It’s a fascinating study in human nature that at the corporate level profit is stigmatized, but at the individual level it’s immunized against criticism, regardless of whether it’s legitimate or fabricated.  Indeed, when you force a universal motivation, such as the pursuit of profit, to bear the political burden of a specious moral crime—in this case, the abuse of the common man—you can be assured it will limp dejectedly off the field of competition.

That, of course, is what the left is spending sleepless nights doing with respect to health insurance companies.  As Rick Newman reported this week in US News & World Report,

President Obama has already singled out insurers as the villains responsible for exorbitant healthcare costs that are bankrupting families and businesses and making care unattainable for millions.

Since the left has been especially adept at exploiting our cultural tendency to conflate an entitlement to services with those we’re obligated to purchase, it’s easy for them to argue that insurance companies are abridging our rights with their draconian rules and regulations.

In the heat of that battle they insidiously inject the notion that such companies are only motivated by profit—read greed—which is leveraged against the innocent masses that have no recourse.  Therefore, although, as Mr. Newman further reports, the profit margin for insurance companies is only 3.4 percent (just 1.2 percent above the median), thanks to the media’s scandalously biased characterization of them, the public instinctively consigns them to one of Dante’s inner circles, along with cigarette manufacturers.

It’s apparently fine for Google and Microsoft to have profit margins of 20.6 and 24.9 percent respectively, because in the public’s view, they run beneficent companies that improve our lives.  The practical application of products and services of such companies when juxtaposed to those in health care clearly plays a role in this.  Indeed, contrast using Google to find a nice Italian restaurant to having a colonoscopy and you quickly understand the difference.

What steel hardens the vilification of the profit motive is the deliberate bastardization of competition.  As Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek wrote:

Competition is valuable only because, and so far as, its results are unpredictable and on the whole different from those which anyone has, or could have, deliberately aimed at.

The result is that the ebb and flow of supply and demand and the allocation of market resources is at once a dynamic and evolving process.  An incessant serious of simultaneous transactions, the result of complex consumer decision making, handicaps products and services and provides either profit or loss, which companies tally at the end of each quarter.  This works with stunning efficiency, with successful companies reaping the rewards and unsuccessful ones fading unceremoniously into the hazy horizon.

What’s remarkable is that the same process at work in the clothing industry is lauded as a boon for consumers but is savaged in the health care industry.  That, as we know, is due to the left’s dream of a non-profit insurance industry, with the obvious, if lamentable goal of the same superbly mediocre services we’ve come to expect from the post office.

Since so few Americans seem to take more than a passing interest in history, it’s probably something of a revelation to them when events play out in ways that could easily have been predicted.  Such is the case with President Obama and his artful posturing as a moderate during his campaign. 

Indeed, moderate Democrats and Independents are experiencing the epiphany they should have had when they were swooning over the callow leftist junior senator from Illinois.  In the years before Barack Obama knew he would run for president, he logged a number of no votes in the Illinois state senate and later in the U.S. senate, which should have sent shivers up the spine—not the leg—of the electorate. 

Here is but a sampling of votes in the U.S. senate:

Ø      Voted against expanding opportunities for small business medical insurance plans (motion to invoke cloture, May 11, 2006);

Ø      Voted against allowing the use of private HSA funds for insurance purchases (HR 2, January 25, 2007);

Ø      Voted against allowing the purchase of medical insurance across state lines (HR 976, April 2, 2007);

Ø      Voted against requiring immigrants on Z Visas maintain minimum health coverage (S 1348, June 6, 2007);

Ø      Voted against preventing the erosion of coverage (amendment, HR 976, August 2, 2007);

Ø      Voted against preserving employer-sponsored coverage (amendment, HR 976, August 2, 2007);

Ø      Voted against allowing deductions of health care costs (amendment, March 3, 2008).

Here are two of his more illustrative votes in the Illinois senate:

Ø      In 2001, he voted "present" on two Born Alive Protection Acts that would assure born-alive abortion infants receive medical treatment and hospital care;

Ø      In 2002 he voted against the Induced Labor Liability Act, which would cover a live-birth child (after abortion or induced labor) on the child's behalf.

Finally, Mr. Obama stridently endorses FOCA (Freedom of Choice Act), an Orwellian abomination that nullifies all state and federal limits on abortion, effectively permitting all forms of abortion, including the barbarity called “live-birth abortion.”

Now that the nation has roused itself from its post-election slumber, the president’s approval rating is on a downward trajectory and is showing no signs of abating.  The legislative overreach that caused such feverish excitement in Congressional Democrats has spiked and so their Looking Glass dreams of a Euro-style health care system are turning into nightmares.

