Tuesday, September 18, 2012

We Are Deeply Offended

The royal British bosom is almost getting out-trended by the royal American boob commonly known as Moochie Mitt. He is managing to offend whole swaths of the population today, thanks to that viral video that has him accusing Obama voters of being moochers. Even staid columnist David Brooks is faux-fended. Actually, Brooks is miffed that Mitt finally got caught voicing the derision with which the upper crust holds the rest of us. It is always better for Republicans to speak in code to get their points across. Such as, always refer to the common folk as being "trapped in the culture of dependency" when what you really mean is why can't the wastrels just all die, already.


What with all the recent bad press about an upstart judge slapping him down over his unconstitutional detention policies, President Obama must be breathing a huge sigh of relief today, now that Mitt is grabbing more than his fair share of negative attention. Obama fans are gloating with outrage over the Inept Evil that is Mitt Romney. I love how some of them are fighting back against the slander. Rather than expressing annoyance that Mitt is unfairly castigating the poor and the downtrodden, they're miffed that Mitt is accusing them of being the poor and downtrodden. These people belong to the well-heeled, upper middle class subset of the Obama demographic. It's reverse snobbism. "All of the people I know who are voting for our president are professionals with excellent incomes," sniffed one Times commenter. Harrumph.

They were also incensed at another Times article outlining how President Obama is callously denying health coverage to the young "Dreamers" recently bestowed with deferred prosecution by His Coolness in order to get out the Hispanic Vote. It turns out that just because he's letting young Latino folks stay here till after he's safely re-elected doesn't mean he wants them to be health care moochers, too. The White House has decided that even though they're allowed to stay, they're still here illegally. His Royal Parse-imony has spoken. From Robert Pear's article:

Immigrants granted such relief would ordinarily meet the definition of “lawfully present” residents, making them eligible for government subsidies to buy private insurance, a central part of the new health care law. But the administration issued a rule in late August that specifically excluded the young immigrants from the definition of “lawfully present.”
At the same time, in a letter to state health officials, the administration said that young immigrants granted a reprieve from deportation “shall not be eligible” for Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Administration officials said they viewed the immigration initiative and health coverage as separate matters.
Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, said in the Federal Register that the reasons offered for the immigration initiative “do not pertain to eligibility for Medicaid,” the children’s health program or federal subsidies for buying private health insurance.
Pear tells the story of a young Dream Act candidate named Ricardo Campos who will not qualify for coverage under the Affordable Care Act for ongoing cancer treatments while he's here attending college. Immigration rights organizations are appalled that President Obama is denying health coverage to the same young people he so recently praised.

But here's a sampling of the most highly recommended reader comments from some of the same liberal Obama supporters who are shocked and appalled at Romney's lack of compassion:
The fact is, these "children" are STILL ILLEGAL ALIENS. Obama's policy change doesn't change that. They're still deportable and still don't have a route to legal status that they didn't have before. They are NOT members of this society--their parents and then they saw to that by avoiding the routes to become legal members of this society. (Ali, Michigan)
If a young immigrant is taking advantage of our President's compassion by not pursuing a legal citizenship, I do not believe they also deserve their health care wholly subsidized by the federal government. Let them become a citizen before they gain that advantage. (Jeff T., Portland ME)
By the way, Mr. Campos has still spent more than half of his life in his home country, the formative early years at that. He had only been here 7 years when at age 18 he made his own decision to remain here illegally. (Ali again, echoing the conservative "self-deport" mantra.)
But then there's this snippet of truth, from Mookie of Brooklyn:
Here is the real Obama. He's all for unions until Wisconsin happens or the Chicago teachers go on strike -- then he's nowhere to be found.
He offers young illegals a chance to stay in the US then denies them benefits.
This President who loves the sound of his own voice is once again silent when it comes to taking a clear stand on an issue.
Incidentally, don't count on a viral video or audio surfacing of President Obama sucking up to rich people. His campaign wisely confiscates cell phones and other recording devices at the fund-raising door. What happens in Jay-Z's bar tonight will stay in Jay-Z's bar.


