And while House and Senate leaders may end up wanting to throttle one another, Obama gets to play the reluctant arbiter between the two, rather than actually having to challenge his base.

 It’s an impressive balancing act, but it may not be sustainable as the emotional debate over health care unfolds. Some House Democrats I talked to have already begun to wonder audibly why they’re the ones who always have to surrender in Emanuel’s middle-of-the-night negotiating sessions. They accuse Reid and his lieutenants of repeatedly placating Republicans to avoid a filibuster, rather than taking a stand on principle now and then. Why not force centrist Democrats to vote against their party and let Republicans filibuster the agenda on national television? What would the voters think then? Centrists in the Senate, meanwhile, have grown furious at some of Pelosi’s backroom maneuvering — most notably, the final negotiations over the stimulus bill, when she brazenly reinserted $50 million in arts funding that had been struck as part of an earlier compromise.

During his campaign last year, Obama took at least two positions on health care that he may soon find hard to maintain. First, in the primaries, he differentiated his plan from Hillary Clinton’s by refusing to back an “individual mandate” — that is, the provision that would require every American to obtain insurance. Then, during the fall campaign, Obama criticized John McCain for proposing to tax employer-based health benefits. If he were to offer a detailed proposal of his own right now, Obama might have to…reverse himself on one or both positions. But with Baucus urging him to leave the details to his committee, Obama can instead wait for a plan to emerge from the Senate and then, if need be, reluctantly change his mind in the interest of compromise. Thus he preserves the option of backing away from his previous anti-big-government stances, and he gets to appear statesmanlike and pragmatic in the process. 

[Senator] Baucus remarked … offhandedly that Obama “didn’t really serve in the Senate,” which seems to be the prevailing sentiment among senators who saw him for only a brief time before he took off to run for president.

Obama seems to have decided early on that his model for pursuing legislation would be something closer to Ronald Reagan, a president whose political savvy he has often expressed admiration for.

Though such machinations have been the unfortunate part and parcel of politics since the first caveman bartered a piece of meat for a lump of burning coal, I can only imagine that Ronnie is rolling over in his grave.  As a small but critical prelude to our upcoming focus on the dangers inherent in and lies surrounding the next Obama agenda item for his destruction of America, I think it fitting to let Ronald Reagan himself speak to us one more time about the topic of “socialized medicine”.  Words spoken while he was “just” another American citizen, like you and me:

“Now back in 1927 an American socialist, Norman Thomas, six times candidate for president on the Socialist Party ticket, said the American people would never vote for socialism. But he said under the name of liberalism the American people will adopt every fragment of the socialist program.

One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. Most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it.

Now, the American people, if you put it to them about socialized medicine and gave them a chance to choose, would unhesitatingly vote against it. We had an example of this. Under the Truman administration it was proposed that we have a compulsory health insurance program for all people in the United States, and, of course, the American people unhesitatingly rejected this.

Let’s take a look at social security itself. Again, very few of us disagree with the original premise that there should be some form of savings that would keep destitution from following unemployment by reason of death, disability or old age. And to this end, social security was adopted, but it was never intended to supplant private savings, private insurance, pension programs of unions and industries.

Now in our country under our free enterprise system we have seen medicine reach the greatest heights that it has in any country in the world. Today, the relationship between patient and doctor in this country is something to be envied any place. The privacy, the care that is given to a person, the right to chose a doctor, the right to go from one doctor to the other.

But let’s also look from the other side, at the freedom the doctor loses. A doctor would be reluctant to say this. Well, like you, I am only a patient, so I can say it in his behalf. The doctor begins to lose freedoms; it’s like telling a lie, and one leads to another. First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then the doctors aren’t equally divided geographically, so a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him you can’t live in that town, they already have enough doctors. You have to go some place else. And from here it is only a short step to dictating where he will go.

This is a freedom that I wonder whether any of us have the right to take from any human being.  All of us can see what happens once you establish the precedent that the government can determine a man’s working place and his working methods, determine his employment. From here it is a short step to all the rest of socialism, to determining his pay and pretty soon your children won’t decide when they’re in school where they will go or what they will do for a living. They will wait for the government to tell them where they will go to work and what they will do.

What can we do about this? Well, you and I can do a great deal. We can write to our congressmen and our senators. We can say right now that we want no further encroachment on these individual liberties and freedoms. And at the moment, the key issue is, we do not want socialized medicine.

Former Representative Halleck of Indiana has said, “When the American people want something from Congress, regardless of its political complexion, if they make their wants known, Congress does what the people want.”

So write, and if your representative writes back to you and tells you that he or she, too, is for free enterprise, that we have these great services and so forth, that must be performed by government, don’t let them get away with it. Show that you have not been convinced. Write a letter right back and tell them that you believe in government economy and fiscal responsibility; that you know governments don’t tax to get the money the need; governments will always find a need for the money they get and that you demand the continuation of our free enterprise system. You and I can do this. The only way we can do it is by writing to our congressmen even we believe that he is on our side to begin with. Write to strengthen his hand. Give him the ability to stand before his colleagues in Congress and say “I have heard from my constituents and this is what they want.”

Write those letters now; call your friends and them to write them. If you don’t, this program I promise you, will pass just as surely as the sun will come up tomorrow, and behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country. Until, one day, as Normal Thomas said we will awake to find that we have socialism. And if you don’t do this and if I don’t do it, one of these days we are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.“