Great Scott!

Great Scott!
Thomas Sowell
Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Some of the most melancholy letters and e-mails that are sent to me are from people who lament that there is nothing they can do about the bad policies that they see ruining this country. They don't have any media outlet for their opinions and the letters they send to their Congressmen are either ignored or are answered by form letters with weasel words. They feel powerless.

Sometimes I remind them that the whole political establishment -- both Democrats and Republicans, as well as the mainstream media -- were behind amnesty for illegal immigrants, until the public opinion polls showed that the voters were not buying it. If politicians can't do anything else right, they can count votes.

It was the same story with the government's health care takeover legislation. The Democrats have such huge majorities in both houses of Congress that they could literally lock the Republicans out of the room where they were deciding what to do, set arbitrary deadlines for votes, and cut off debate in the Senate. The mainstream media was on board with this bill too. To hear the talking heads on TV, you would think it was a done deal.

Then Scott Brown got elected to the "Kennedy seat" in the Senate, showing that that seat was not the inheritance of any dynasty to pass on. Moreover, it showed that the voters were already fed up with the Obama administration, even in liberal Massachusetts, as well as in Virginia and New Jersey. The backtracking on health care began immediately. Politicians can count votes. Once again, the public was not helpless.

One seat did not deprive the Democrats of big majorities in Congress. But one seat was the difference between being able to shut off debate in the Senate and having to allow debate on what was in this massive legislation. From day one it was clear that concealing what was in this bill was the key to getting it passed.

That is why there had to be arbitrary deadlines-- first to get it passed before the August 2009 recess, then before Labor Day, then before the Christmas recess.

The President could wait months before deciding to give a general the troops he asked for to fight the war in Afghanistan but there was never to be enough time for the health care bill to be exposed in the light of day to the usual Congressional hearings and debate. Moreover, despite all the haste, the health care program would not actually go into effect until after the 2012 presidential election. In other words, the public was not supposed to find out whether the government's takeover of medical care actually made things better or worse until after it was too late.

Although even the members of Congress who voted on this massive legislation did not have time to read its thousands of pages, just the way it was being rushed through in the dark should have told us all we needed to know. For many voters, that turned out to be enough.

Even after Scott Brown came out of nowhere to make a stunning upset election victory, there were still some cute political tricks that could have been pulled to save the health care bill. But enough Democrats saw the handwriting on the wall that they were not going to risk their own re-election to save this bill that Barack Obama has been hell-bent to pass, even when polls showed repeatedly that the public didn't want it.

President Obama's desire to do something "historic" by succeeding, where previous presidents had failed, was perfectly consistent for a man consumed with his own ego satisfaction, rather than the welfare of the country or even of his own political party.

As for the public, it doesn't matter if your Congressman answers your letter with a form letter, or doesn't answer at all. What matters is that you let him know what you are for or against and, when enough people do that-- whether in letters, in polls or in an election, politicians get the message, because they know their jobs depend on it.

As for what is likely to happen to health care, neither the bill passed by the House of Representatives nor the Senate bill can be expected to be enacted into law. Meanwhile, Obama's reaction to his political setback has been to respond rhetorically and to call on the political operatives who helped engineer his successful election campaign in 2008. But the public did not know him then, and his rhetoric may not fool them again, now that they do.
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The Real Loser In The Massachusetts Election
Phyllis Schlafly
Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Smarting from their surprise loss in the race to fill the U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts, the Democrats are throwing their candidate, Martha Coakley, under the bus. They blame her for running a poor campaign that made losers out of Barack Obama, the Democrats, their bad health care bill and even Ted Kennedy in his grave.

Many reasons, of course, contributed to Scott Brown's remarkable victory. However, the chief reason Coakley's campaign didn't connect with the voters is that she is a feminist, causing even a liberal female TV commentator to admit she is "unappealing."

The feminists for years have had a stranglehold over the Democratic Party, enforcing their rule that every Democratic presidential candidate must pledge his fidelity to abortion with taxpayer funding. But abortion is only the first commandment of feminist ideology, and Coakley revealed much, much more, so let's use her defeat as a teaching moment.

"Martha's a really great candidate for everything that NOW stands for," gushed Christina Knowles, director of the Massachusetts chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW). Coakley was, indeed, a really great advocate for NOW's feminist ideology, but that did not attract the voters.

It was not so great when Coakley was disdainful about Brown campaigning in the cold outside Fenway Park, the fabled home of the beloved Boston Red Sox. It was not so great when Coakley dismissed one of the biggest Red Sox stars as a "Yankee fan."

Those comments fit the profile of feminists who have contempt for men's sports and therefore have eliminated hundreds of men's teams from college athletic programs under a misinterpretation of Title IX. Howard University even canceled both wrestling and baseball on the same day, giving double pleasure to the hateful feminists.

Boston University is the largest school in Boston, but it no longer has an NCAA baseball team. Nationwide, feminist opposition to anything masculine has forced the elimination of more than 450 wrestling teams.

Coakley insulted people with religious values by declaring that those who oppose abortion probably shouldn't work in emergency rooms because an occasional patient might demand an immediate abortion. Feminists refuse to allow respect for a right of conscience because that might get in the way of their ideology that abortion is women's premier right.

Feminists pretend they want all laws and behavior to be gender-neutral, with identical treatment of male and female (and other genders, whatever they are). But when it comes to domestic violence and child abuse, feminist ideology decrees that men are naturally batterers and women never lie so they don't have to present evidence in order to convict a man.

As prosecutor, Coakley followed this pattern when she insisted on treating a falsely accused man worse than a falsely accused woman. As copiously detailed by Dorothy Rabinowitz in The Wall Street Journal, Coakley persecuted the Amirault family for child abuse even after it became widely recognized that they had been imprisoned on false charges.

Although virtually everyone aware of the Amirault case recognized it to be as preposterous as the false allegation of rape against the Duke lacrosse players, Coakley insisted on continued incarceration of the Amirault brother in contrast with the release of his sister. Coakley insisted that when women are involved in child abuse cases, the real culprit is typically "a primary male offender."

Eventually, the falsely accused man, Gerald Amirault, was released by the extraordinary intervention of the Massachusetts parole board, considered the toughest in the nation. That followed an exhaustive investigation, but Coakley continued to pretend that he was somehow guilty.

Democratic Party leadership has shown that it cannot or will not stand up to the incoherent, man-hating attitude of feminists like Coakley. For example, after they had a tantrum and demanded that the majority of jobs created by Obama's stimulus be given to women (instead of to shovel-ready jobs), even though most of those who lost jobs in this recession are men, President Obama dutifully acquiesced.

It's no wonder that non-college-educated men voted overwhelmingly for Brown against Coakley by a massive 27-point margin. The Democrats are lucky enough to elect some feminists, but feminists are just too unappealing when running against a masculine man such as Brown.

Brown's driving a 2005 GMC pickup truck (which Obama sneered at) symbolized the elitism of Coakley, who drives a foreign car. While Coakley was sipping wine with drug and insurance company PAC representatives, Brown was shaking hands with the voters.

Commentary about Brown's appeal to women is diversionary -- it was male voters who overwhelmingly pulled the lever for him. Men are fed up with the feminist mindset and delivered a clear message in the Massachusetts election: give us a candidate who stands up to the feminists, and we will cross over from Democrat and independent to elect a Republican.