'Dumb' Gipper Nails It

Roger Kimball writes re Obama's 'health care' pantomime (my bolds):

Gentlemen, start your teleprompters.

The nation readies itself for the spectacle of Obama’s special exercise in showmanship and partisan bi-partisanship, offering Republicans and the American people once last chance to sign on to the Democratic plan to take health care out of the hands of us plebs and hand it over to a caring, sharing government.

Any moment now, we will be treated to the President of the United States lecturing us about how he is going to improve health care by making it worse, how he is going to save money by spending $1 trillion dollars, how he is going to make the delivery of health care more efficient by turning it over to a government bureaucracy.

Does anyone — anyone — really believe him? Does he believe himself?

I do not know.

What I do know is that we’ve been down this road before. And one person who saw what socialized medicine was all about was Ronald Reagan. I’ve quoted from this magnificent speech before. Let me quote from it again: “One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people,” Reagan observed, “has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project.”

Ask Americans whether they want socialized medicine: the invariable answer is no. As Reagan notes, Truman tried it. He failed. But just present socialism as a liberal project and you can get people to roll over, wave their arms and legs in the air, and empty their wallets...

That Reagan sure was one smart cookie.