I’ve already used the Alice-in-Wonderland metaphor several times regarding my past week, but this last video was the mushroom on the cake. First, I’m astounded and a bit embarrassed that until now I didn’t understand the degree to which this kind of thing was happening in the USA. Second, I’m just embarrassed for America itself.
Let’s start. There’s a lot here, so bear with me. Again, this was one of those “censored” videos that was supposed to be unobtainable because the Obama administration was making them disappear. As I have done before, I simply took the video title provided and typed it into YouTube. The video below tops the list and is undoubtedly one of the scariest things I have seen in recent memory — Not because of any treasonous army, but because the complete manipulation of reality in it is beyond belief.
First, you have to watch the video. If you haven’t yet gone through the whole Sherry dialogue yet, and seen the videos she wanted me to see, you should probably do that first to get a better understanding of how this all pieces together. Either way, however, it’s disturbing.
Let’s start with the first 10 seconds. Rahm Emmanuel is shown saying “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is that its an opportunity to do things that you did not think that you could do before.”
To me, it doesn’t come across as scary — until it gets paired with the next 15 seconds, featuring the then Senator Obama saying “We cannot continue relying only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set. We have to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.”
Fade to Fox (Who, by the way, is not responsible for this video, only the segment in which they have content.), where the story about President Obama’s new ‘Army’ (Fox’s quotes — They need some deniability or even they were unwilling to take a full swing at this.) is the topic of the day. But before we get into that, let’s look at these first two clips.
Here’s the Rahm Emmanuel clip in full. It’s all of 2 minutes, 47 seconds long, and you really only need to watch the first 30 seconds to understand how completely his words were taken out of context above. This video is from November, 2008.
And here’s the full video of President Obama giving the election speech from where his sound bite was taken. It’s a much longer video, but if you watch from 16:00 to 17:00, you’ll get enough context to understand what he was trying to say. This speech was made on July 2, 2008.
I also want to provide a link to the official text of the speech, released before the speech was made. This is a common practice, because it allows publications to easily post the speech of the text immediately after the speech concludes. If you search through it for the word “diplomacy” (Use CTRL-F in your browser after the page loads.), you’ll see that the clip shown in this “treason” video has the only part of the speech that isn’t in the official text. President Obama has been caught screwing up when he ad-libs before, and this is undoubtedly what happened here. He strayed from the teleprompter and said something that could be twisted around. Contextually, it is clear that he means that a militarily powerful army is not enough to keep us safe any longer. We need civilians in all walks of life to participate in security by helping to provide better health care, better education, better international aid efforts, better work with the poor, etc. Taken out of context? Well, you get treason…
Continuing on with the video, we enter Fox’s segment, which in many ways frightens me the most. It does so because it features intelligent people on a national stage being paid to twist the truth into a rat’s nest of lies, innuendo, mis-truths and omission. Ironically, the worst of them in my opinion, Judge Andrew Napolitano, A Senior Judicial Analyst for Fox, says at one point that we can’t trust politicians “because they only vote (for or against a bill) for one reason, and that’s to get reelected.” Where do you draw the difference between a paid politician wanting to get reelected and a paid commentator wanting to get called back to a show? Nobody’s 100% neutral, folks, but based even just on this single performance Judge Napolitano should absolutely not be casting the first stone.
So why do I think Judge Napolitano is the worst of the bunch in this segment? Because his intellectual dishonesty runs so deep, and because his lack of consistency is so glaring in someone whose profession demands consistency more than anything else. A good example is his assertation that nobody knows who put the text into the bill and that it was never discussed while he simultaneously proclaims the text to be intentionally vague. Hmmm. We don’t know who did it and it was never discussed, but we know this ghost’s intentions? Even the lady and the guy on the right seem a bit embarrassed by this all — not that they ever do anything about it except throw some softball questions to the Judge with no follow-up.
Judge Napolitano speaks for 5 minutes or so in the middle of this video, and he covers a lot of ground. He references President Obama’s call for an “army” and then talks about how it would be implemented. And he talks about it as an expert — as Senior Judicial Analyst for Fox News. I’m not a lawyer by any means, but I can read, so I did.
Here’s the link to HR3590, otherwise known as ObamaCare. Because of the intricacies, particularly in this case, of how a bill goes through the House and the Senate and then gets reconciled, there are some additional documents that also are part of what was signed, but this is the big meaty core. And it’s where I found Judge Napolitano’s 2 pages (Actually 3 pages.) of text, starting on page 1312, line 8 and going on through page 1315, line 8. Here’s the text so that you don’t have to go through the actual document itself (Which wasn’t hard, by the way. It was very well-organized and easy to find this — It showed up in the table of contents…) To make it a bit easier to follow in this excerpt, I highlighted the pages in red and some other texts in other colors so that I could reference them easily at the bottom of the quote.
