I wish that the rhetoric from this diary title was exaggerated, but in his article today from "National Review Online," a spectacular display of runaway-train illogic, Bill Whittle closes with a surprising invocation:
Because there’s a word for someone who has their food, housing and care provided for them... for people who owe their existence to someone else.
And that word is "slaves."
View the whole article here: Bill Whittle: What is a "Right" and How Do We Know It?
Bill Whittle thinks he's performing a fairly cute and acute method of logical inference when he takes Barack Obama's answer from Tuesday night's debate--that healthcare is indeed a right--and runs forty acres afield with it.
Whittle argues that if healthcare is a right, then surely food and shelter are also rights, since they are more essential. Ok, Whittle, but you better stop there.
He doesn't.
Whittle asks:
Do we have a right to be safe? Do we have a right to be comfortable? Do we have a right to wide-screen televisions? Where does this end?
(The answers of course are yes, depending on the circumstances, no, and whenever you shut the fuck up. But this is something called "nuance," a word which so many conservatives and their candidate have deleted from their vocabularies. Everything is dire, extreme, and imminent for them, as if when we give healthcare to people who need it, the next day Russia will win that Cold War that they pretend is still going on).
This is the argument of conservatism: that certain institutions should either never change, or change only slowly and subtly. It reflects a fear of some sort of an overhaul of the status quo, which has served them so well. This is the same argument that says that if we let gays get married, then men and boys will get married, women and horses will get married, a black man will be president (whoops!), er, I mean, the sky will fall!!!
Whittle leans on a literal interpretation of our infallible Founding Fathers, who wrote "All men are created equal." And women?
The Constitution did not include the rights of African-Americans and women to vote. I am sure that during the push for suffrage some nutjob wrote a parchment editorial or two saying that expanding the electorate would lead directly to the Apocalypse.
Whittle later reincarnates the same-old anti-Socialist rhetoric:
But these new so-called "rights" are about the government — who the Founders saw as the enemy — giving us things: food, health care, education... And when we have a right to be given stuff that previously we had to work for, then there is no reason — none — to go and work for them. The goody bag has no bottom, except bankruptcy and ruin.
But the most tactless and embarrassing part is the ending, quoted here again:
Only it’s not something for nothing. "Free" health-care costs us something precious, and no less precious for being invisible. Because there’s a word for someone who has their food, housing and care provided for them... for people who owe their existence to someone else.
And that word is "slaves."
Barack Obama is the first African-American presidential candidate of a major American political party in the history of the United States. Bill Whittle knows this, unless he really is as dumb as he sounds. To indirectly call him a defender of slavery is despicable. For National Review Online to publish this incendiary garbage is, well, not surprising.
Whittle, as his name might warn, took a simple, harmless piece of ideological wood (healthcare is a right) and shaped it into a switch with which the Liberals want beat the backs of slaves? I'd be surprised, if I had been living in Whittle's Cold War bomb shelter for the last 8 years.
Bill Whittle blog, Eject! Eject! Eject! can be viewed here: Whittle's Blog
My blog, Take Your Own Advice, Bill Whittle!, is under construction.
Whittle is also the author of the book "Silent America," which is a collection of essays with one word, faux-Emersonian titles like "Courage," "Trinity," and my favorite "Magic," which begins with the sentence "When I was nine I saw a leprechaun!"