Justin Bieber IS inane. It’s hard to tell whether that’s a chronological rather than a congenital problem (most 16-year-olds, after all, don’t have it all figured out just yet), but you don’t have to employ selective quotation from an article you probably haven’t even read to make the point that reasonably intelligent and well-informed adults should not be looking to teen rock idols for sound political commentary:
Oh look, Sarah Palin just tweeted something.
It’s not that I’m looking to rock stars, least of all sixteen-year-old rock stars, to enlighten me about anything. It just happens that Justin Bieber permeates nearly every aspect of the social environment at my son’s junior high school –kids either “love” or “hate” Bieber music, and for better or worse his moppy hairstyle is commonplace with my son and his friends these days – so when he makes the headlines I generally read them. And that’s how I happened to stumble past Rollingstone.com, to read the exclusive Justin Bieber interview.
I guess he subscribes to Rolling Stone, then, because you need a subscription to read the whole interview on Rollingstone.com. All you can “stumble past” is a teaser. Let’s be big-hearted about this, bleeding hearts as we are, and assume that Hill is simply too thick to have failed to understand that he wasn’t reading the whole thing and isn’t being mendacious. After all, he only admits to to reading “headlines” about Bieber, and thinks “love” and “hate” need scare quotes. He’s a bit glib.
When asked for his opinion about abortion, Bieber noted that “it’s like killing a baby” (Planned Parenthood, did you hear that?).
This appears to be some species of “joke.”* Anyway, Bieber seems to Hill quite an insightful young man when he agrees with him!
But then Bieber says something naughty and is sent to bed without his poutin.
And whether he was asked about it or not (it’s not clear from the Rolling Stone text), he also managed to get in some comments about the American quest for “free” government-run healthcare. That’s when things got real interesting with Canadian Justin Bieber.
Maybe it would be more clear if he’d read the article? …
Far be it from me to suggest that Hill is NOT just as thick as Thers thinks he is — I have no doubt he is — but I can’t quite let him off the hook on those grounds. The fact that he does not supply a link to the Rolling Stone article, as Thers does, so readers can plainly see it’s just a teaser and not the full article, or tell his readers that the full article is behind a subscription firewall, or either tell readers he has a subscription or admit that he didn’t read the entire article, makes me reasonably certain that he knew damn well that he was trying to score political points by quoting out of context from a teaser to an article about someone who shouldn’t be cited as a credible source on either abortion or health care.
Having said this, there are plenty of adults one can turn to if one wants to know how the Canadian health care system stacks up against ours — like, oh, say, the vast majority of Canadians (just to state the obvious, Justin Bieber is Canadian, but he’s not an adult, so he’s not someone I would rely on heavily or solely if I wanted to know how Canadians feel about their health care system).
Well, there you go. A Canadian who likes his government-run medical care. Which makes him, you know, a typical Canadian. To Hill, this means Canadians are stupid. Why?
What a wonderful little fantasy, wouldn’t you say? America is so “evil” that when one goes to “see the Doctor,” one has to fuss with something so trivial as “paying him.” How terrible it is that a highly trained professional like a Medical Doctor must be compensated for his or her work.
Doctors in Canada are not paid, but compelled to treat patients for free on pain of severe forechecking. This is well-known.
Yet how beautiful it is that in Canada, “the Doctor” just provides services, the patient just receives those services – as much as he or she needs – and the Doctor apparently doesn’t need to be paid. Or at least the patient doesn’t have to worry about it, right? Isn’t that the way it goes in Canada? Somehow, because of the magic of government, Doctors and nurses and everyone “at the hospital” in Canada just simply perform their jobs, patients just simply “get” what they need, and everybody’s happy. And Canadians don’t have to face that devastating threat of long-term medical bills.
Well, yes. Except not “everybody’s happy” with their public healthcare. Only a piddling 86% of Canadians.
Aside from that, empty sarcasm is a pretty devastating comeback! Just ask any, uh, 16 year old.
I expect such childlike silliness from, well, children.
Hill lives up admirably to my expectations of Townhall columnists.
But far too many elected “leaders” in Washington have been emulating this kind of fantasy-based thinking for far too long – and if our nation is to survive, they need to be un-elected altogether.
I wish anyone in Washington was proposing a Canadian-style system. However, they are not. The Canadian system is not especially similar to “Obamacare.” They are different things! This minor detail of substance however does not detain Hill; he has a trendy pop culture hook for a canned wingnut diatribe, dammit!
Recall that in May of 2010, then Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi noted that the Obamacare legislation would enable “artists” to simply quit their day-jobs, and not worry about providing for themselves. “We see this as an entrepreneurial bill,” Pelosi noted at the time, “a bill that says to someone, ‘if you want to be creative and be a musician or whatever, you can leave your work, focus on your talent, your skill, your passion, your aspirations because you will have health care.'”
No need to think about who pays the Doctor, for Ms. Pelosi. Just focus on your “passion” and “aspirations,” and thanks in no small part to her, you will simply “have” healthcare. Sounds like Bieber’s Canada.
The ability to work hard and live your dreams without having to worry about going bankrupt because of medical bills– sure sounds like Canada is basically Mordor. This is one of the reasons an overwhelming majority of 14% of all Canadians want a US style system, because they’re tired of having the freedom to follow their “passion” and “aspirations,” on account of how terrifying those things are once you put them in scare quotes.
There is more, and I suggest you read it. Highly recommend, in fact.
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