The 48 percent of voters who opposed Mr. Obama have gained a few percentage points from disaffected Obama supporters who are seeing McGovern reruns playing in their heads.  They’re finally beginning to understand that Mr. Obama’s goal of having the government’s “public option” compete with private health insurance to keep them honest is nothing more than a well-orchestrated lie.

Although President Obama and his Congressional liberals aren’t the first to misappraise the uniquely vigilant character of the mainstream American voter, for those of us who innately recoil against intrusive government, this sea change is at once poetic justice and further testimony that our tripartite system of government is the best check against those with extremist designs.

We don’t have to review the annals of history to appreciate that Machiavelli’s political realism has a lengthy half-life.  In this instance, E.J. Dionne has done the leg work for us in a piece guaranteed to elicit a rare mix of laughter and scorn.  Equally evident is that the ghost of John Maynard Keynes is no longer on intellectual life support, because liberals such as Dionne remain thoroughly convinced of that profligate government spending is the best antidote to a recession.

Mr. Dionne spends considerable time laying the shaky groundwork to defend President Obama’s ‘stimulus’ package, using the example of Australia to make his case that our president has saved the American economy.  At just the critical juncture of his argument he resuscitates the moribund image of the spendthrift Bush 43 as though to handicap Obama’s odds of correcting the deficit he inherited, conveniently forgetting that the Democrats controlled Congress since 2006.

As long as we’re talking about the presumed virtues of deficit spending let’s recall that France and Germany resisted the siren song of a Leviathan stimulus.  Their economies grew at the encouraging pace of 0.3 percent in the second quarter while America’s was a lackluster negative 1 percent.

Dionne finishes his mythic diatribe with a remarkable paean to the left’s infatuation with government:

In other words, once it's in place, government-guaranteed universal health coverage becomes an unassailable social gain [emphasis added].  Obama's chances of securing such a victory will improve if he can overcome reflexive anti-government propaganda that ignores how governments kept the world economy from falling off the cliff.

In the lexicon of the left, a “social gain” is defined is the highest earthly accolade attainable, and the Dionnes of the world define it with such injudicious precision that it’s guaranteed to be deemed a success, regardless of the economic and cultural disasters it leaves in its wake.

Moreover, for Dionne, our dog-eared encyclopedia of failed, corrupt, and dysfunctional government programs, merely reflects “anti-government propaganda,” a brazenly obtuse assertion that provides an oblique, but cogent vindication of the wisdom of mainstream America.

In medicine, as in politics, prognosticators perform various tests to determine the current status and possible scenarios that may occur with a given diagnosis. In the case of print media, the diagnosis has long been in and it paints a grim picture indeed. 

There was a time not long ago when newspapers maintained their image of objectivity, despite the fact that mounting evidence betrayed a left-leaning bias. With the passage of time and the advent of Internet news agencies and sources, that image has been replaced by a tacit admission of journalistic malpractice as evidenced by its willful pattern of transparent indifference to traditional professional standards.

The most obvious malefactor in America today is the New York Times, whose news editors have single-handedly proven that it can’t be trusted to faithfully report the news. Beginning with its selection process, which scrupulously adheres to a liberal subject bias—that is, reporting that is effectively staged to showcase the alleged foibles of capitalism, the presumed poor treatment of workers, “obscene” executive compensation, corporate “indifference” to the environment, and the “scandalous” way insurance companies treat those they insure, to name just a few—and maintaining its uncanny gift for melding news and editorial comment, the Times is the quintessential example of how arrogance corrupts judgment.

Indeed, the Times seems genetically programmed for liberals infatuated with echo chamber politics, which holds a mirror to the reader and perfectly reflects every nurtured myth, false preconception, and indulgent cynicism. It provides a kind of emotive sustenance for the liberal sensibility which, in moments of candor, understands the intellectual vulnerability of its ideas. 

For a particularly egregious example, let’s have a look at Richard Baehr’s piece today in the American Thinker, which highlights the craven, churlish way in which the Times malignly advances the left’s political agenda. In this instance its goal was to disabuse readers of the nascent fear of “death panels” that obliquely lurk in President Obama’s health care reform initiative. 

What’s remarkable about the rapid decline in mainstream newspaper readership is the obvious zeal their news editors bring to their studied denial of bias and singular determination to drive their papers to extinction as rapidly as possible. Like a poorly performing actor with an ever dwindling audience who summarily dismisses his dismal press reports, the Times seems perfectly content with its reputation as a reliable mouthpiece for the Democratic National Committee.

You don’t have to subscribe to theorists such as George Santayana, who have written about the fate of those who fail to learn history’s lessons, to appreciate the similarities of 2009 to 1993.  A friend and an astute political observer with a keen eye for history recently wrote:

I’ve been wondering the past several days more and more about the similarities between ’93 and ’09…Both [Clinton and Obama] tried to push through a government-run, government-mandated healthcare plan; both experienced significant grassroots resistance to those efforts.  Clinton managed to lose his party’s majority in Congress for the next 12 years and the Big 0’s poised to do the same thing.

