Peter Lemiska

On December 25^th, the New York Times published an editorial by liberal columnist, Paul Krugman. It was entitled “America Is Not Yet Lost,” and it was a message wrapped in hope, but filled with hate.

Still fuming about the 2016 election and its aftermath, Krugman ranted that Donald Trump has proven himself unfit for office – morally and intellectually, and that the Republican Party is composed of “cynical apparatchiks, willing to sell out every principle – and every shred of dignity – as long as donors get big tax cuts.”

He had no kind words for the media, either – the conservative media, that is – which, he argued, has given up even the pretense of doing real reporting. He failed to mention the Pew Research study showing that negative coverage of Trump in his first 60 days was three times that of Barack Obama during the same period.

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Christians and peace-loving people around the world are struggling today – struggling to find hope in a world filled with violence and hatred.

They see men, women, and children indiscriminately killed by despots and zealots who care nothing about peace. They see soldiers dying in conflicts around the world. At home, we see random killings and senseless violence in the streets of our cities. We see a fractured nation, deeply divided with no common ground in sight, a nation in which rational, civil discourse is gone – replaced by rigid ideology and hateful words.

But our country has gone through much worse.

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By now, everyone knows the name. He’s the senior FBI agent who played a pivotal role in the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email scandal and was later assigned to Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia. He’s the one ultimately removed from that team because of his own email scandal.

Recently exposed email correspondence between Strzok and his mistress, Lisa Page, another FBI employee, revealed a seething hatred of Donald Trump. The messages so far obtained contain mostly the same kind of contemptuous words found on most anti-Trump websites.

But some of it was especially troubling and potentially problematic.

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In 2008, while Barack Obama was campaigning for the presidency, many Americans were deeply concerned about his background, as well as his ideology. Among many other issues, they were profoundly disturbed by his admitted friendships with Marxist professors and assorted socialists and anti-American zealots. His notion of wealth redistribution was also, at that time, a concept foreign to Americans, who had always believed that success and wealth come from hard work, not redistribution by the state. His critics were afraid that the country was about to elect a president like no other, a president whose values were antithetical to American values, and a president who only saw America’s flaws, not its greatness.

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Mention the words, “Uranium One,” and many Americans shrug their shoulders, either blissfully unaware of the controversy or convinced that it’s a Republican ploy targeting Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. Others see a major scandal with far greater impact than Watergate. They see the covert sale of 20 percent of our uranium deposits to a Russian-owned company in exchange for bribes at the highest levels of our government.

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The war currently being waged against Confederate monuments seemingly came from nowhere, but it’s quickly becoming a fierce and brutal conflict. That was made clear when those self-appointed champions of justice triumphantly toppled the statue of a Confederate soldier in Durham and then, in an orgy of hate, took turns kicking and spitting on the vanquished hunk of metal.

Rational people are finding it hard to understand this collective statuary revulsion. It’s as if so many Rip Van Winkles simultaneously awoke from a 150-year slumber, filled with self-righteous rage, and ready to do battle against a scourge that had already ended around the time they dozed off.

What motivates these people?

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As the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, continues to disintegrate, and Republicans endlessly fumble their plan to repeal and replace it, support is growing in this country for a single payer system. That concept, originated by Democrats and the left, has now begun to spread, possibly helped by the new entitlements Obamacare provided. The Pew Research Center recently reported that 33 percent of the public favors a single payer approach to health care. While that’s still a minority, it represents a five point increase since January and a 12 point increase since 2014.

Perhaps more significant is the number of Americans who now believe that, in principle, the federal government should be responsible for providing health care for all its citizens. According to the Center, that figure is 60 percent, the largest number in nearly a decade.

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A hundred years ago, our healthcare system was pretty simple.  There were no government regulations, and the few doctors there were, offered their services in exchange for whatever payment they could negotiate with their patients.  Like most of our economy, it was a free market system.  The term, “universal healthcare,” was non-existent.

Since then, with rapid advances in medical care, life expectancy has nearly doubled, but not without cost.  Someone had to pay for research, for educating our medical professionals, for the manufacture of medicines, and for increasingly expensive treatments.  To help defray those costs, which were ultimately passed on to patients, the concept of health insurance was born around 1929.

As it evolved, most working Americans acquired their health insurance through their employers, usually at reduced rates.  Charitable foundations and various government programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and SCHIP (State Children’s Health Insurance Program) were created for those who could not afford insurance.

The system was far from perfect.  Though nearly every American had access to emergency care and basic healthcare, countless individuals without insurance were still unable to pay for life-saving, long term treatments or costly procedures.  Still, that’s how our society survived for nearly the past hundred years.

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