Watch Marco Rubio Set a Confused (?) News Anchor Straight on Hillary’s Benghazi Lie

Senator Marco Rubio does a fine job of setting a news man, and the record, straight in regard to Hillary Clinton lying to the American people about a video being the cause of an attack on an American compound in Benghazi, Libya on the anniversary of 9/11 in 2012.

The video can be found here.

I shouldn’t be amazed, but I am.

CBS’s Charlie Rose is an experienced news man, but it’s hard to tell if he’s truly confused or if he’s parroting talking points from the Hillary campaign in regard to Hillary’s conflicting accounts of the attack on an American compound by radical Islamists. My guess is it’s more of the latter.

In contrast, Marco Rubio couldn’t be more clear: Hillary Clinton lied about the attack on Benghazi compound that left four Americans dead (including Ambassador Chris Stephens, the first ambassador killed in the line of duty in 30+ years) being caused by a video.

Yawning at The Apocalypse Mongers

To be born in the early 1960’s puts one somewhere near the tail end of the Baby Boomer generation and makes one a beneficiary of the fruits of the labor of the ‘Greatest Generation’, a phrase popularized by journalist Tom Brokaw to describe the parents of the ‘Boomers’ – those who lived through the Great Depression and defeated the totalitarian forces of German Nazism, Italian Fascism, and Japanese Imperialism in World War II.

At the conclusion of the war, years of suffering, sacrifice, and deprivation gave way to a burst of prosperity and confidence. America enjoyed a position of unparalleled cultural, economic, and military dominance in the world, and Americans now had time to pursue the ‘American Dream’, including home ownership, a large family, and having disposable income to buy automobiles, color television sets, and the latest appliances.

To be sure, it wasn’t all prosperity and sunny optimism after World War II. The post-World War II world had become divided between the ideologies of Communism and Democracy. The Soviet Union detonated its first atomic weapon in 1949, with the Chinese following suit by exploding their first nuclear device in 1964. America found itself in military conflict by proxy or directly with the communists of the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea in the Korean War and soon afterwards fighting communists in the Vietnam War.

But even while American elementary school children were practicing ‘Duck and Cover’ in case of a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union, by and large most Americans fully occupied themselves with the business of Pursuing Happiness, as epitomized by the opening of the Happiest Place on Earth in 1955.

America and the other nations making up the ‘Western World’ were confident in the morality of their world view and way of life, and they were for the most part united in their view that communism was an evil (yes, they used the word, ‘evil’) that needed to be fought and beaten.

Then the late 1960’s/early 1970’s came, and with that time period, a tidal wave of cultural change, the impact of which is felt to this day.

By no means were all of the cultural changes in the 1960’s/1970’s negative. The civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King was enormously positive, populated by people of faith and good will who worked to steer America in the direction of making good on the promissory note that “…all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the “unalienable Rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

One cannot say the same for the sexual revolution and the fruits thereof, including the disintegration of so many marriages and families, the wreckage of whole communities, and the abortion of some 56 million humans.

Of note was the change of what I’ll call ‘Yay America’ and sunny optimism seen in popular culture to one where dark, foreboding, apocalyptic themes became all the rage.

Popular television shows like ‘I Love Lucy’, ‘The Adventures of Ozzy and Harriet’, and ‘Father Knows Best’, shows that took a lighthearted and sympathetic look at America went the way of the Dodo, and were over time replaced with movies like Planet Of The Apes, The Omega Man, The Andromeda Strain, and Soylent Green, which all dealt in dark, apocalyptic, doomsday visions of humanity’s future.

Around the same time, I was playing dodgeball.

Little did I know that at the tender age of nine or so my classmates and I would be exposed to another dimension of doomsday-ism and indoctrination from our 4th grade teacher, a young woman in her 20’s, who, in a most earnest and sincere manner, told us about a book that predicted mass starvation caused by overpopulation of the planet. When she wasn’t telling us impressionable children about this book, she would fill her spare time in class teaching us about, you know, reading, writing, and arithmetic. I’m sure she meant well.

On and on Hollywood and popular culture went, churning out one show, movie, article, and book after another about some variety of nuclear, medical, zombie, acne, toe fungus – or whatever – end-of-days depiction of the demise of humanity and the world as we know it.

Apocalyptic catastrophe, like sex, sells, big time.

With the demise of Soviet communism in Russia and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the object of apocalyptic, we’re-all-gonna-die-so-kiss-yer-a*s-goodbye gloom, doom, death, and destruction moved away from nuclear annihilation and gravitated towards environmental calamity as the instrument du jour of the demise of humanity.

Thus was Global Warming, now called Climate Change, brought into the world, and has attained the status of something like religious doctrine among the cultural elite, who reside for the most part in the rarefied aether of government, higher education, entertainment, and media. Their best known (and perhaps best compensated) apostle is former vice president Al Gore, who in 2006 introduced his movie, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ to a world thirsting for an innovative twist on the tried-and-true (and lucrative) formula of disease, devastation, and death.

Gore’s movie and his apocalyptic message sold like hotcakes at a fireman’s fundraising breakfast the weekend after payday.

