full of mist and vapor

Anson Burlingame cracks me up. By design or personal initiative, he has become the Globe’s online multifaceted sprinkler system. His fertile spray reaches every corner of the cyber-garden. No opinion is denied a squirt from his omnipotent nozzle. Should the paper decide to include a blog about dog grooming, Anson’s hose will eventually douse Shear Tails with insightful droplets, moisturizing canine nail trimming tips with comments about his harrowing misadventure with Joker, the left-leaning Filipino chiropodist.

I’m just kidding; if Anson wants to reprise the role of Falstaff, so be it. But when he takes issue with opinions that favor the public option playing a role in health-care, I have a bone to pick with the right-leaning ex-submariner.

First of all, Anson’s income and health-care is taxpayer subsidized. Unless his political aversion to socialism has caused him to renounce inflation-adjusted US Treasury checks and free medical care, echoing Republican talking points demonizing “Big Government” is pure hypocrisy. Of course, Anson would cry foul when labeling his perks as socialism-in-action. He has earned his retirement benefits, via military service; placing his iron rice bowl in with the thirty percent of Americans already receiving government provided health-care is an apples and oranges scenario: A few, like Anson, deserve their subsidized ride, while the rest fall into the ‘un-American’ welfare queen category.

Let’s assume that instead of working on a submarine Anson worked for the Submarine Sandwich Company. After twenty-odd years of faithful service, he becomes the victim of corporate downsizing. To make the scenario dicier, let’s say that his 401-K investment lost fifty percent of its value in the past year. To really rub salt in the wound, Anson’s wife is suffering from a chronic illness that requires expensive medication. Because losing your job means losing employer provided health-care, the $500 dollar per month pharmacy bill is now an out-of-pocket expense. Anson, fifty-something and unemployed, is hard-pressed to find a job in the Joplin area that comes close to matching his previous salary. He takes the tax hit and cashes out what’s left of his 401-K. Putting pencil to paper, he figures that he has maybe two years to pay his monthly bills, plus the $700 dollars for COBRA, before facing a very uncertain future. Luckily for retired naval officer Anson, he’ll avoid this all too common quandary thanks to that terrible monstrosity known as the federal government.
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Yep, it must be fun to champion the righteousness of free market capitalism when sucking off the public teat. Anson never has to worry about Emerson’s hobgoblins when pressing thumbs to keyboard. His blog needs an updated title. I suggest, Do as I Say, Not as I Do.

I assume from what local conservatives espouse, hard luck stories are self-inflicted wounds. Like automatons, they repeat back everything Rush bellows as gospel truth. Eagerly swallowing blatant lies manufactured by insurance company shills, Burlingame & Friends revert back to championing fiscal responsibility only after their party is out of power. To be lectured by such ethically challenged frauds on the ’true’ intent of The Constitution is beyond insufferable.

I guess America will finally become a Marxist Utopia when everyone gets the green check in the mail: I don’t know, do you?

Juan Don