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The Vice-Presidential Debate
From Don McCanne's quote-of-the-day
The Vice-Presidential Debate
October 2, 2008
Sarah Palin: (in her closing statement) It was Ronald Reagan who said
that freedom is always just one generation away from extinction. We
don't pass it to our children in the bloodstream; we have to fight for
it and protect it, and then hand it to them so that they shall do the
same, or we're going to find ourselves SPENDING OUR SUNSET YEARS
TELLING OUR CHILDREN AND OUR CHILDREN'S CHILDREN ABOUT A TIME IN
AMERICA, BACK IN THE DAY, WHEN MEN AND WOMEN WERE FREE.
Video and transcript:
http://elections.nytimes.com/
And...
Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine
LP recording, 1961, Woman's Auxiliary of the AMA
Ronald Reagan: Write those letters now. Call your friends, and tell
them to write them. If you don't, this program (King-Anderson version
of Medicare) I promise you will pass just as surely as the sun will
come up tomorrow. And behind it will come other federal programs that
will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country,
until, one day, as Norman Thomas said, we will awake to find that we
have socialism. And if you don't do this, and if I don't do it, one of
these days, you and I are going to SPEND OUR SUNSET YEARS TELLING OUR
CHILDREN, AND OUR CHILDREN'S CHILDREN, WHAT IT WAS ONCE LIKE IN
AMERICA WHEN MEN WERE FREE.
WHAM campaign (Women Help American Medicine):
http://www.larrydewitt.net/
mp3 audio of "Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine"
http://blogfiles.wfmu.org/KF/
Comment: If you really care about the future of our health care
system, you should give some thought to the motivation of the
McCain/Palin camp in selecting this closing statement for her debate.
Obama and Biden support a greater government role in ensuring that
more individuals have affordable health care and health care coverage.
McCain and Palin support freedom and individual responsibility in
accessing health care and health care coverage. If you need health
care, well designed public policies can work for all of us, but
private policies can work only for those with the financial means to
obtain adequate coverage.
For her closing statement, the McCain/Palin advisors selected the most
notorious attack on a government role in health care, deceptively
cloaked in the rhetoric of freedom. That should tell you something.