The Press-Dispatch
Issue link: https://www.ifoldsflip.com/i/324078
OpiniOn C-2 Wednesday, June 4, 2014 The Press-Dispatch Points to ponder—by Rev. Ford Bond Observations by Thomas Sowell Think Big by Ben Carson Random thoughts Refusing to compromise continued on page 3 Why VA service won't improve A woman's perspective—by Mona Charen The virtue behind Memorial Day Here's a not-so-bold prediction: After the press loses interest in the Veterans Affairs scandal, after the in- vestigations have been com- pleted and one or two offi- cials have resigned, nothing will change. Is this cynicism? Not re- ally. It comes down to one's view of how much gov- ernment can achieve by bureaucratic, top-down management. The progressive project has limitless faith in the ca- pacity of wise managers to run complex systems for the benefit of all. Untainted by the profit mo- tive, bureaucrats can deliver services eq- uitably and efficiently. Every liberal/pro- gressive program has the effect of taking decision-making away from individuals, communities and local governments, and centralizing it in Washington. President Barack Obama has dog- gedly championed this approach. His admirers, who share his belief in the power of central management, have no- ticed that there have been lapses on his watch. Doyle McManus of the Los Ange- les Times summarized the disillusioned progressives lament thusly: "The biggest problems Obama has faced in the White House ... have come not from making policy but from trying to implement it. The calamitous launch of his healthcare plan last fall is the big- gest and most painful example... "The 2009 economic stimulus plan's 'shovel-ready' projects that took months to start, the confused response to the 2010 BP oil spill, the flap over IRS scru- tiny of conservative organizations, even the State Department failures that led to the deaths of four Americans in Beng- hazi in 2012—all were mainly lapses in management, not policy." Obama, McManus concludes sadly, is a "skilled politician and speechmaker but a lousy manager." It's certainly true that Obama is a poor manag- er. He isn't interested in the nuts and bolts of pol- icy implementation. He prefers to strike poses. He makes pronouncements like: "If these allegations prove to be true, it is dis- honorable, it is disgrace- ful, and I will not tolerate it. Period." ( You'd think by now he'd avoid the intensifier "peri- od.") As with his comments about the IRS scandal, and "If you like your doc- tor..." and Benghazi, and the Justice De- partment targeting journalists, the im- portant thing is to get the affect right, not to solve problems or take responsibility. It's unacceptable and a disgrace and no one is angrier than he ... and what's on "Game of Thrones" tonight? Maybe he should pose for a photo holding a sign saying "#ManageOurGovernment." Even if Obama were the best man- ager in the world, the problems with efficient service delivery by govern- ment would continue—because the government is too large, too unwieldy and too lacking in incentives for effi- ciency to yield much, if at all, to man- agement. A business that fails to deliv- er services will be crushed by its com- petitors. Government can never go out of business. At the Veterans Affairs, bureaucrats lied and cooked the books regarding the care they were providing veterans. Eight cardiologists at the Albuquerque, N.M., facility, The Daily Beast reports, saw the same number of patients in a week that a single cardiologist in private practice sees in two days. According to the in- spector general's report, long wait times, poor service and deceit are "systemic" throughout the system. Some veterans may have died for lack of timely treat- ment. Care for another headline guaran- teed to recur? "Senate Chair: Fix Dys- functional Indian Health." That's an As- sociated Press story about the Indian Health Service, tasked since 1955 with delivering free medical care to 2 mil- lion Native Americans. Former Sen. By- ron Dorgan found that a "chronic state of crisis" plagued the service, featur- ing "a lack of providers, hospitals at risk of losing their accreditation, improper- ly licensed staff, and missing or stolen narcotics." A spokesman for the Assini- boine and Sioux tribes of northeast Mon- tana's Fort Peck Indian Reservation told the Journal Gazette: "All too often, trib- al members complain of ailments but get sent home from the Indian Health Ser- vice with cough medicine or pain kill- ers. Later we learn the situation is much more serious, like cancer." Progressives respond that the IHS is simply underfunded—as they regard ev- ery federal program except the military. But even Democratic Sen. Jon Tester of Montana found when he examined prob- lems with the IHS that at least one pro- vider was seeing only one patient per day. It isn't management; it's a matter of in- centives. No central authority can make a system like the VA or the IHS or Brit- ain's National Health Service run effi- ciently. Competition is the only system that gives the power to consumers to re- ward good service and punish bad. But progressives cannot shed their faith that more government is the answer to bad government, so this story is sure to be repeated. In your face The gospel of Matthew zeros in on the hidden lust of the heart: "But the things that come out of a person's mouth come from the heart, and these defile them." Take a look around the en- tertainment media and try to summarize what is being offered as entertainment. Look at the big picture. How would our great-grand- parents react to what is con- sidered normal today? I am sure many of them would consider us a defiled nation. They would not consid- er the demand to dialogue and