Each time I think it can’t get any more ridiculous it gets more ridiculous. And I would have the fleeting thought that some folks are placed on earth just for my amusement simply confirmed if were not for the influence these clowns are exerting. I am afraid that it is time for the adults to start speaking out and giving no quarter. Not that there haven’t been sane voices all along. But they’ve been carrying the baggage for all of us and we need to step in and lend a hand.

If I hear one more fool pronounce that reform of the health insurance industry by creation of a public option is socialism, I think I will just fall over. What do they think insurance is? It’s the rawest form of socialism. From each according to the needs of the fund and to each according to individual need. Pure and simple that’s what it is. It doesn’t change the nature of the beast that private companies are reaping huge profits by managing the fund, setting rates and defining benefits. That just makes it bad socialism. It doesn’t make it free enterprise or free market insurance. That’s an oxymoron. Free enterprise would require that each individual bear the cost of his or her own medical needs. Some wouldn’t have to pay anything and others would be crushed by the costs. We could do that, but we wouldn’t be a society. We would just be a bunch of people governed by and surrounded by good luck and bad luck. So we decided that it makes more sense to share the risk. We did this by socializing the cost or, in other words, creating the mechanism we call insurance. We all pay something so that no one gets crushed. Some pay and end up getting no benefits because they are blessed with good health. Others have health problems and end up receiving more in benefits than they have paid in. One year it works for one guy. The next it works for someone else. It doesn’t make any difference who manages the fund. It’s socialism. So if you have health insurance, you’re a socialist. Get over it. Socialism is not the bogeyman. It’s just a way of doing things. It works for some things It probably doesn’t work for other things.

My friend says it’s not socialism. Under socialism you pay into the fund based on your ability and you receive from the fund based on your need. Wrong. It’s socialism because we are spreading or socializing costs. It’s just bad or, perhaps, half-baked socialism. It’s the kind of socialism where the rich and the poor would be paying the same if we make the wild assumption that they would buy the same insurance or that the poor could even afford it.

And this morning I awake to read that conservatives are lobbying school boards not to broadcast the President’s speech on education. What? They think he’s going to use the opportunity to advance his political agenda, his “socialist” point of view. Will these people never tire of protecting the rest of us from fears we got over when we were four years old? They should all be required to look under their beds and in their closets and see there is nothing there. Then they will have to start sleeping with the lights out. Is that what they think freedom of speech means? You should only listen to people you agree with? That way you won’t be poisoned with someone else’s dangerous thinking. When do you get to start listening to opposing points of view and forming your own opinion? 18? 21? Never? Who made these people the thought guardians? But oh, you can hear them, the children, the children. They are so easily infected with wrong thinking. And you can see what’s coming. Because you have to ask them: Whose thinking should they be exposed to? Theirs. Why? Because they are right-thinking people. Got it. The man is our President elected by the majority of us and you don’t want the children to hear him because he disagrees with you and you are, of course, right. Those of them unwilling to go there fall back, of course, on – yep, you guessed it – Americanism. You see, socialism is un-American. I want one of them to show me anything in the Constitution that makes socialism un-American. And while they are at it, they can explain to me what it means to say, as it clearly does in the Constitution, that one of the purposes for which we formed the nation was to “provide for the common welfare.”

I am tired of these children, these creatures from the Second Amendment. I am not going to be polite when I hear their drivel. They are ideological bullies and they deserve to have their health insurance taken away from them so they can be true capitalists. We are not going down their road. It’s the wrong road and it goes in the wrong direction.