One of the problems with making everybody’s business your business, is it becomes your business. Like, say, making someone’s health care your business, whether by fining them for not having it; dismissing their plans as sub-par; telling them what services they have to pay for; and in many cases, getting their plans outright canceled.
Things get particularly icky when one is forced to look at the people those ideas have wronged — a prospect that has one of The Washington Post’s liberal bloggers, Greg Sargent, worried.
Mr. Sargent’s Thursday post addresses some of the very many examples of Americans suffering the consequences of Obamacare’s wrecking ball. What seems to have him most concerned, though, is the effectiveness of the “strategy.”
The article is a bit of a gem, starting with little quotation marks around “Obamacare horror stories.” Horror stories like Julie Boonstra’s.
Mr. Sargent zeroes in on Ms. Boonstra, a woman featured in an Americans for Prosperity (AFP) ad. Ms. Boonstra, who has Leukemia, was thrown off her old health-care plan by Obamacare, and her new costs are high and unpredictable.
Mr. Sargent is a little incredulous, to say the least, “strongly” suggesting that the woman is wrong about her rising costs, and blandly dismissing her worries about unpredictable monthly bills. “Kessler notes costs will even out over time,” Mr. Sargent assures us, referencing a Post buddy of his who doesn’t think the woman should be worried.
And then it gets absurd. Because we get to Mr. Sargent’s real point: He thinks that groups like AFP are just using the stories of Obamacare victims to promote their agenda. Unfair, he says, alleging that “the emotional content of these victims’ stories” is being used as a “shield … from scrutiny.”
Just like, well, everything progressives do. Just name it.
Gun control isn’t about the Constitution, liberty or freedom from fear — it’s about the child victims of a madman.
Abortion isn’t about the over-one million lives that are fatally rejected each year — it’s about women dying in back alleys.
Food stamps? Conservatives want Joe to starve. Regulation? Conservatives want Steve to get killed in a factory accident. Hell, we heard Republicans want people to die simply to spite Obama.
Interestingly enough, when complaining about AFP, Mr. Sargent failed to link back to some of his earlier work, like “Another Romney layoff victim, this one a conservative, speaks out,” and “Mitt Romney’s new antagonists: His layoff victims.”
Read: Connecting a Republican to the sad victim stories he is indirectly involved in is fair; connecting Democrats to the sad victim stories their law directly caused is not.
The most ironic twist, of course, is that the left leaned heavily on victim stories to pass Obamacare in 2010. And to justify it since. Because victimhood is the strategy of the left — one the right often finds unseemly.
But the left uses the victimhood tactic so readily because it really can work. And what has Mr. Sargent worried is not the true stories of hardship and suffering, but just how effective those stories can be. (BEDFORD: The (real) life of Julie)
It’s fitting that AFP — one of many conservative organizations that warned all of this would happen, and tried to stop Obamacare from being passed — is using the tactics the left used to pass the law against the law.
And it’s also fitting that Democratic politicians who passed Obamacare four years ago now have to hear from the constituents they hurt.
Liberals in Washington made our private decisions their business. Now it’s time to make the consequences their business, and let the voters make some private decisions of their own — in the voting booth.
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