Tough Love Fantasies

In many ways the election of Barack Obama has been like the opening of a giant Pandora's Box. Years of pent-up liberal fantasies keep popping out, now suddenly possible, no matter how radical.

Check this one out, for instance. It's from the LA Times blog but represents the exact sentiment that scares the daylights out of so many people about government-controlled health care:

If you happen to be the 1-in-3 Americans who is neither obese nor overweight (and, thus, considered at risk of becoming obese), you might well conclude that the habits of the remaining two-thirds of Americans are costing you, big time. U.S. life expectancies are expected to slide backward, after years of marching upward. (But that's their statistical problem: Yours is how to make them stop costing you all that extra money because they are presumably making poor choices in their food consumption.)

This writer, probably skinny, wants to move beyond simply being grossed out over her neighbor's penchant for Krispy Kremes and Thickburgers to the point of actually controlling and punishing them for it. She's certainly not alone. How many self-identified lefties would have a big problem with the idea of the federal government operating as a giant set of brass knuckles to influence whatever cause du jour they happen to be pushing at the moment? Just don't listen to their phone calls or scan their email looking for terrorists and things are fine.

Decades ago ideas like this one would have been laughed off the pages:

Key among the "interventions" the report weighs is that of imposing an excise or sales tax on fattening foods. That, says the report, could be expected to lower consumption of those foods. But it would also generate revenues that could be used to extend health insurance coverage to the uninsured and under-insured, and perhaps to fund campaigns intended to make healthy foods more widely available to, say, low-income Americans and to encourage exercise and healthy eating habits.

Now they are reported seriously. As if healthy foods are not already available to 'low-income Americans'? It's called choice, something the left apparently only believes when it applies to fetuses living or dying. Or perhaps grandma. If it wasn't so judgmental it would almost be racist.

But it's the central core of everything being pushed--control. Cap and trade, health care, immigration, wealth distribution, and targeted lifestyle taxes are all about centralized control under the cover of saving the world, saving money, saving lives. There's probably an old book out there somewhere that predicted this stuff. Oh well, in leftyland the ends have always justified the means. They now control the lights, gates and ticket booths. Or as McCain is apt to say, elections have consequences, my friends.

Limbaugh warned of this stuff years ago (which is why they excoriate him and others like him) but it doesn't take a guy operating on half a brain to see the writing on the wall these days.