Tuesday, October 26, 2004

Much has been made recently about the dislike, even hatred, of President Bush amongst the European elites. The Guardian of London was sending voters in Ohio demands to vote for John Kerry, in the hopes of educating the poor ignorant masses in America's heartland. Ohioans told them to get bent.

Is this perhaps a bit of jealousy? Could it be that with a more obsequious John Kerry in the White House, Europeans hope they will be made to feel relevant and powerful again? It must be difficult to go from being the center of the world's culture and military might to a washed up bunch of has-been nations, full of socialized medicine and lazy workers. The whole of Europe combined couldn't begin to challenge the U.S. militarily. Their impotence must be frustrating, given how they rail against the U.S. like a small child. The world has moved past Europe and they just don't see it. Europe is dying, and as Mark Steyn writes in the Chicago Sun-Times:

So this is no time to vote for Europhile delusions. The Continental health and welfare systems John Kerry so admires are, in fact, part of the reason those societies are dying.

He goes on to blast this notion that Canadians have such a great heath care system and we should get our drugs from them...

I'm Canadian, so I know a thing or two about prescription drugs from Canada. Specifically speaking, I know they're American; the only thing Canadian about them is the label in French and English. How can politicians from both parties think that Americans can get cheaper drugs simply by outsourcing (as John Kerry would say) their distribution through a Canadian mailing address? U.S. pharmaceutical companies put up with Ottawa's price controls because it's a peripheral market. But, if you attempt to extend the price controls from the peripheral market of 30 million people to the primary market of 300 million people, all that's going to happen is that after approximately a week and a half there aren't going to be any drugs in Canada, cheap or otherwise

After much stonewalling, the Province of Quebec's Health Department announced this week that in the last year some 600 Quebecers had died from C. difficile, a bacterium acquired in hospital. ... It's a bacterium caused by inattention to hygiene -- by unionized, unsackable cleaners who don't clean properly; by harassed overstretched hospital staff who don't bother washing their hands as often as they should. So 600 people have been killed by the filthy squalor of disease-ridden government hospitals. That's the official number.

One thousand Americans are killed in 18 months in Iraq, and it's a quagmire. One thousand Quebecers are killed by insufficient hand-washing in their filthy, decrepit health care system, and kindly progressive Americans can't wait to bring it south of the border. If one has to die for a cause, bringing liberty to the Middle East is a nobler venture and a better bet than government health care.

Why don't people get this?

No comments: