About a week ago Jack Kingston posted a picture on his own flickr pages of himself holding a tee-shirt (or teashirt, as many people have called it) which says R.I.P. U.S. Constitution. Today he gets around to saying what he meant.
What of the message? Is the Constitution under attack? Unless you have full confidence in the nine ivory tower members of the Supreme Court, it’s always worth talking about. Where in the Constitution does it give the government the power to require you to have health care? Up until now all of Ashleigh’s older brothers, sisters, parents, grandparents, family and friends have had the freedom to choose but Ashleigh will lose that freedom if "Obamacare" passes. She has the right to protest.
How were we supposed to know the shirt was any sort of political protest? The Republican Get Out of Jail card: Ronald Reagan!
Updated at end.
Kingston tries to divert us. Ashleigh he says is the student who gave him the shirt, shown in the same picture. He claims "the left" attacked her, for which he provides no links and no evidence beyond his bald assertion.
About the tee-shirt itself, Kingston now says:
...the back has a Ronald Reagan quote, "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem".
Well, the picture didn't show that, nor did any other picture in his same set on flickr. And he still doesn't provide a picture of the back. Mr. Flag Pin, of all people, should know better than to flaunt any clothing of questionable patriotism. And he wasn't wearing a flag pin!
Now I do want to give Kingston some credit. He remarks that he voted against "sneak and peak" warrants under the PATRIOT Act, and in passing he even slaps at Dick Cheney and Halliburton. He doesn't mention that he also voted against the Hank Paulson TARP (Goldman Sachs bailout) bill. I applaud him for all those things. And I agree with him that Obama is not above criticism, especially about wiretapping.
However, in this case, he put that picture of one side of the tee-shirt up there without a picture of the back, and with no explanation of what it meant. He either acted stupidly and got caught and now is trying to blame "the left", or he put it up there as bait and is now claiming he caught some fish.
It's the old Kingston question. Is he as doofus as he wants us to believe? Or is he a clever, slick, political operator? I bet on the latter.
About that alleged Reagan quote. As applied to this health care crisis it's just plain wrong. Government is the solution to private health insurance dumping customers because they actually use their health insurance: regulations preventing them from doing that, and a public option to provide real choice.
The Reagan quote comes from his first inaugural address of 1981, in which he recommended three paragraphs earlier against running up a big government deficit, and then proceeded to do exactly that. A debt so big it took Democratic President, Bill Clinton, to rein it in. Then of course Republican President W. drove it right back up again with his war of aggression in Iraq and his ill-directed War on Terror and his continuation of the War on Drugs and his mismanagement of the economy by Reagan principles which led to the economic collapse which Democratic President Obama is trying to fix.
But I'll even give Reagan credit. Immediately after the "problem" quote, he said:
From time to time, we have been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? All of us together, in and out of government, must bear the burden. The solutions we seek must be equitable, with no one group singled out to pay a higher price.
We hear much of special interest groups. Our concern must be for a special interest group that has been too long neglected. It knows no sectional boundaries or ethnic and racial divisions, and it crosses political party lines. It is made up of men and women who raise our food, patrol our streets, man our mines and our factories, teach our children, keep our homes, and heal us when we are sick—professionals, industrialists, shopkeepers, clerks, cabbies, and truckdrivers. They are, in short, "We the people," this breed called Americans.
Well, this administration's objective will be a healthy, vigorous, growing economy that provides equal opportunity for all Americans, with no barriers born of bigotry or discrimination. Putting America back to work means putting all Americans back to work. Ending inflation means freeing all Americans from the terror of runaway living costs. All must share in the productive work of this "new beginning" and all must share in the bounty of a revived economy. With the idealism and fair play which are the core of our system and our strength, we can have a strong and prosperous America at peace with itself and the world.
The biggest runaway living cost is health insurance, so Obama's trying to fix that by removing the elite group of insurance executives from control of our health. How about a healthy people to produce a healthy economy? That's what Obama's trying to get. "For a strong and prosperous America at peace with itself and the world." After all:
All of us together, in and out of government, must bear the burden.
Yeah, yeah, I know Reagan was promoting devolving government to the states and privatization and lower taxes for the rich in the same speech. But his background rhetoric, before he spun off the Laffer curve into the weeds, could just as easily be taken as a sales pitch for Obama's health care plan.
Hey, somebody should do a video ad "Ronald Reagan for ObamaCare!"
Update: Commenter estelpowell manages to find one disparaging comment about the t-shirt student, and it's none of the ones Kingston claimed were made, plus he didn't mention the blog she found it on. The irony of Jack Kingston complaining about other people making disparaging comments, fictional or real; the irony, it burns!
However, when the master of distraction politics throws out a ball, the media happily run with it. The local newspaper assistant editor writes a long story about the student's new national notoriety and the paper publishes a glowing editorial about the same. It's not just the local press; Bill Maher discussed her, and of course Fox has had her on.
Discuss health care reform and how Kingston's now-famous pie chart claiming only 11 million people are uninsured is wildly inaccurate, not to mention not even the main problem? Nah! We can talk about a t-shirt!
Kingston is running another series of health care town halls in GA-01. We can go and speak, like last time.