Even before her health care plan is ready to reveal to the public, Hillary Rodham Clinton has started her bare-knuckles campaign for a “revolution” in American health care. It’s based on the customary Clinton tactics of class envy and of demonizing targets, i.e., vilifying the alleged “price gouging, cost shifting and unconscionable profiteering” of insurance companies, drug companies and doctors.
So much for her scapegoating rhetoric — but what’s actually in her “comprehensive benefits package”? Will it include all the horrendously expensive items that Friends of Hillary are demanding, such as long-term care, care for mental and addictive disorders, and care for illegal immigrants? If dental care is to be included, why not eyeglasses? What about abortion? Prescription drugs?
How high will new payroll taxes have to go? Will her “universal coverage” be just like putting all Americans on Medicaid?
The one specific Hillary promises is “peace of mind.” That doesn’t tell us anything about what benefits we will get or how much they will cost, but it tells a lot about Hillary’s vision of the White House stage she struts on.
Just as Hillary was getting ready to unveil her health care plan, she made a remarkable speech at the University of Texas at Austin on April 6 in which she rolled out her desire “to remold society by redefining what it means to be a human being in the 20th century.” Her speech was reported and dissected by the New York Times Magazine with illustrations that portray Mrs. Clinton as “Saint Hillary” complete with sword (not a cross), leading the way to “the remaking of the American way of politics, government, indeed life.”
It’s important to realize the scope of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s ambitious vision to “remold society in the West” in order to put into perspective her plan to take over the $850 billion-a-year pot of gold which Americans now spend on health care. She thinks that Western society needs to be “remolded” and “redefined” (two of her favorite words), and she thinks she is ready to take on the responsibility.
Hillary calls for “a new politics of meaning.” (Does she mean a new meaning of politics?) She even thinks that she has “to first create a language that would better communicate what we are trying to say, and the policies would flow from that language.”
There’s nothing new about a national leader trying to get his countrymen to follow his vision of where the nation should be headed. But it’s another kettle of fish when an unelected national leader (with unprecedented governmental power) is leading us down a road that has already proven to be a dead end.
In her Texas speech, Hillary admitted that she’s having a hard time finding any meaning to life, government, or their relationship. She said, “We lack at some core level meaning in our individual lives and meaning collectively.”
“We are in a crisis of meaning,” she theorized. “What do our governmental institutions mean? What do our lives in today’s world mean? … What does it mean in today’s world to pursue not only vocations, to be part of institutions, but to be human?” She admits she finds it difficult “to redefine who we are as human beings in this post-modern age.”
The New York Times Magazine called her speech “at times slightly incoherent,” and described her meanderings as “a thicket of theologies and ideologies, a mix of Bible and Bill Moyers, of New Testament and New Age.” Is this the one we want to be in charge of redesigning the $850 billion health care industry?
Hillary’s 1993 speech is the descendant of her 1969 Wellesley College graduation speech. She said then that she was searching for “more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating modes of living,” so that she could come “to terms with our humanness” and “talk about reality sometime, authentic reality, inauthentic reality.”
She seems still as confused about the meaning of life and the ole of government as she was 24 years earlier. The search for her identity and for life’s meaning, and the obsession with language and definitions, sound a bit like all-night bull sessions in college.
Comparing her adolescent 1969 speech with her 1993 First Lady speech, the New York Times concludes, “They share all the same traits: vaulting ambition, didactic moralizing, intellectual incoherence and the adolescent assumption that the past does not exist and the present needs only your guiding hand to create the glorious future.”
Yet, most of what Hillary sees as wrong with America today was caused, at least in part, by the liberal spending extravagances of the 1960s that were invented by the intellectual elite of her own generation and brought into being by the liberal politicians of her own party. If it is necessary to remake society, why should someone who personifies the generation that threw out the old societal standards, replacing them with Big Brother Knows Best, now lead the charge into the future?
