The response of a large plurality of Americans, if not an absolute majority to almost everything Barack Obama has done in the past five years can be summed up in a single phrase: It doesn't directly affect me, so I don’t care.
Want to bomb Syria, Barry? Well, it doesn't affect me.
Those four guys slaughtered in Benghazi? Well, they weren't in my immediate family, so it doesn't affect me. Or arresting the film maker that Obama blamed for the Benghazi massacre? I don’t even know how to run a video camera, so it doesn’t affect me.
The thousands of men maimed or killed in Afghanistan? Again, they're not in my immediate family and I don't know them personally, so it doesn't affect me.
The Fast and Furious gun running fiasco? Yeah, I realize that Brian Terry's family would be upset, and I can imagine that a few Mexican families might be in mourning, but really, it doesn't affect me.
James Rosen of FOX News and people in the Associated Press being spied upon by Obama’s NSA? Well, I’m not a reporter, so it doesn’t affect me.
The IRS harassing Americans who oppose the President? Well, I haven’t been trying to donate to their cause, so it doesn’t affect me.
None of this affects me.
After all, Obama and the Democrats made sure that we get "free" phones, and "free" food stamps, and constantly extended unemployment insurance, and that stuff actually DOES affect me.
Kind of makes me look like the “What? Me, worry?” guy on the cover of MAD Magazine, Alfred E. Newman.
Each time Obama and the Democrats/Progressives pulled one of these things, and got away with it because of the “Hey, it doesn’t affect me!” mindset in the country, they got bolder, thinking that the non-affect syndrome was a permanent condition.
But now, along comes ObamaCare. Does that affect me? You bet your sweet life it does.
When it was being debated in Congress before its passage, along predictably partisan lines, we kept hear the President tell us again and again (and again and again and again) that "If you like your health plan you can keep it. Period." and "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. Period." He also said that ObamaCare would save the average family about $2,500 a year. Oops.
We have found out, thanks to cancellation notices from health insurance firms, that the President lied to us. It was only after those cancellation notices went out that we found out about a health insurance concept that didn't exist until the President's lies were unmasked -- the "sub-standard" health insurance policy. We didn't know that the policies that 80% or more of us had, and liked, prior to the passage of ObamaCare were sub-standard. When we went to a doctor (of our choice, by the way) the insurer paid part of the bill and we paid a nominal amount as a "co-pay". The same thing also happened when we went to get a prescription filled. Our insurance provider paid part of the cost, we paid the rest. None of that seemed sub-standard to any of us.
But thanks to ObamaCare, we have the “new, improved and completely standard compliant” medical insurance coverage available to us, but at a slightly higher cost.
We were told, again prior to the passage of ObamaCare, that the law would give people without health insurance a chance to be insured. Those with pre-existing conditions would be able to buy insurance. Those who were too poor to pay the cost of the then current (and sub-standard) insurance would be “helped” via tax credits or some other wealth transfer system. Well, those things sounded nice, and since I had health insurance already, none of those things affected me, so I didn’t care.
We were told that Obama could reduce medical costs for each of us. I suppose we were at fault for not being able to see how adding a tax to the cost of every medical device sold would reduce the cost of a doctor visit. I’m sure glad that Barack Obama cleared that math up for us, and explained that some Republican must have slipped that into the bill he never read before he signed it. Unfortunately, that one actually does affect me.
In fact there are innumerable parts of the Affordable Care Act that affect me, and literally hundreds of millions of other Americans.
As more and more Americans find that ObamaCare actually does affect them negatively, they won’t be able to continue the “Hey, it’s all good, it doesn’t affect me!” mantra. They will find out more and more each day of the consequences of allowing Democrats alone to force this law upon us.
Unless Republicans are affected by pre-existing stupidity, they should be able to expand the number of seats they hold in the House and take back the majority in the Senate. Can they gain enough seats in either house of Congress to override a Barack Obama veto of a bill to repeal ObamaCare? I don’t know. But with a strong majority, and with the anger of the American electorate to support them, they can make life for Obama and whoever the Democrats select as their nominees for the presidency and candidate down further on the ticket in 2016 utterly miserable.
That will affect all of us, as well. Sadly, absolutely none of this is new. Just ask Martin Niemöller, who wrote this as a young minister in Hitler’s Germany:
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me--and there was no one left to speak for me.
