A: Fox News surprised some people when Roger Friedman, their film critic, called Michael Moore's SiCKO "brilliant". Of course, Fox News being Fox News, they're still leaving room for some healthy fearmongering. As Think Progress reports, yesterday's Your World with Neil Cavuto featured National Review Online columnist Jerry Bowyer warning us how universal health care will get us all killed by terrorists. But there was a delicious irony to Bowyer's comments that Think Progress seems to have missed.
In the transcript, Bowyer argues that the bureaucracy of a public health care system would breed vulnerability:
A state run health care enterprise is bureaucratic, and I think the terrorists have shown over and over again, whether it’s dealing with INS or whether it’s dealing with airport security, they’re very good at gaming the system with bureaucracies. They’re very good at getting around bureaucracies.
(Let's ignore, for a moment, that the recent terrorist threat in London, allegedly orchestrated by foreigners within the national health care system there, was
largely unthreatening. Or that every domestic "terrorist" plot we've busted up over the past six years eventually turned out to be either:
- the pipe dream of incompetents; or
- a work of fiction relayed by the Justice Department and/or Homeland Security; or
- some horrific combination of the two.
Have you ignored those things yet? Shouldn't be too tough; most of the populace is already doing it.)
Assuming the terrorist threat is as real and present as the average Neil Cavuto viewer fears, Bowyer seems to be making a valid point. Government bureaucracy is a real problem. Things fall through the cracks here and there. So I guess universal health care
could theoretically pose an opportunity for terrorists... right?
Except later in the same segment, Bowyer undermines his point into oblivion:
And if one of your guys is a jihadist, if one of your doctors is spending all the time online reading Osama bin Laden fatwas, someone’s going to notice that. But the National Health Service is more like the post office, you know there’s a lot of anonymity, it’s easy to hide in the bureaucracy.
Hmm, post office? What's this "post office" you speak of? A government bureaucracy that comes into regular contact with, and has access to the homes of, millions of average citizens every day? OMG THAT SOUNDS TERRIFYING. Thank God we're not socialists, or else we might start some kind of "post office" here in the United States. We'd all be killed within hours.
P.S.: If Bowyer thinks the current health care system isn't a crippled bureaucracy, he's apparently never been covered by
Kaiser Permanente. I abandoned Kaiser a couple years ago, but from what I remember of the place, by now it must be like the
Al Qaeda reading room over there.
P.P.S.: Before you remind me that jihadist mailmen
did try to anthrax the bejeezus out of us in 2001 (but then forgot about their nefarious plan and took a nap), it might interest you to learn that all signs point to those attacks being carried out by a
government scientist. Specifically, by a government scientist whose career stood to benefit greatly from
anthrax hysteria.
Anyway, I'm sure the terrorists will be striking our mailboxes any minute now. Your new issue of
TV Guide is probably coated with AIDS. So please remember to be frightened of everything.
Kristol: The sneers of a clown
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