Our "Freedom Fetish"

At the Daily Beast,  Michael Tomasky lays down the gauntlet:

Behind Court Challenge to Health Care Lies the Right's 'Freedom Fetish'

 Behind the challenges to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) being heard at the Supreme Court this week is the idea that Barack Obama wants to take away your freedoms (as Mitt Romney himself asserted today). I’ve long since stopped counting the number of ridiculous things said about Obama, but this might be the ridiculousest of them all. At least the Kenyan rumors have some basis in reality, however threadbare it is, since his father was indeed Kenyan and he does have a funny name, for an American president.

But this "freedom" business is simply paranoid and delusional. I defy anyone to name for me a specific and precise freedom that Obama has taken away from the American people. You can’t. When they’re not just invented out of whole cloth by multi-millionaire propagandists, all such laments are based on ignorance about what freedom actually means and an equal ignorance about how our system of government works.

 

Who wants to go first? 

Comments

[Mannie Sherberg]

This is what you get when you give a word processor to someone who thinks the superlative of "ridiculous" is "ridiculousest." When a man who styles himself a "writer" can turn out nothing more than disheveled drivel and jejune gibber-jabber, we can only conclude that Plato -- who believed that the invention of writing was a dreadful mistake and would prove the undoing of civilization -- was right.

[scp]

From Google ( http://www.google.com/search?q=fetish+definition& ) fetish (n): 1) 2) A COURSE OF ACTION TO WHICH ONE HAS AN EXCESSIVE AND IRRATIONAL COMMITMENT. "Freedom Fetish" they called it.

[scp]

Freedom "fetish"? In reference to Soviet aggression, whether physical or merely psychological, or to any form of creeping socialism/communism, some of us used to say "Better dead than red!" No doubt, that anti-American Michael Tomasky /and his kind/ certainly thought of that as a "freedom fetish." In 1775, the Virginia House of Burgesses debated whether or not to commit Virginia soldiers to the upcoming war with Great Britain, Patrick Henry delivered his famous "Give me liberty, or give me death" speech (9:47): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_JvvURKElo Would this Michael Tomasky decry Patrick Henry as having some kind of quote-unquote "freedom fetish?" (The sad and probable fact is that he probably would...)

[Yael]

Gotta love it: The Freedom 'Fetish' of the Founding Fathers.

[Mannie Sherberg]

Congratulations, Yael! A four-part alliterative phrase is, in my estimation, better than winning the trifecta. A felicitous feat with which to counter Michael Tomasky's fallacious falderal!