From: Olga Bourlin (fauxever@sprynet.com)
Date: Sun Jun 02 2002 - 21:44:56 MDT
I've admitted it to the list before - I have this problem with Ayn Rand. I break out (tears? laughter? hives?) when I see her name. I just poked my head into the new Extropians List Guidelines, and saw Ayn's name there again, keeping company with all the other erudite recommended books. Oh dear oh dear oh dear - I may be kicked off the list for good, but I needed some anti-venom fast, and what follows is pretty lame, but it helped me exorcise running into Ayn. You who may be acquainted with Russian toasts know that one of the most popular ones simply goes: "Long Life!" If you read the following, this rambling tirade may make some sense to you:
PRESIDENT'S STATEMENT ON MEDICARE POLICY, AS DELIVERED TO RESIDENTS OF THE HEMLOCK FARMS DISCOUNT ELDERCARE FACILITY
Statement by the President
THE PRESIDENT: Good morning. It's great to be back in Florida. And it's a real pleasure to be here at the Hemlock Farms Eldercare Facility, looking out over so many dazed and toothless faces. Now I know it's hard to hear me over the creaking of wheelchairs and raspy din of the second-hand respirators which keep you clinging to your spent and empty lives, but I wanted to take a few minutes to talk at all of you about my plans for Medicare.
As you know, Medicare is one of the few remaining pieces of pork barrel legislation passed by the closet Socialist Lyndon Baines Johnson as part of his so-called "Great Society" initiatives of the mid-1960's. Now sure, Johnson may have been from Texas (and had the longhorn in his pants to prove it), but at the end of the day, he was just another bleeding heart liberal - never mind that he had the patriotic balls to send thousands of American boys off to Vietnam to die gruesomely in a war he knew was hopelessly unwinnable.
Today, I'm here in front of all these television cameras to impart the impression that my administration is not doing everything in its power to completely eradicate Johnson's time-tested Medicare program and replace it with a system that will line the pockets of my pals in the insurance industry and put your Truman-voting asses six feet under in crushing medical bills.
Now I understand how popular Medicare is with poor seniors like yourselves. It's like another chunk of Social Security, except earmarked for doctors with lousy Bahamanian medical degrees who suckle at the Federal cash teat by poking and prodding at those walking corpses you call bodies. Makes you wonder why old LBJ didn't just combine Medicare and Social Security into one program called "Fat Handouts for Lazy Old People Who Were Too Stupid to Invest Enough Money From Their Lucrative White Collar Jobs to Retire Comfortably Without Begging for Help Like Some Brandy-Soaked Hobo." But that's another issue.
For far too long, my enemies in the Democratic party have used the issue of Medicare as a vehicle to disseminate the truism that Republicans really couldn't care less whether you people live or die, on account of you're all too poor to contribute to our campaigns - and even if you did, you're far too decrepit and sickly to get to the polls on election day. Well just let me say one thing: it is important to me that people not believe this. I mean, we know there's not going to be any butterfly ballots down here in 2004, and that's why we need as many of you on our side as we can get. And so I want each of you to take it to heart when I say I honestly think of you as so much more than just digestive systems on legs, and that I would never exploit your collective snowballing senility by assuring you that I will not do all of those wildly destructive things to your healthcare plan which I'm actually secretly planning to do.
(Scattered feeble applause.)
Thank you all for listening. Please give my best to the big guy upstairs. You'll all be seeing him sooner than you think.
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"Ever notice that 'What the hell' is always the right decision?"
Marilyn Monroe
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