compromise with un- righteousness an option. Much of what we accept as the new normal they would classify sin! The drumbeat we hear to- day, and have for decades, is tolerance and dialogue. The problem is that there is nev- er any give on the side of the progressives; the group al- ways returns with the same demands, just repackaged and with a voice a few deci- bels higher. Our culture can be likening to How to Boil a Frog. If you throw a frog in- to hot water, it would jump out, but place it in a pot of cold water first, then you can bring it to a boil, and the frog will never realize what's happening until it's too late. That is an analogy to what the enter- tainment indus- try has done to us. Cultural warriors often point to Nor- man Lear's All in the Family as the first of a se- ries of produc- tions that were designed spe- cifically to at- tack Christianity and con- servative America. Howev- er, the groundwork for this type of program was years in the making and deliber- ate. Ben Shapiro points this out in his book Primetime Propaganda. The offen- sive against decency, mom, and apple pie originated in a large extent in the liber- al writers and producers of the 1950s. Shapiro mentions ABC as the Avant guard of stealth due to its small size when compared to CBS and NBC. ABC's programming was deliberately aimed at pushing the envelope of de- cency, the shock and awe of the era. It was this con- stant pressure and pushing the limits that would make Lear's programs possible. Two of ABC's leading programs still in reruns are The Rifleman and The Un- touchables and underscore this fact. The Rifleman was about a widower and his son who were homestead- ing a farm in New Mexico in the 1870s. The program was one of the first to center upon a single father raising a child. However, the son/ father relationship was not the focus of each episode. It was the rifle-aka the Ri- fleman. Almost without fail, there was at least one "jus- tifiable" killing in each epi- sode with the moral being that the one shot "deserved it; he was just no good." The Untouchables is a loose chronology of Eliot Ness and his unit [The Un- touchables] who dealt with issues of the prohibition era. As far as violence, this pro- gram outscored The Rifle- man in the number of kill- ings in each episode, which usually ran four to six, all in cold blood by the hood- lum racketeers; and the feds didn't act much better. One oft cited technique to get by the censors [the Good Seal of Approval for T V] was to put in a script a series of lines or a scene which the writer knew would get censored. While the writer/pro- ducers argued for this part to be left in the final cut, the censor would miss or let go the double en- tente that would by itself be considered risqué. Today there is no need for stealth. The degeneracy of the media is now in-your- face; a constant drumbeat of all things gay, bisexual, lesbian, transgendered, oc- cult, and evil. It is routine for the media to herald another element of society has decided to open its rants to the LGBT com- munity and get the camer- as rolling for the first open- ly gay [insert occupation here]. Ad nausea, we have been treated to the phone call to Michael Sam from the St. Louis Rams drafting him as the first openly gay player. We have been treated to the scene of his emotional out- burst among his followers [minus family] and the kiss from his partner. So what! Is that really news [anymore]? I suspect this was a pub- lic relations campaign de- signed to get Sam drafted into the NFL. Jason Whit- lock of ESPN openly pon- ders this issue and sug- gest the media circus gen- erated by his coming out [of the closet] could have been used to get a somewhat me- diocre player into the draft. In the end, Tim Tebow is still out [too Christian and a distraction so says ESPN], and Michael Sam is in. You draw your own conclusions. I would say turn off the T V and read your Bible, but that could be considered offen- sive. Think about it! More dis- cussion on the topic of pragmatism and politics is critical. If conserva- tives decide to take their marbles and go home rather than fight to the bitter end because they feel their principles have been compromised, they will needlessly subject future genera- tions to untold misery. Voting for someone who agrees with you 90 percent of the time is far superior to voting for someone who disagrees with you 100 percent of the time. This is exactly what will happen if people refuse to exercise their civic duty and boycott elec- tions because they feel betrayed. Personally, I am not supportive of abortion at all, but I can support people who feel differently if, in the gigantic scheme of things, they can help put an end to the murder of innocent babies. This is especial- ly true of those who are personal- ly inclined to save and protect life. Perhaps an illustration is in or- der: Two armies are engaged in a war. Let's call the good army that is trying to defend an entire soci- ety the red army and the bad army that is trying to invade and pillage society the blue army. The blue ar- my occupies a superior strategic po- sition and is composed of slightly more troops, putting the red army at a distinct disadvantage. Some in the red army feel that they are right and, therefore, should simply march directly into battle with the blue ar- my because right always wins. Fortunately, some members of the red army are wise and have a better plan. They send a battalion of troops to the base of the moun- tain occupied by the blue army to distract them while the vast major- ity of red troops approach the moun- tain from the backside. They de- scend upon the blue army by sur- prise, completely vanquishing them and winning the