Health care reform; Trutherism

publius at Obsidian Wings posted on Keeping Perspective about health care, and Barney Frank. I commented, variously:

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von:
Why should I accept the devil I don't know instead of the devil I know?

For the reason publius gives: because the current system is reprehensibly bad for many people other than yourself. The devil you know kills people for profit.

If you're afraid of a new massive government bureaucracy, remember that we've *already* got massive bureaucracy -- we'd be shifting it, not expanding the total supply. Your choice is *not* between government bureaucracy and no bureaucracy -- your choice is between Big Government or Big Corporation. If you say you're "opposed to big government", then you are *automatically* in favor of big corporations getting their way. "No large bureaucracies" is not one of the available options.

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I might qualify as one of those batSH!& insane Truthers, by Sebastian's standards.

"People in the federal government took no action to stop the attacks"

-- The "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." memo makes this IMHO a matter of historical record.

"they wanted to United States to go to war in the Middle East."

-- the Project for the New American Century (signatories to whose Statement include Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Libby) makes this, also, a matter of historical record.

Does that mean they did it "because"? Not in a planned, strictly-speaking way, *necessarily*, they might just have ignored the Al Quaeda threat because they wanted to go to war in the Middle East -- and Iraq, specifically -- and preventing an Al Quaeda attack did not serve that goal.

So: they failed to protect the country; they wanted war in Iraq. The country was attacked; we went to war in Iraq (though Iraq had not attacked us). Conscious conspiracy? I doubt it. Letting things just sort of happen to get the result they wanted? Not unlikely.