Let me start off by saying that Reagan is the President of my youth, the President that as a child I trusted to keep the missiles from falling, who grieved the astronauts, and who – at the time, I thought – single-handedly defeated communism. You can solidly put me down in the “not a fan” column. Yet I still think he deserves a place on our currency.
If opting-out becomes a reality in the healthcare reform bill, it is almost certain to be a political wedge and a litmus test of Conservative Values for Republicans. No GOP incumbent will stave off primary challenges without walking the coals and rejecting ’socialized medicine’.
As a anecdote, consider this Wired magazine article about parents who opt-out of vaccination for their children (via kottke):
[As] a crowd bludgeon in modern political speechmaking, “my friends” can be laid at the feet of one man: William Jennings Bryan. His famed 1896 “Cross of Gold” speech at the Democratic National Convention invoked the phrase a mind-crushing 10 times. Inveighing against “those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below,” Bryan declared, “My friends, the question we are to decide is: Upon which side will the Democratic party fight; upon the side of the idle holders of idle capital or upon the side of the struggling masses?” Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” is historically considered to be among the most viscerally powerful speeches ever made by an American politician, with one New York World journalist reporting the crowd’s reaction as “tumult—hills and valleys of shrieking men and women.” The temptation to bottle that kind of lightning again is alluring.
It’s a damn shame, the things that we’re left to wonder. Can you safely assume there was no shooter on the grassy knoll? That ‘DC Madam’ Palfrey committed suicide? Or that alleged anthrax-attacker Bruce Ivins worked alone? Or that the heroic passengers of Flight 93 brought the plane down, and not a US missile?
Did you see this story in the Post (and reprinted today on page 2 in the Inky)?