war. The decoy red battalion may have sustained some casualties, but in the long run, the war was won, and the entire society was saved. I hope this illustration is useful in helping some to understand that achieving a critical mass of conser- vatives and RINOs (Republicans in Name Only, as some call them) in office will ensure that we can get non-activist Supreme Court and fed- eral judges in place who respect the U.S. Constitution. It is essential to achieve a critical mass of individ- uals in the U.S. House and Senate who can join with a president in up- holding the Constitution. These rep- resentatives must believe in per- sonal responsibility and creating a business-friendly environment, un- derstand the balance between abun- dant fossil-fuel development and en- vironmental safety, and yearn to el- evate the government-dependent 47 percent rather than make them more dependent. They also must be totally pro-life and believe that the rule of law can undo a host of dam- aging regulations and restore the value system that made this nation great. In the long run, with the help of God, we will be in a position to save millions of babies who other- wise would be slaughtered. With this kind of responsible empower- ment, energizing a sluggish econo- my, bringing stability to a leaderless planet and facilitating innovation By Ed Feulner If you were to sum up Memorial Day in one word, what would it be? For me, it would be "courage." Courage means going forward, into the unknown, with no guarantee of suc- cess. It means moving out of your comfort zone and being willing to act boldly when the situation requires it. You couldn't storm the beaches on D-Day, or ac- complish your mission in the face of terrorist attacks, without it. Courage is built into the DNA of the American char- acter. It took courage for mil- lions of immigrants to leave home and come to America in search of a better life. It required courage to move west, to face the open fron- tier, to risk lives and fami- lies to acquire a piece of the American Dream. It also takes courage to stand up for what you know is right. For example, on Oct. 18, 1986, President Rea- gan was meeting in Reykja- vik, Iceland, with Soviet Pre- mier Mikhail Gorbachev. The purpose: to broker an arms-control pact that would end the deadly standoff of mutual assured destruction between the United States and the Soviet Union. Just as the deal was about to be struck, though, Mr. Gorbachev looked across the table at Reagan, smiled, and said, "This all depends, of course, on you giving up [the Strategic Defense Ini- tiative]." Well, missile de- fense was one thing that Ronald Reagan would nev- er give up. "Reagan had every- thing to gain everything in the eyes of the world if he had accepted the Reyk- javik deal," Peggy Noonan wrote in "When Character Was King," her Reagan bi- ography. "He would have been celebrated by history, known the pleasure of hav- ing given the world a gift of extraordinary and un- dreamed-of progress. But he wouldn't do it. He didn't think it was right. And be- cause he didn't do it, the So- viet Union finally fell." Now, leave Iceland and turn the calendar back 31 years to the evening of Dec. 1, 1955. We're in Montgom- ery, Ala. Buses are carry- ing people home from work. On one bus all the seats are filled, including the sec- tion behind the rear doors, the only place blacks are al- lowed to sit. Four white men board- ed. The driver calls out to the four black passengers seated behind the white section. "Get up," he tells them. "Let the white men have those seats." Three do as they're told. But the fourth doesn't budge. The other passengers turn and stare in stunned silence. Rosa Parks is defying the unwritten, centuries- old code of racial subservi- ence. She is also defying Al- abama law. The driver sum- mons a policeman, who ar- rests Parks. Viewed from one perspec- tive, Ronald Reagan and Ro- sa Parks couldn't have been more different. He was the most powerful person in the world, commander in chief of the armed forces of the United States. She was one of the least power- ful, an unknown seamstress working in the back room of a department store in the Deep South before the Civil Rights Act. But in a more fundamen- tal sense, they couldn't have been more alike. All continued on page 3 continued on page 3 Random thoughts on the passing scene: Will the Veterans Administration scan- dal wake up those people who have been blithely saying that what we need is a "sin- gle payer" system for medical care? Delays in getting to see a doctor have been a com- mon denominator in government-run med- ical systems in England, Canada and Aus- tralia, among other places. Class warfare rhetoric would have us re- senting "the top ten percent" in income. But that would be a farce, because most of us would be resenting ourselves, since more than half of all Americans—54 percent— are in the top ten percent at some stage of their lives. Some people act as if the answer to every problem is to put more money and power in the hands of politicians. Freedom means nothing if it does not mean the freedom to do what other people don't like. Everyone was free to be a Communist un- der the Stalin dictatorship, and everyone is free to be a Muslim in Saudi Arabia. Yet whole generations are coming out of our col- leges where only those who are politically correct are free to speak their minds. What kind of America will they create? In Thomas Piketty's highly-praised new book, "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" he asserts that the top tax rate under Presi- dent Herbert Hoover was 25 percent. But In- ternal Revenue Service records show that it was 63 percent in 1932. If Piketty can't even