Guy W. Farmer: Heart vs. head splits us along political lines

In his best-selling new book “Things That Matter,” syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer presents his Fundamental Law of American Politics: “Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.”

Krauthammer, a conservative who writes for the liberal Washington Post, goes on to say that “liberals tend to be nice, and they believe ... that most everybody else is nice too. Deep down, that is. Sure, you’ve got your multiple felons and your occasional war criminal, but they’re undoubtedly depraved ‘cause they’re deprived. If only we could get social conditions right ... everyone would be holding hands smiley-faced, rocking back and forth to ‘We Shall Overcome.’”

Card-carrying liberals such as President Obama prefer to be called “progressives,” but their agenda is right out of the old New Deal/Great Society playbook with government providing cradle-to-grave benefits (or entitlements), including low-cost or “free” health care, to the so-called “middle class.” During his 2012 re-election campaign, the president’s PR people invented a fictional young woman named Julia who “is swaddled and subsidized throughout her life by an all-giving government of bottomless pockets and ‘Queen for a Day’ magnanimity,” Krauthammer writes. She receives “preschool classes and cut-rate college loans, birth control and maternity care, business loans and retirement. The only time she’s alone is at her grave site.”

That’s a pretty stark portrayal of a sizable slice of Americana, those who look to the government to bail them out and save them from their own bad decisions.

As Krauthammer notes, liberals think conservatives are mean when they profess to believe in things such as self-reliance, self-discipline, competition and military power. “How to understand the conservative desire to actually abolish welfare,” the author asks, “if it is not to punish the poor? Liberals, who have no head, believe that conservatives have no heart.”

The Affordable Care Act is the most obvious manifestation of the president’s liberalism. Basically, he wants the government to take over one-sixth of America’s economy to provide “affordable” health care to everyone, whether they want it or not. He had to stretch the facts to sell Obamacare to Congress, where it passed three years ago without a single Republican vote. But now, Obama has had to “apologize” for telling us that we could keep our health insurance if we liked it ... period. As it turns out, that’s not true for millions of Americans and as a result, Obama’s popularity has plunged to an all-time low going into the 2014 midterm elections, so he proposed a dubious “fix” in an attempt to impose burdensome requirements on private insurance companies.

I suppose the president meant well when he urged Congress to pass the ACA, his signature legislative achievement, but as we know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Those “progressive” good intentions have backfired — as they so often do — and many healthy young Americans are deciding to pay fines (to the IRS, of course) rather than sign up for Obamacare.

In response to the news that millions of Americans are being dropped from their health care plans and forced to buy more expensive plans from a website that doesn’t work, many congressmen support “If you like your health plan, you can keep it” legislation to hold the president to his promises. The president should keep his promises. Period.