4 comments:

  1. Wow, Karen, you nailed it with this post. How in the world can this society treat these "Dreamers" as illegal outsiders when most of them were brought to the U.S. when they were babies or very young children? I imagine that these young people without a country are our version of the Palestinians. How sad, and how sad that people call them names because of choices their parents made years ago.

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  2. Mittens is very, very different from you and me. He was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.

    “What do you call it, when Lords break off door-knockers and beat policemen, and play at coaches with other people's money, and all that sort of thing?”

    “Aristocratic?” suggested the collector.

    “Ah! aristocratic,” replied Miss Petowker, “something very aristocratic about him, isn't there?'

    - Charles Dickens, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby

    An aristocrat doing God’s work! “Who better to be president of the greatest of all capitalist nations than a man who got rich by being a brilliant capitalist?”

    Winners and losers. The undeserving poor and middle and working classes, the freeloaders in our “culture of dependency,” must be forced to assume personal responsibility.

    “In a plutonomy, we're all occasional butlers now, relying in the increasingly erratic jobs and spending of the wealthy.” - Robert Frank, The High-Beta Rich

    Romney as “Archipelago Man”….

    “You’ve got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists.” - G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

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  3. Beautifully written, Karen, and painful to read. I'd like to think that my compassion for these young people stems from my being a good person, but I know that my own children being half-Colombian adds poignancy to the issue for me.

    Their father entered this country in March of 1962 on a student visa, which he later converted into "resident alien" status, and he carried a green card until he returned to Colombia in 1995. My kids are lucky: they were born in America to an American-born mother and a legally resident Hispanic father. (Interestingly, as a legal resident, he was eligible for the draft, and when he was 27 the FBI showed up at our door one Friday claiming he had been hiding from the government to evade the draft. He hadn't been, but we spent that weekend preparing to flee to Canada if need be. The issue was resolved the following week, but he had to provide our marriage license and both birth certificates, along with proof that he had filed his alien address update every January.) I would say I digress, but I don't, actually. This is an example of how we treat immigrants in America, even legal ones. He couldn't vote, and couldn't get work in his field because it generally required a security clearance (which he couldn't get because he -- all together now -- wasn't a citizen), but our government was more than ready to dragoon him into military service, where he could die in a senseless war for this country that otherwise didn't want him.

    This is how America treats its residents -- immigrants both legal and illegal, African-American citizens, poor people of whatever ethnic background, women (especially in Republican-controlled states) -- in short, anyone who isn't rich, white and male.

    We've been seeing statistics lately about the increasing number of children in poverty, and those going hungry every day in a nation with plenty of food for every single citizen, and now we have "Dreamers" (what a slap in the face THAT term is!) being denied basic medical care. It seems as if each week brings more revelations of how bad things are in America, and you think, "That's it; it can't possibly get worse."

    And then it does.

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  4. @ Denis Neville, "He was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple."

    Thanks Denis, that is a great quote.

    Our long-gone prosperity was made possible by generations who suffered the Great Depression and WWII, including George Romney, Mitt’s father. According to Wikipedia, after leaving Mexico in 1912, George Romney "...grew up in humble circumstances. The family subsisted with other Mormon refugees on government relief in El Paso, Texas, for a few months before moving to Los Angeles..."

    As an adult, George Romney "mocked the products of the "Big Three" automakers as "gas-guzzling dinosaurs"" and focused on the compact Rambler car at American Motors. George Romney was "was a strong supporter of the American Civil Rights Movement" and remarked in 1967 "that his earlier support for the Vietnam War had been due to a "brainwashing" by U.S. military and diplomatic officials in Vietnam". Wow, what a breath of fresh air.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Romney

    Today our leaders, and a significant portion of our population, seem to be a victim of success. They just can’t imagine any life but their own.

    What value is that kind of success?

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