"moral bankruptcy behind the glittering words"

The hard part about blogging is trying to come up with something to say that isn't being said better by someone else. This is especially true of something--anything-- said by Dr. Thomas Sowell, the brilliant columnist, thinker, author and senior fellow at the Hoover Institute.

Dr. Sowell has come up with perhaps the best post-Obama Health Care speech analysis I have yet seen. He proves through simple logic the lies at the heart of Obama's speech last night, lies so obvious that one wonders why he gave the speech at all.

Dr. Sowell's point can be summarized by the following grafs, pertaining to Obama's denials that ObamaCare will inevitable and necessarily lead to rationing and waiting times in the style of the U.K. and Canada:

Obama can deny it in words but what matters are deeds-- and no one's words have been more repeatedly the direct opposite of his deeds-- whether talking about how his election campaign would be financed, how he would not rush legislation through Congress, or how his administration was not going to go after CIA agents for their past efforts to extract information from captured terrorists.

President Obama has also declared emphatically that he will not interfere in the internal affairs of other nations-- while telling the Israelis where they can and cannot build settlements and telling the Hondurans whom they should and should not choose to be their president.

And Sowell isn't the only one out there with a mighty pen. Daniel Henninger of The Wall Street Journal wonders why, with unemployment heading to 10%, Obama is "draining a dwindling reservoir of presidential capital on health care?" (memo to Henninger: unemployment including discouraged job-seekers and part-time workers who can't find full time work is closer to 17%). Henninger doesn't say it, but a Republican who turned his back on an economy as fragiles as this one would be pilloried.

Henninger's point is Obama has not only failed to learn from the failure of Hillarycare but he has failed to inernalize James Carville's message posted on desks in the 1992 Clinton campaign War Room--"its the economy stupid." In the face of an economy which has 87% of the pubic dissatisfied, " Barack Obama's mad obsession with arcane health-insurance puzzles looks beside the point."

Henninger believes that Obama's single-minded focus on a new health-care bureaucracy and budget-busting entitlement program when the economy is on fire could lead to unprecedented losses for Democrats in 2010. Says Henninger, "this could be America's greatest failed presidency." (From his mouth to G-d's ears!).

And then there is radio talk show host and columnist Hugh Hewitt, who doesn't think people are as stupid as Obama apparently does. Hewitt believes that seniors hold the keys to the kingdom in the health care debate (did I say debate? I forgot; the time for debating is over). According to Hewitt:

Seniors know that you cannot drain $500 or more billion dollars from medicare and deliver the same benefits as are delivered today. You cannot make deep cuts in Medicare Advantage and not lower the standard of living for many seniors.

Seniors are afraid, and they are right to be afraid, and nothing the president said in his speech will make them less afraid because he did not discuss their fears --he dismissed them.

Hugh Hewitt thinks that "not a mind was changed" last night. I disagree--it is quite possible that once people who were on the fence digest the audacity and tone of Obama's speech and the internal inconsistencies therein, many will conclude that neither the government nor Obama can be trusted with their lives.