ObamaCare And The Bard

Hattip to my friend and blogging colleague Darwin Catholic.  The indispensable Iowahawk gives his own unique take on the famed “Band of Brothers” speech.

ACT XXIV, SCENE 13. On the eve of the health care battle.

Enter the PRESIDENT.

PELOSI.

O that we now had here
But one one-hundred of those Blue Dogs 
That face no re-election to-day!

OBAMA.

What’s she that wishes so?
My handmaiden Pelosi? No, my fair lady;
If by ballot we are mark’d to die, we are enow
To do our party loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of ear-marks.
Who cares! I pray thee, wish not one vote more
Than is needed for simple majority.
By Alinsky, I am not covetous for gold,
Nor care I who doth feed at my state dinners;
It yearns me not that Ashton and Demi my t-shirts wear;
Such outward things are cool but dwell not in my desires.
But if it be a sin to covet permanent state control,
I am the most offending soul alive.
No, faith, Madame Speaker, wish not a man from a swing district.
Screw that! I would not lose so great a bill
As one man more methinks would share from me
For the last hope I have. O, do not wish one more!
Rather proclaim it, Pelosi, through my hosts on CNN,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
And a token DNC contribution put into his media fund;
But speak not again his traitorous name,
For his re-election is likewise screw’d. 

Go hereth to readeth the rest.

Update:  Father Z has some talented commenters in his comboxes:

Mark Anthony Obama
Easter Monday 2010

Friends, Chicagoans, flaming liberals, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Health Care, not to praise him;
The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interréd with their bones,
So let it be with Health Care…. The noble Boehner
Hath told you Health Care was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault,
And grievously hath Health Care answered it….
Here, under leave of Boehner and the rest,
(For Boehner is an honourable man;
So are they all; all honourable men)
Come I to speak in Health Care’s funeral….
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Boehner says he was ambitious;
And Boehner is an honourable man….
He would hath brought many people to the emergency room,
Whose expenses would the general coffers empty:
Did this in Health Care seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Health Care hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Boehner says he was ambitious;
And Boehner is an honourable man.
You all did see that on the congressional floor
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice fail to pass: was this ambition?
Yet Boehner says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Boehner spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once, not without cause:
What cause withholds you then to mourn for him?
O judgement! thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason…. Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Health Care,
And I must pause till it come back to me.

Comment by Eric

 

OBAMA.
Wherefore was that cry?

EMANUEL.
Health Care, my Lord, is dead.

OBAMA.
It should have died hereafter;
The time for spin would have been post election.
Republicans, and Republicans, and Republicans,
Creep in their petty pace from state to state,
Till the last second of the open polls,
And all my speeches have lighted none but
yellow dogs. Out, Out brief majority!
Politics is but a poor speaker
that hams and haws and umms through his address
Until the prompter spurs his words. It is
The Ouroboros, circling endlessly,
Progressing nowhere.

Comment by Ernesto Gonzalez

Mark Steyn Explains Why the Welfare State is Dying

Mark Steyn explains in a column here why the Welfare State is on life support.  The short version is not enough babies and too many people living off the State.

While President Obama was making his latest pitch for a brand new, even more unsustainable entitlement at the health care “summit,” thousands of Greeks took to the streets to riot. An enterprising cable network might have shown the two scenes on a continuous split screen – because they’re part of the same story. It’s just that Greece is a little further along in the plot: They’re at the point where the canoe is about to plunge over the falls. America is further upstream and can still pull for shore, but has decided instead that what it needs to do is catch up with the Greek canoe. Chapter One (the introduction of unsustainable entitlements) leads eventually to Chapter 20 (total societal collapse): The Greeks are at Chapter 17 or 18.

What’s happening in the developed world today isn’t so very hard to understand: The 20th century Bismarckian welfare state has run out of people to stick it to. In America, the feckless insatiable boobs in Washington, Sacramento, Albany and elsewhere are screwing over our kids and grandkids. In Europe, they’ve reached the next stage in social democratic evolution: There are no kids or grandkids to screw over. The United States has a fertility rate of around 2.1, or just over two kids per couple. Greece has a fertility rate of about 1.3: 10 grandparents have six kids have four grandkids – i.e., the family tree is upside down. Demographers call 1.3 “lowest-low” fertility – the point from which no society has ever recovered. And compared to Spain and Italy, Greece has the least worst fertility rate in Mediterranean Europe.