He continues this thread by calling for another “Contract With America,” but redacting the dual-edged word “Contract.”  Newt Gingrich led that charge in ’93 and, my friend argues, perhaps a Rick Perry or Tim Pawlenty might be our man this time around.  He suggests it could be dubbed “Take Back Our future.”

Republicans, and their dispirited subgroup, conservatives, have had little to cheer about since the loss of the White House.  However, not unlike every formidable movement that coalesced from the ashes of defeat, the time may, indeed, be ripe for a reanimation of real—read traditional—Republican values.

As Bryon York writes in today’s Washington Examiner, it’s not just Republicans who see this as a plausible scenario:

“I think what's going to happen is Obama's going to be fine, and the Democrats in Congress are going to get their [       ] kicked in 2010," says one Democratic strategist who prefers not to be named.  "This is following a curve like the Clinton years: take on really controversial things early, fail, or succeed partially, ask Democrats to take really tough votes, and then lose.

Rep. Tom Price, the talented Georgia congressman in charge of the House Republican Study Committee, cites the two traits that are genetically linked to every such political sea change, “overreaching and arrogance”: 

"I think that means huge gains in the House, with a very distinct possibility of returning Republicans to the majority," says Price.  "The American people like checks and balances, and right now they don't see any checks and balances in Washington."

The doomsday scenario by the anonymous Democrat strategics and the sunny, Reaganesque prognostication from Mr. Price aside, the challenge this time around will be far more profound.  That’s because there is a newly minted generation of voter whose understanding of American history wouldn’t fill a commercial break during a football game.  Coupled with a public school education that studiously avoided economic theory—other than the excoriation of capitalism—and, the left’s wholly misguided notion that evil is a convenient fiction Republicans use to justify war, and you can be sure we’ll be swimming upstream.

However, there’s a largely overlooked, but broad swath of flyover folks who are the butt of liberals jokes on late night television, those “Astroturf” types who are orchestrating all that dissent in town hall meetings across the fruited plain.  Ironically, some of them may have voted for Obama but are now well beyond buyers remorse.  In aggregate, they could comprise the start of rebellion against this Neolithic liberal Congress.

As history has shown numerous times, hubris is the father of political overreach, and Democrats are being unwittingly faithful to the script that political players have recited in countless other decades.  We can only hope that the American people begin to better understand that an expansive, oppressive role for government in our lives is hostile to the common good, which will lead to the electoral authority to retake control of both houses of Congress.

President Obama seems to be causing his own leadership breach with the American people. Although his administration complains that it’s difficult to communicate above the growing din of people concerned about the growth of government, as well as the Trojan Horse known as the ‘public option’ in health insurance, they ought to take a time out for some candid self-reflection.

Despite his obvious intelligence, the problem with extremists such as Obama is that he and his administration are all cut from the same political cloth. It’s the political equivalent of the ‘stove-pipe thinking’ that the Central Intelligence Agency has been guilty of, which is a kind of intellectual incestuousness that inhibits innovative thinking.

It reflects a mix of arrogance and callowness that Mr. Obama doesn’t live the kind of transcendental politics he championed on the campaign trail. When mainstream Americans push back on health care in AARP or political town hall meetings, he cynically charges Republicans with undermining his message by fomenting unrest. His insecurity on this issue is palpable and it’s unbecoming of a man of such obvious talents. It’s also abundantly evident that he’s struggling to find his voice in issue after issue, which leads us to question the leadership skills that were apparently on display during the campaign.

Indeed, it’s as though he’s confused about the difference between leadership and campaigning. He ought to stop playing to his base by excoriating conservatives and speak directly to the common folks in middle America. The problem is that his Harvard-speak inevitably surfaces and he begins talking down to us, as elitist bromides trip effortlessly off his tongue, which makes our political blood pressure rise.

You might recall his stunningly obtuse statement about how the America could increase its national gas mileage rate if we would all just inflate our tires correctly. Well, he should have added that our health care spending would drop like a rock if the 60 percent of Americans who are overweight would doff some poundage. It’s that “eat your vegetables” lecturing that elicits a collective sigh of exasperation.

Those gifted with astute political instincts clearly have it over those with raw intelligence, which always breeds an unflattering hubris which, in turn, creates it’s own special genus of problems. Policy differences momentarily aside, Obama seems to lack the kind of perfect political pitch that brought such charm to the Kennedy, Reagan, and Clinton presidencies.

It’s still early in the game, but this neophyte, arch-liberal seems to be sputtering, over-reaching, and, worst of all, he seems politically uncomfortable about where things are and where they appear to be heading, which doesn’t bode well for his political stock.