Behind Court Challenge to Health Care Lies the Right’s ‘Freedom Fetish’

[Julian Englis]

Frm The Daily Beast: Behind Court Challenge to Health Care Lies the Right’s ‘Freedom Fetish’

Mar 27, 2012 4:45 AM EDT

Conservatives love to say Obama has robbed us of our liberty. But can they name a single freedom that the administration has curtailed? Michael Tomasky poses a challenge.

Behind the challenges to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) being heard at the Supreme Court this week is the idea that Barack Obama wants to take away your freedoms (as Mitt Romney himself asserted today). I’ve long since stopped counting the number of ridiculous things said about Obama, but this might be the ridiculousest of them all. At least the Kenyan rumors have some basis in reality, however threadbare it is, since his father was indeed Kenyan and he does have a funny name, for an American president. But this "freedom" business is simply paranoid and delusional. I defy anyone to name for me a specific and precise freedom that Obama has taken away from the American people. You can’t. When they’re not just invented out of whole cloth by multi-millionaire propagandists, all such laments are based on ignorance about what freedom actually means and an equal ignorance about how our system of government works.

Back in March 2010, Megyn Kelly was on Fox talking up a CNN poll showing that 54 percent of people thought the government could pose a threat to their rights. This clinched it, she said. But Alan Colmes came on and actually asked her: Okay, Megyn, what freedoms, exactly, have disappeared under President Obama? She didn’t answer, and of course she didn’t answer because there is no answer. People are “worried,” she said, that “the federal government is going to step in, take over, and they’re not going to be able to see their [health-care] coverage.” It just got lamer from there.

I wouldn’t doubt that there are assorted people here and there who may have been, say, adversely affected by a wetlands determination or some other bureaucratic decision. And of course there are American citizens who have been detained—and worse—in the war on terror. They tend to be of Arab descent, and something tells me these Americans aren’t the ones Kelly or those protesting the Affordable Care Act outside the Supreme Court building have in mind. Outside of those examples, though, the idea that anyone is losing freedoms in this country is foolishness.

More at http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/03/27/behind-court-challenge-to-health-care-lies-the-right-s-freedom-fetish.html

[sinkingfeeling]

1. The right wants you to have the absolute freedom to die from lack

of medical care.