"Do You, as a Candidate for President, Really Believe..."

[paft.livejournal.com]

Susan Grigsby, who lost her brother, Steve, to cancer: What really horrified me about the debate was not the poorly phrased question, it wasn’t Dr. Paul’s answer, and it wasn’t even the scream after Wolf Blitzer asked, ‘Would you let him die,’ and somebody in the audience yelled ‘Yeah!’ That wasn’t as horrifying as was the silence from the stage, from these men and women who are running for office, not a word. Nothing.

This is the reality of the right wing libertarian attitude toward the sick. It is vile. It is inhumane. It is unworthy of Americans.

The question posed by Susan Grigsby needs to be asked of every Republican candidate. "Do you, as a candidate for President, really believe that if an American cannot get, or does not get insurance, that they should be treated the way Steve was?"


When they don’t answer it it needs to be asked again. And again. And again. They cannot be allowed to evade it. They cannot be allowed to look the other way.

Republicans are already trying. Here’s Mitch McConnell when confronted with that clip from the debate and asked if it troubled him:

(Brief chuckle) Look, we have a lot of people running for president, there are going to be a lot of debates, a lot of things said, a lot of audience reactions, I don’t have a particular reaction to what’s going on in the Republican campaign for president right now.

The silence that horrified Susan Grigsby continues.

Prominent Republicans are afraid of coming out in favor of saving the lives of the sick and uninsured.

Comments

[mrbogey.livejournal.com]

A work house existed so there would be no idle poor. If they were capable of work but had none that's where they'd be sent so as to not be vagrants or beggars.

So no, they didn't tolerate the existance of idle poor. And that's really what we have a lot of. The Scroogian response has little bearing today to the modern landscape of poverty. His solution of forcing the poor into jail or shops ignores the actual reason for the solicitation of the charity from the collectors. They weren't there for the idle poor. They were there for actually infirmed or incapacitated poor. To which Scrooge ignores this and decries all poor is lazy.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

If they considered workhouses solutions, then that means that the only concept of poor that existed in the Dickens Age was in fact idle poor, hence you conceded my argument in the first reply to it.

[mrbogey.livejournal.com]

It's one thing to miss a point. It's another to not even know what a point is.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The point that I'm making is that Victorian laws defined the only solutions to the poor as workhouses and poorhouses. This tendency existed from laws dating back to the Elizabethan era and appropriate to the institutions of that time but not the 19th Century. To expect compassion from the same people who starved 13 million people to death and eradicated an entire people in the most successful (in terms of people killed by proportion) genocide in human history is to miss that the Victorian age was in fact populated by nasty, unpleasant wretches.