Cue to the present day, October 30th, 2015 and the question of leadership. Barack Obama has been president for nearly 7 years, and in the face of the bloody horrors of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, in the face of Vladimir Putin working to reestablish Russia as a world power to be reckoned with, in the face of Iran working to gain nuclear weapons and become the regional hegemon in the Middle East, in the face of a refugee crisis of biblical proportions, Obama has stated he defines leadership by helping to organize the world to respond to the threats he believes are posed by Climate Change.

It is clear President Obama, Al Gore, and their fellow travelers are fully invested in Climate Change. For Gore, it’s his literal meal ticket. Obama appears unable or unwilling to discern between acute, actual, immediate, clear and present threats (a belligerent Russia, a saber-rattling China, an Iranian mullah death cult bent on gaining nuclear weapons, resurgent radical Islamists in Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere, etc.) for the at best chronic, long-term (to the degree it is a threat at all) ‘threat’ of Climate Change.

How very much easier it is for people like Obama to summon the world’s elites to an international conference on Climate Change to give fellow True Believers the opportunity to gather in luxurious accommodations to clink their goblets filled with French wine and nibble on Russian caviar than it is to commit to spending blood and treasure to eradicate actual threats to national security and global stability.

This is what Obama calls ‘leadership’.

In the end, the elites of the world are attracted to apocalyptic Climate Change because it affords them the opportunity to exercise more authority, more power, and more control over others and get rich doing it.

This is why Climate Change is such a yawner for the rest of us. People are on to the elite’s game, but the elites haven’t gotten the memo.

While ObamaCare Collapses Under Its Own Weight, The People Groan

Syndicated talk show host and author Dennis Prager recently observed that people on the right and people on the left assess public policies from fundamentally different perspectives.

Namely, people on the right tend to ask, ‘Does it do good’, while people on the left are more apt to ask, ‘Does it make me and others feel good’.

Case in point: ObamaCare. The reader is encouraged to read this piece from Avik Roy detailing the latest on ObamaCare — basically, ObamaCare is collapsing on itself, as Roy and others predicted it would when it was, ahem, ‘passed’ in Congress in 2010.

Jammed through Congress like a piece of rotten pork through a meat grinder more filthy than any imagined in an Upton Sinclair novel, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, at times literally in the dead of night through legislative sleight of hand, procedural trickery, back-room agreements, and raw power politics, shoved ObamaCare down the American people’s throats on a party-line vote (zero Republicans voted for it).

And were my liberal friends happy — jubilant, even. ObamaCare made them feel good.

Who can forget President Obama repeatedly promising the American people that a family could look forward to seeing their health care premiums dropping by as much as $2,500.00 a year?

For that whopper, along with promising people that if they liked their doctor/health plan they can keep it, “period”, Obama was awarded Politifact’s ‘Lie of the Year’.

Now here we are in October 2015, with skyrocketing premiums and deductibles, along with constricted choices of doctors, hospitals, and medications — *all* a direct result of ObamaCare.

Think about it: Obama and his allies/followers confidently assured the American people that ObamaCare would succeed in “bending down the cost curve” on already expensive doctors, hospitals, and medication while — get this — adding the cost of a bloated, centralized, government bureaucracy to the existing cost of doctors, hospitals, and medication!

Ray Charles could have seen how absurd and ridiculous this is, but not our president in search of his presidential ‘legacy’, and not his followers who just wanted to feel good.

It’s time to stop forming and enacting policies based on what makes some feel good and go with what actually works. Good intentions and wanting to feel good are not enough when it comes to allocating scarce resources to the best good and needs of the greatest number of people.

This country needs to go to a patient-centered health care delivery system that removes the unwelcome input of some far away, ignorant, box-checking bureaucrat who is more concerned about cutting costs (a form of reallocating smaller pieces from a shrinking pie) than what the caregiver believes will lead to the best healthcare outcomes of his/her patients at the least cost.

We need to go to a patient-centered health care delivery system that provides greater choices for patients that’s made possible through the freedom, innovation, and competition that results in increased choices and higher quality while keeping costs competitive.

Republicans have a golden opportunity to propose serious programs to do just this in the presidential election season. Whether they’re able to come together as a party and do so is another question. Even more questionable is if individual Democrats will be able to loosen their white-knuckle death grip on ObamaCare and work with Republicans to fashion patient-centered health care. There may be more hope for this after Obama leaves office.

This we know: ObamaCare is a disaster that is collapsing under its own weight. It is an unsustainable scheme involving a bloated, centralized, inefficient government bureaucracy in league with fewer and larger health insurance corporations. If you are a government bureaucrat, you are reveling in how much control you have over your fellow man. If you are the CEO of United Health Care or Kaiser Foundation, you are lighting Cohiba Behike’s with $100 dollar bills.

But if you are a doctor or a patient, you’re getting the shaft from ObamaCare.

Put simply, ObamaCare is utterly failing the American people.

I don’t doubt my liberal friend’s good intentions regarding ObamaCare. It made them feel good. They apparently don’t know much about basic economics, but Obama assured them in the most glowing terms that ObamaCare would be the greatest thing since hospital food, and they swallowed it — hook, line, and sinker.

Would it be too much to ask my liberal friends to, instead of asking themselves, ‘will it feel good?’ to ask, at least occasionally, ‘will it do good?’.