Friday, July 06, 2007

The latest from the conservative clown show



The newest angle on the failed London and Glasgow car bombings emerged on Fox yesterday as Jerry Bowyer of NRO explained why state-run health care makes terrorism more likely:

Doctors in America tend to sort of cluster together in these practices... maybe a dozen partners... And if one of your partners is a jihadist, spending all this time online reading Osama Bin Laden fatwas, somebody's going to notice that. But the National Health Service is more like the Post Office. You know, there's a lot of anonymity. It's easy to hide in the bureaucracy. And more to the point, if you're a physician and you're in partnership with another physician and they turn out to be a terrorist, the practice is blown. You know, there are severe economic consequences for you. But in a big bureaucracy, that's not the case.


The ideas were maybe a little unformed - under this logic, shouldn't we also eliminate single-doctor practices (something incidently that is taking place in Britain) - but by the time the new brilliant idea reached MSNBC and its military-affairs (!) sage Jack Jacobs, the emotional thrust was really less about state-run healthcare per se and more about about the horrors of pluralistic states that allow things like this to happen:

A very large proportion of the medical practitioners are foreign -- not just foreign born medical practitioners, but foreign-born medical practitioners who aren't even British subjects, something you've got to keep an eye on.


It's hard to know whether to laugh or get very drunk.

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