1312
8 SEC. 5209. ELIMINATION OF CAP ON COMMISSIONED
9 CORPS.
10 Section 202 of the Department of Health and Human
11 Services Appropriations Act, 1993 (Public Law 102–394)
12 is amended by striking ‘‘not to exceed 2,800’’.
13 SEC. 5210. ESTABLISHING A READY RESERVE CORPS.
14 Section 203 of the Public Health Service Act (42
15 U.S.C. 204) is amended to read as follows:
16 ‘‘SEC. 203. COMMISSIONED CORPS AND READY RESERVE
17 CORPS.
18 ‘‘(a) ESTABLISHMENT.—
19 ‘‘(1) IN GENERAL.—There shall be in the Service
20 a commissioned Regular Corps and a Ready Reserve
21 Corps for service in time of national emergency.
22 ‘‘(2) REQUIREMENT.—All commissioned officers23 shall be citizens of the United States and shall be ap-
24 pointed without regard to the civil-service laws and
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1313
HR 3590 EAS/PP
1 compensated without regard to the Classification Act
2 of 1923, as amended.
3 ‘‘(3) APPOINTMENT.—Commissioned officers of
4 the Ready Reserve Corps shall be appointed by the
5 President and commissioned officers of the Regular
6 Corps shall be appointed by the President with the
7 advice and consent of the Senate.
8 ‘‘(4) ACTIVE DUTY.—Commissioned officers of the
9 Ready Reserve Corps shall at all times be subject to
10 call to active duty by the Surgeon General, including
11 active duty for the purpose of training.
12 ‘‘(5) WARRANT OFFICERS.—Warrant officers
13 may be appointed to the Service for the purpose of
14 providing support to the health and delivery systems
15 maintained by the Service and any warrant officer
16 appointed to the Service shall be considered for pur-
17 poses of this Act and title 37, United States Code, to
18 be a commissioned officer within the Commissioned
19 Corps of the Service.
20 ‘‘(b) ASSIMILATING RESERVE CORP OFFICERS INTO
21 THE REGULAR CORPS.—Effective on the date of enactment
22 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, all indi23
viduals classified as officers in the Reserve Corps under this
24 section (as such section existed on the day before the date
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1314
HR 3590 EAS/PP
1 of enactment of such Act) and serving on active duty shall
2 be deemed to be commissioned officers of the Regular Corps.
3 ‘‘(c) PURPOSE AND USE OF READY RESEARCH.—
4 ‘‘(1) PURPOSE.—The purpose of the Ready Re5
serve Corps is to fulfill the need to have additional
6 Commissioned Corps personnel available on short no-
7 tice (similar to the uniformed service’s reserve pro-
8 gram) to assist regular Commissioned Corps per-
9 sonnel to meet both routine public health and emer-
10 gency response missions.
11 ‘‘(2) USES.—The Ready Reserve Corps shall—
12 ‘‘(A) participate in routine training to meet
13 the general and specific needs of the Commis-
14 sioned Corps;
15 ‘‘(B) be available and ready for involuntary
16 calls to active duty during national emergencies
17 and public health crises, similar to the uni-
18 formed service reserve personnel;
19 ‘‘(C) be available for backfilling critical po-
20 sitions left vacant during deployment of active
21 duty Commissioned Corps members, as well as
22 for deployment to respond to public health emer-
23 gencies, both foreign and domestic; and
24 ‘‘(D) be available for service assignment in
25 isolated, hardship, and medically underserved
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HR 3590 EAS/PP
1 communities (as defined in section 799B) to im2
prove access to health services.
3 ‘‘(d) FUNDING.—For the purpose of carrying out the
4 duties and responsibilities of the Commissioned Corps
5 under this section, there are authorized to be appropriated
6 $5,000,000 for each of fiscal years 2010 through 2014 for
7 recruitment and training and $12,500,000 for each of fiscal
8 years 2010 through 2014 for the Ready Reserve Corps.’’.
The blue text refers to another bill, and one that’s been around since 1993. I looked it up here, and the actual relevent text is quoted below. You can read it yourself, but this so-called Obama Army was created in one of the last bills signed into law by President George Bush. What the new health care bill does is expand the number of people that are funded. It places no hard limit on the number of people now, so I suppose (Remember, I’m not a lawyer.) that the limit is now based on how much funding they have. The purpose of these people is to educate, inform, and provide medical services, both within the USA and in foreign countries.