We are at a time of transition from a time when governments throughout the Western world established  ever more elaborate social welfare networks, to a time in the future, and probably the very near future, when these systems simply can no longer be funded:

Married Priests From the First Centuries Practiced Celibacy

The practice of celibacy in the priesthood is apparent in the years following Jesus’ resurrection.  Single priests and priests who were married abstained from sex, of course with approval from their wives. Just as Jesus chose celibacy giving up a family in order to give himself to mankind, priests are called by God to imitate Jesus. In fact, the priest is able to better serve all people because he is more available.

Monsignor Angelo Amato of the Prefect of the Congregation of the Causes of Saints states:

“Jesus was chaste, virgin, celibate and he defended it. His virginity distanced him from others, but it’s what made him able to show, compassion and forgiveness to others.”

Thus priests are called by God to imitate Jesus in this discipline.

By the end of the fourth century Pope Saint Siricius pushed for a celibate priesthood in order to maintain continuity with earlier centuries.  Later this became a discipline* in order to carry out the tradition of celibacy, thus priests could not marry in the Catholic Church.

Video courtesy Rome Reports.

_._

* The Eastern Orthodox still allow their priests to marry, but they must be so before entering the seminary and are not allowed to become bishops.

Obama Seems Unable to Face Up to Americas Problems

Simon Heffer of London’s Daily Telegraph wrote this timely piece on President Obama’s inability to govern America.  Here are some snippets [emphases mine]:

It is a universal political truth that administrations do not begin to fragment when things are going well: it only happens when they go badly, and those who think they know better begin to attack those who manifestly do not. The descent of Barack Obama’s regime, characterised now by factionalism in the Democratic Party and talk of his being set to emulate Jimmy Carter as a one-term president [We can only hope], has been swift and precipitate. It was just 16 months ago that weeping men and women celebrated his victory over John McCain in the American presidential election. If they weep now, a year and six weeks into his rule, it is for different reasons.

“Obama’s big problem,” a senior Democrat told me, “is that four times as many people watch Fox News as watch CNN.” The Fox network is a remarkable cultural phenomenon which almost shocks those of us from a country where a technical rule of impartiality is applied in the broadcast media [Like the BBC is a bastion of impartiality my left foot]. With little rest, it pours out rage 24 hours a day: its message is of the construction of the socialist state, the hijacking of America by “progressives” who now dominate institutions, the indoctrination of children, the undermining of religion and the expropriation of public money for these nefarious projects. The public loves it, and it is manifestly stirring up political activism against Mr Obama, and also against those in the Republican Party who are not deemed conservatives. However, it is arguable whether the now-reorganising Right is half as effective in its assault on the President as some of Mr Obama’s own party are.

Father Norman Weslin, Champion of the Unborn

There will come a day in this country when future generations will look back on legal abortion with the same shame and abhorrence that we now look upon slavery.  In that future those who stood up for the unborn will be regarded as heroines and heroes.  On that day no name will be more praised than that of Father Norman Weslin.

Father Weslin followed an extremely unlikely path to the priesthood.  Born 80 years ago to Oscar and Hilma Weslin, he was the 16th of 18 children, the first ten of whom died in infancy.  The family lived in Iron City in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.  A tough land, it often produces tough people, and Norman Weslin was no exception.  Always in trouble in school, a bright spot in his life was his future wife Mary Lou who he met in the fifth grade.   She was Catholic and he was Lutheran, but that made no difference to him.  As they reached high school age she became the center of his life.

At 17 he joined the Army and asked Mary Lou to marry him.  She flatly refused unless he made something of himself.  Perhaps to the astonishment of both of them he did.  He graduated from Officer’s Candidate School in October of 1951 and was commissioned a second lieutenant.  He went on to artillery and missile school at Fort Bliss, Texas.  While there he converted to Catholicism and he and Mary Lou were married.

He then attended Airborne School at Fort Benning, Georgia which began his association with the 82nd Airborne.  Unfortunately, it was here that he began to drink heavily and became, in the words of Father Weslin, for the next twenty years “a hopeless alcoholic”.  While stationed in Panama in 1952 he almost killed Mary Lou while driving drunk.  The doctor treating her after the collision told him that she had suffered a massive brain concussion and was going to die.  A nurse gave him a green scapular and told him to pin it to Mary Lou’s pajamas and pray, “Immaculate Heart of Mary, pray for us, now and at the hour of our death.”  He did so.  Against the odds Mary Lou fully recovered and left the hospital three days later.