Monday, July 26, 2004|
Just when you thought John Kerry couldn't be less inspiring. . . 8:02:50 AM permalink What do you think? [] trackback [] |
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Not only do we have cognitive dissonance from some on the left, we have transference, too. It's hard to believe that the Michael Moore lovers on the left actually put stock in the idea that when Bush goes to Texas for the summer, he's really goofing off. Lots of people seem to believe that though. Virginia says it better than me:"No mature student of politics believes the president of the United States goofs off on vacation. It's not the kind of job you escape.". 7:52:23 AM permalink What do you think? [] trackback [] |
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An editorial in the Dallas Morning News argues for legislation that allows importation of drugs from other countries to satisfy our desire for cheap drugs. The editorial opens like this:
We need medicines. We want them cheaply. We want them to be reliable." Of course, the glaring problem here is that, far from being truths, the last two are probably mutually exclusive. America has access to the greatest medicines because American pharmaceutical companies do far more R&D than other countries. We are the innovators in that market. And naturally, people want to have their cake and eat it too. The question is, if we buy all our medicines from other countries who imported it from our companies to begin with, who's going to pay for the R&D budgets that are constantly churning out newer and more effective drugs in the States? One of two things could happen, either innovation will be stifled or the prices will have to go up. Eventually, the market will prevail because it costs so much money to create new drugs. The countries that we would be importing from practice governmentally-sponsored price controls to keep prices down. Importation would just be another name for the same thing in America. What should really be the discussion is insurance. The only people paying full price for drugs are those without adequate insurance. Of course, creating legislation to provide insurance to those who cannot get it is a much more complex, difficult topic than merely importing drugs. But because we want to ignore the gorilla in the living room, we're disussing importation legislation. This will not be the answer for the long term that some people believe it to be. |
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Is the New York Times a liberal newspaper? Roger Simon examines that question. But the key graf to me is only peripherally related to his topic but directly related to the War on Terror:
Talk about "On Contradiction"! People of the "Zabar's zeitgeist" find it almost constitutionally impossible to acknowledge the other side "did the right thing." These freedoms that the left always cries for in America seem to be strangely missing in their foreign policy. The fact that women have infinitely more freedoms now in both Afghanistan and Iraq, that the people there have the ability to critize their governments when before they did not, that by making particular countries safer necessarily means that the world, and America by relation, is a safer place, these facts seem to be so alien to many on the left side of the aisle and yet these are the ideals that those on the left of the aisle claim to hold most dear. The cognitive dissonance must be crushing. When you bring this up to someone of the "Bush is a liar and Satan who can't talk and should be shot", their typical response is a sputtering, stuttering reply revolving around what the American people were told. But they can't seem to grasp the fact that it's entirely possible that regardless of what the American people were told, the results are at least a net positive and possibly much greater than that if for no other reason than women aren't burned in Afghanistan anymore for showing their face and people aren't being rounded up and killed for no real reason in Iraq. Eventually, America needs to come to the realization that in being the only superpower, we have responsibilities that may require the shedding of our own blood to increase and foster the lofty ideals and rights that we hold dear throughout the world. But those who critize the simplisme of the current Administration seem to want to hold those ideals while concurrently doing everything in their power to avoid spreading the ideals to the greater world. |
Last update: 6/4/2005; 9:28:24 PM .
