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发帖数: 29846 | 1 By Carol Peracchio
One of the benefits of having been a nurse for over thirty years is that
people will occasionally allow me to be brutally honest. For example, I can
get away with telling an acquaintance, "God did not create gastric reflux
medication just so you can eat an entire pizza and then go lie on the couch
like a beached whale."
Until recently, I was willing to believe that President Obama and his party
were merely way-out-leftists, even Marxists. But after listening to their
response to last week's horrific economic news, I can only conclude that
today's Democratic Party has lost its collective mind. In this nurse's
expert opinion, Obama and the Democrats are crazy.
By "crazy," I mean looney, batty, daft, bonkers, and nutty as a fruitcake,
to put it in medical terms.
On Friday, we learned that the recovering American economy added a piddling
18,000 jobs in June and that the unemployment rate rose to 9.2%. The
underemployment rate jumped to 16.2%. Americans based in reality were not
surprised. Contrary to the reactions of professional economists, these
numbers were hardly "unexpected" to us. After all, chances are that we are
unemployed or underemployed, or else we love someone who is one or the other.
But the economic picture is very different on Planet Democrat. In his
comments last Friday after receiving the dismal jobs report, President Obama
actually suggested:
Right now, there are over a million construction workers out of work after
the housing boom went bust, just as a lot of America needs rebuilding. We
connect the two by investing in rebuilding our roads and our bridges and our
railways and our infrastructure. And we could put back to work right now
some of those construction workers that lost their jobs when the housing
market went bust.
That statement is indicative of a person suffering from delusions and a lack
of short-term memory. After a trillion dollars in stimulus spending a mere
year and a half ago that didn't work, President Obama suggests...more
stimulus!
Today in Washington, Republicans are attempting to negotiate with the
president and the Democrats on raising the debt ceiling. Why bother? Any
sane adult will tell them: it is impossible to negotiate with a crazy person
. And it's obvious to every rational American that today's leading
Democrats are crazy.
Only a crazy person would insist that we raise taxes in a recession.
Only a crazy person would tell us that Social Security is just fine.
Only a crazy person believes that people won't vote based on the
unemployment rate.
Occasionally in my work in emergency and intensive care nursing, I would be
assigned a patient who was delusional in addition to whatever physical
trauma or disease brought him to the hospital. These patients are
challenging, to say the least. I quickly learned that if the two of us were
going to make it through the shift, there were some very important ground
rules.
First, the nurse must accept that the patient is delusional, and therefore a
lot of the things he "knows" are not based in reality and therefore not
true. Asking a delusional patient who sees a giant pink bunny in the corner
what medications he takes is not the best way to gather information.
Asking a Democrat who believes that the rich are not paying their fair share
to come up with a budget that makes sense is ludicrous.
Second, it is impossible to compromise with a person who is not in touch
with reality. Hospital staff can't realistically make a discharge plan with
a patient who believes she lives in Buckingham Palace. Likewise,
Republicans can't compromise with any delusional Democrat who, for example,
actually believes that the 14th amendment gives the president the authority
to raise the debt ceiling all by himself.
Third, it's important to avoid validating the patient's delusions by arguing
about them. In nursing school, we were taught to say, "I understand that
the penguin at the foot of the bed is very real to you. But I don't see it.
" Then simply get on with your job. Republicans need to stop wasting their
breath trying to prove to crazy liberals that Medicare is going broke.
Republicans will never win that argument, because the two sides are working
from different solar systems. Republicans work from reality. Liberals live
on Planet Democrat.
I've always been fascinated by how differently we treat crazy people who
happen to be rich and/or powerful as opposed to the run-of the-mill nut
found in everybody's family or workplace. Examples abound, from Howard
Hughes to Michael Jackson to Charlie Sheen. Famous lunatics are surrounded
by people whose livelihood depends on the crazy person. These sycophants
are thus charged with keeping the famous person's more outrageous statements
and antics under wraps. Should the crazy famous person actually find his
way to a microphone or camera, the sycophants' responsibility is to spin the
incoherency of the crazy person into something resembling rationality.
Crazy Democrats have sycophants. They are known as the mainstream media.
With Obama's election, the press fully embraced its role of publicist to the
looney left. The president's statements are tightly scripted and confined
to his teleprompter, even when speaking at a grade school. Official
business is conducted out of sight. (Note how all the debt negotiations
with President Obama are being held in secret.) Should a crazy Democrat's
lunacy actually be disseminated unfiltered, the press stand at the ready to
explain, obfuscate, and, if all else fails, attack the messenger.
So as I observe the ongoing negotiations on raising the debt ceiling, I have
to express great admiration for Speaker of the House John Boehner. I
understand that many conservatives are disappointed in the speaker, wishing
that he could bring the president and the Democrats to our side of the table
. But how can Boehner do that when the crazy Democrats are at a fictional
table on another planet?
No, John Boehner appears to be doing what a good nurse would do: get to the
end of shift with as little damage as possible. In the speaker's case, that
means no tax increases. Here's hoping he's able to stand firm. The bad
news is that the shift isn't over until November 2012.
Carol Peracchio is a registered nurse. |
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