The final move in Al Gore’s shift to the left came last week, according to ABCNews.com’s The Note. He has now formally abandoned his earlier centrist position on healthcare and plumped for a Canadian single-payer system of the kind specifically avoided by Clinton. It’s good to know that this is the new Gore: statist, populist, and the most left-wing member of the current group of Democratic contenders. Maybe he should take a look at yet another story from Britain’s vaunted National Health Service. Here’s a testimony from a man who is still attached to the idea of collectivist healthcare, but who saw what it means when it mattered most. He needed urgent radiotherapy for a brain tumor. Nuh-huh:
[T]he best estimate I could get from the NHS was a six week wait. I have medical insurance through my employer and I am lucky enough to now have started privately arranged treatment on Wednesday, less than two weeks after my diagnosis. There are thousands of cases like mine every year in this country and most will not have that option.
Notice that in Britain, if you actually need good care, you have to both pay higher taxes and get private insurance – for healthcare inferior to much that is available here. This is what Al Gore wants to bring to America. At least now we know.
BUSH VS. ROBERTSON?: Colin Powell takes on the Christian Right. Bush paved the way.
THE MILITARY’S GIFT TO TERRORISTS: A case study in how anti-gay prejudice is undermining the war on terror. Meanwhile, an email from a younger generation shows how dated this bigotry is:
An anecdote from a service academy. A majority of the upperclassmen that I’ve talked to here at the Naval Academy have no problem with openly gay service members. (Many of the freshmen, or plebes, who’ve just been through a full summer of intense physical training and indoctrination, are not yet so open to the idea.) This being my first semester here, the sample of my students is statistically meaningless, of course, but it still surprised the hell out of me. These kids seem to understand a few things that their superiors don’t.
And that’s without any guidance as to integrating gay soldiers. The real question is: how much more damage will we do to our national defense by hanging on to what Dick Cheney called an “old chestnut” a long decade ago?
UH-OH: Slate’s Chris Suellentrop on Nancy Pelosi: “While it’s true that Pelosi’s views, particularly on war and foreign policy, are out of step with much of the American public’s, they’re right in the mainstream of what House Democrats believe.” Okay. I feel better now.
LOSERS’ HALL OF FAME: Time’s Matt Cooper emails to point out that George McGovern briefly ran for president in 1984 and lost in the Massachusetts Democratic primary. He’d already lost the 49 other states in 1972. I’m not sure primaries count. So Mondale gets an edge. But it’s close!
AN ONION CLASSIC: This is roughly how I feel when the p.c. police tell us not to jump to any rash conclusions about anti-American Islamic converts who shoot up innocents in suburbs. Who’s to say they’re terrorists, after all?
MORE BUTS: A reader notices some other lacunae in Saddam’s deranged letter to the U.N.:
I think you’ve missed another key indication in the letter of Saddam’s true intentions. Many times when the letter mentions allowing the inspectors into Iraq it includes language referring to international law. For example: “We are eager to see them perform their duties in accordance with the international law,” and “let the inspectors come to Baghdad to carry out their duties in accordance with the law.” The key to understanding these references, I think, is in the last substantive paragraph of the letter, in which the writer promises “to forward another letter to you on a later date, in which I shall state our observations the measures and procedures, contained in SCR 1441 that are contrary to international law . . . .” It seems clear to me that the letter is designed to build into the “acceptance” of the inspectors an escape hatch, whereby if the inspectors actually demand the access that the U.N. Resolution requires, Iraq can refuse on the ground that the demands are inconsistent with “international law.” All in all, the letter looks like another in a long line of Iraq’s pattern of loudly proclaiming “yes” while quietly adding conditions that make it really a “no.”
Poor Saddam. He’s getting nervous, isn’t he?
The Dish 