Kennedy Legacy

I am more moved by Ted's death than I expected. I grew up among Protestant, Republican skeptics of the Kennedy myth -- a cynicism that lingered even after we all became Democrats.

It was Bobby's murder that I felt as a personal loss, since 1968 was my year of conversion. I think we lost our ignorance when Jack was killed and our blind optimism when Bobby died. I trust that Ted's realistic idealism has a true heir in President Obama.

I also had a feeling that the death of Eunice and her last brother is the real end of the truly liberal wind that Vatican II blew -- in a truly, "catholic" way -- all over the world. Eunice devoted herself to the feminine personal world, Ted to the masculine, political one. And they did not hesitate to insist on making a difference here, on this Earth, in this life-time.

For those of us who think the torch must be passed on, we may do it without their religion, but only because their ethics have become so ingrained in our secular lives.

We should find a way to make our generation as committed to ideals that transcend their roots in Irish, Catholic, Democratic dogma. Something as powerful a liberal counterforce to fundamentalist demogogues as these two were.

Cynicism will not do it.

Real Info about Healthcare and Public Opinion

The New England Journal of Medicine this week has a free article with an excellent analysis of recent polls on what Americans really believe, like, and dislike, about health insurance and health care. The scary part of this analysis is that so many Americans who have insurance are afraid their coverage will be worse -- and their taxes will be higher -- under a new plan.

Too many believe that reform will make the status quo worse, for their families and for the country as a whole.

How can we convince the public that much worse is what healthcare -- quality and cost -- will be without reform?


http://healthcarereform.nejm.org/?p=1424?query=TOC

For an excellent critique of anti-health-care rhetoric, which demolishes the distortions, see this article:

http://mediamatters.org/research/200907290047

1930s American Fascists rise again

I had no idea how much Rush Limbaugh was borrowing from the anti-FDR gang, until I read some old speeches by Coghlin.

The "birthers" are using exactly the same kind of inflamatory about "Barak Hussein Obama:"

Here is an historical quote from a 1935 radio broadcast by Father Coghlin:


"I refer to Bernard Manasses Baruch whose full name has seldom been mentioned but which name from this day forth shall not be forgotten in America. This was the name which his parents gave him, the name Manasses. This is the name, General Johnson, of your prince of high finance. Him with the Rothschilds in Europe, the Lazzeres in France, the Warburgs, the Kuhn-Loebs, the Morgans and the rest of that wrecking crew of internationalists whose god is gold and whose emblem is the red shield of exploitation--these men I shall oppose until my dying days even though the Bernard Manasses Baruchs of Wall Street are successful in doing to me what the prince, after whom he was named, accomplished in doing to Isaias."

http://www.ssa.gov/history/fcspeech.html father coghlin speeches

Rush Limbaugh's Father Coghlin's playbook

By calling Obama's health plan "nazi," Limbaugh is beating the same demagogic drum that Father Coghlin and America Firsters did in the 1930s.

In those days, the weapon was anti-semitism -- disguised as "National Union for Social Justice;" today it's Orwellian "new speak" which calls liberals "nazis" and redefines free market fanatics as populists protecting the little guy.

FDR and the New Deal survived those times, and Obama will too.