SEC. 202. Appropriations in this or any other Act or subsequent Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Acts shall be available for expenses for active commissioned officers in the Public Health Service Reserve Corps and for not to exceed 2,800 commissioned officers in the Regular Corps; expenses incident to the dissemination of health information in foreign countries through exhibits and other appropriate means; advances of funds for compensation, travel, and subsistence expenses (or per diem in lieu thereof) for persons coming from abroad to participate in health or scientific activities of the Department pursuant to law; expenses of primary and secondary schooling of dependents in foreign countries, of Public Health Service commissioned officers stationed in foreign countries, at costs for any given area not in excess of those of the Department of Defense for the same area, when it is determined by the Secretary that the schools available in the locality are unable to provide adequately for the education of such dependents, and for the transportation of such dependents, between such schools and their places of residence when the schools are not accessible to such dependents by regular means of transportation; expenses for medical care for civilian and commissioned employees of the Public Health Service and their dependents assigned abroad on a permanent basis in accordance with such regulations as the Secretary may provide; rental or lease of living quarters (for periods not exceeding five years), and provision of heat, fuel, and light and maintenance, improvement, and repair of such quarters, and advance payments therefor, for civilian officers and employees of the Public Health Service who are United States citizens and who have a permanent station in a foreign country; purchase, erection, and maintenance of temporary or portable structures; and for the payment of compensation to consultants or individual scientists appointed for limited periods of time pursuant to section 207(f) or section 207(g) of the Public Health Service Act, at rates established by the Assistant Secretary for Health, or the Secretary where such action is required by statute, not to exceed the per diem rate equivalent to the maximum rate payable for senior-level positions under 5 U.S.C. 5376.
The pink text (sorry) is also an amendment to an existing bill. I didn’t bother looking this one up, but what this section does is take an existing “Ready Reserve Corps” (Remember, Judge Napolitano was worried that we didn’t know what these words mean, despite the fact that they have been in the books for 9 years and that we have an organization under that name already.) and create from it a Ready Reserve Corps and a Commissioned Corps. In other words, rather than just have people standing by (The Reserve Corps), this bill expands the role to have people working in this way all of the time (The Commisioned Corps.).
The green text defines the roles of the Commissioned Corps and Reserve Corps, how they will be organized, where they will be used, and under what circumstances they will be used. There’s nothing shocking, or even really interesting here. The Commissioned Corps is responsible for routine and emergency health services as required, and the Reserve Corps gets called up when required. This is a system that almost everyone in the USA already knows and understands.
The purple(ish) text talks about how much money will be spent. In the greater scheme of things, it’s really a pittance and makes no noticeable impact on the overall cost of the health care bill (Which I remain concerned about.).
Big sigh.
After going through this – and I admit that it took about 2 hours, including this write-up, I cannot believe that Judge Napolitano even read the text you have. He was wrong about the number of pages of text. He was wrong about the terminology. He was wrong about the funding level. He was wrong in saying that it was set at 6,000 people. And he’s a Judge. (He is. I just looked it up and he played one on TV — and in real life. He even has a nifty website where he sells his books. I like his catch line: “Does it really matter whether our politicians bend the truth here and there? When the truth is traded for lies, our freedoms are diminished and don’t return…“) I have no doubt in my mind that he is highly intelligent and very driven. He is also either intellectually dishonest or sloppy. Probably he read a quick brief that someone else did for him, but that’s no excuse to participate in a farce as large as this one.
Which brings us to the end. If you can watch through the end that is. I like how the editor dubbed over the scary black men saying “Because of Obama, I’m going to be the next architect! Because of Obama, I’m going to be the next doctor! Because of Obama, I’m going to be the next lawyer.” Whether it’s because of President Obama or not, none of those professions conjures up scary images for me. Someone has done a very good job with the editing here (Michael Moore might even learn a thing or two.), and the result is a twisted montage of video from July 2008 through April 2010, all designed to frighten and outrage. That’s not what this country is about. Despite mistakes along the way, the United States has always been about acceptance and moderation. As a moderate, I’d like to keep it that way. I’ve been shocked at the extremism and hatred I’ve seen and read in the past few days, and I’m still a bit overwhelmed that I hadn’t grasped it until now. This kind of extremism, whether it comes from the right or the left, will tear this country apart unless it is brought under control. Looking at this video, there are people out there consciously and skillfully manipulating the hearts and minds of Americans through blatant abuse of the truth. I don’t know what we do about that, but I know that it is unacceptable.
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