Too many conservative commentators are focusing on the inessential and the peripheral. Yes, Obama is a brazen liar, a bullshitter, and a consummate Orwellian abuser of the English language. He lied when he said that those who like their plans can keep their plans, and it is obvious why he lied: the ACA probably would not have gotten through otherwise. But the important issue is not Obama and his mendacity. It is not about Obama, which is also why it is perfectly lame, besides being slanderous, for the scumbaggers on the Left to accuse opponents of the ACA of racism. The fundamental issue is the assault on individual liberty and the totalitarian expansion of the state. That assault and this expansion don't have a skin color, white, black, or mulatto.
Mark Steyn got it right back in 2009 in an NRO piece that is no longer available. (Damn you, NRO! Links to high-quality content ought to be permalinks.) Excerpts
(emphasis added):
. . . [nationalized] health
care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. That’s
its attraction for an ambitious president: It redefines the relationship between
the citizen and the state in a way that hands all the advantages to statists —
to those who believe government has a legitimate right to regulate human affairs
in every particular. [. . .]It’s often argued that, as a
proportion of GDP, America spends more on health care than countries with
government medical systems. But, as a point of fact, “America” doesn’t
spend anything on health care: Hundreds of millions of people make hundreds of
millions of individual decisions about what they’re going to spend on health
care. Whereas up north a handful of bureaucrats determine what Canada
will spend on health care — and that’s that: Health care is a government budget
item. [. . .]How did the health-care debate
decay to the point where we think it entirely natural for the central government
to fix a collective figure for what 300 million freeborn citizens ought to be
spending on something as basic to individual liberty as their own
bodies?
Are you willing to
sell your birthright, liberty, for a mess of pottage? That's the issue.
Liberals are a strange breed of cat. They'll puke their guts out in defense of
their 'right' to abortion and their 'right' to violate every norm of decency in
pursuit of the 'artistic' expression of their precious and vacuous selves, but
when it comes to the right to be in control of the sorts of care their bodies
receive they reverse course and surrender their liberties.