Political Irony

Tea Party Senator Ted Cruz was born in Canada (and is still a Canadian citizen), to an American mother and a Cuban father. So how are birthers who questioned Obama’s eligibility to be president responding to Cruz’s desire to run for the highest office?

With an extra dose of irony, of course!

The constitution is a little vague on the issue. It says only that to be eligible to be president, a candidate must be a “natural born citizen“, but does not define what that means. Indeed, John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone (not even considered American territory) to American parents who were stationed there in the military, but hardly anyone questioned his eligibility to run for president. And Mitt Romney’s father George ran for president, but he was born in Mexico to parents who fled the USA so they could practice polygamy.

Birthers claimed that despite Obama having a Hawaiian birth certificate, he was secretly born in Kenya and thus ineligible to be president. But they believe that Cruz, even though he freely admits he was born in Canada, is eligible to be president because he has an American-born mother. Somehow, they ignore the undisputed fact that Obama’s mother was born in the USA (in Kansas).

But it gets even stranger. Take Republican voter Christina Katok, who attended a tea party rally to see Cruz speak. She believes that Obama was not eligible to be president but says she would vote for Cruz in a heartbeat. Her reasoning? “As far as I’m concerned, Canada is not really foreign soil.”

Glenn Greenwald is accusing the UK government of purposely leaking damaging classified information and blaming Edward Snowden for the leak, in order to make it look like Snowden has been leaking damaging information (information that could place people in danger).

I am going to reserve judgement about what is really going on, but it is pretty suspicious that The Independent, a UK paper that has never before published any revelations based on Snowden’s NSA leaks, suddenly publishes potentially damaging information, and when journalists working on Snowden’s information up until now have been careful to avoid publishing any such damaging information.

Furthermore, even though The Independent claims that the information came from Snowden, Snowden himself denies that he has ever talked to The Independent or provided them with any information.

It is also suspicious that this occurred at the exact moment that the UK government is coming under attack for detaining Greenwald’s partner David Miranda under the Terrorism Act and confiscating his laptop, phone, and camera, when they knew that he was not a terrorist. Indeed, the UK government is currently trying to convince a court that Snowden’s disclosures constituted a danger to public safety, and suddenly out pops the first disclosure that could be considered a danger to public safety.

Meet Clint Murphy. Last week, while Newt Gingrich was explaining why Republicans couldn’t repeal Obamacare unless they came up with a better replacement, Murphy showed a more direct example of why they can’t repeal Obamacare.

Murphy is a Republican foot soldier. The kind of party activist who has worked on Republican campaigns including Casey Cagle, John McCain, and Karen Handel. The problem is, political foot soldiers like Murphy only have paid jobs during campaigns. And even in this era of perpetual campaigns, they are going to find themselves out of work from time to time. Which means that if people like him ever get one of those dreaded “pre-existing conditions”, without Obamacare’s requirements that insurance companies cannot turn you down for having a pre-existing condition, they would never be able to qualify for health insurance.

And of course, in a high stress job like politics, eventually you will get a pre-existing condition. In Murphy’s case, it was testicular cancer.

It doesn’t matter that after some chemotherapy his cancer has been in remission for over a decade. And even if the cancer didn’t count as a pre-existing condition, Murphy also has sleep apnea, a condition for which the insurance companies also turned him down. So even though Murphy is only 38, he has no health insurance.

Last week, on the same day as Newt Gingrich was speaking, Murphy made a post to his Facebook account about Obamacare:

When you say you’re against it, you’re saying that you don’t want people like me to have health insurance.

When Georgia’s health insurance exchange opens in October, as mandated by Obamacare, Murphy says he will “absolutely” sign up.

Murphy also points out the irony of how repealing Obamacare could push people like him into bankruptcy, which could lead to welfare, and thus increase the cost of government.

However, Murphy himself isn’t above acting ironically. He is even supporting Karen Handel for the US Senate next year, even though Handel’s campaign remains committed to “a full stop and defunding of Obamacare in its entirety now” and calls for shutting down the government this fall if that doesn’t happen.

So is all the noise about repealing or defunding Obamacare just bluster to fire up the base? I for one do not believe the Republicans will ever do it. They would just be cutting off their own nose to spite their face.

© Jen Sorensen

The real situation is even more bizarre than the comic suggests. The state’s top insurance regulator isn’t even allowed to be interviewed by the media about this. Also, the person responsible for implementing the Affordable Care Act in Missouri is not allowed to be paid by the state, so he is being funded by a nonprofit group and then is “loaned” to the state.

It seems like Obama haters are doing everything they can in order to sabotage the ACA, I guess so they can later claim that it is a failure.