About The times. (Gainesville, Ga.) 1972-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 20, 2020)
4A OPINION ®he £ntics gainesvilletimes.com Thursday, February 20, 2020 Shannon Casas Editor in Chief | 770-718-3417 | scasas@gainesvilletimes.com Submit a letter: letters@gainesvilletimes.com The First Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. LITERS Veterans need care close to home The doctors office called me and wanted to set up an appointment for a colonoscopy as a follow up on my procedure three years ago. I reminded them that I was a veteran with Tri-Care insurance through the VA, then I was asked if I had any other insurance. When I said I didn’t, she said, “Oh, we don’t take VA patients anymore.” I got the same cold shoulder from the Northeast Georgia Medical Center when they decided they weren’t taking care of the veterans anymore. My heart doctor gave me a simple pill to get my heart out of afib. When I had the problem once before and it cost upward of $25,000 to do the same thing, my follow-up appointments were canceled. I went to have my ears cleaned and the same result I encountered, “We don’t take veterans anymore.” Of course the VA hospital takes care of all vet erans for free! It is just so much easier when we can get things done close to home, especially the colonoscopy. It takes about 40 minutes to get to the VA hospital it you don’t have to stop at a restroom! We are losing 22 veterans daily nationwide to suicide, and most of the Vietnam veterans have to deal with the Agent Orange problem. Thank you to those businesses who give a dis count to the veterans, and thank you Lowe’s, who has dedicated parking spots for veterans. Thank God for this country, the safest in the world. And thank a teacher for our children who are taught to read, and thank a veteran for the lan guage that is in English! Roger Keebaugh Gainesville We have expensive problems, but socialism won’t fix them When I was a kid, I took trigonometry in high school paid for by taxpayers and then again in college supplemented by taxpayers. Georgia implemented dual enrollment to reduce the redundancy. It costs a lot of money but probably less than teaching the same course twice. Now, they want to limit the program because of the cost. I am not aware of anyone looking at the high school and college system to determine how much it saves. Schools have a real discipline issue. Our immigration policy is awful. No one has accused our military of being cost efficient. Health care has real cost problems. Medicare is going broke, and some presi dential candidates want to add everyone to the system. A number of our presidential candidates say that if we elect them and adopt socialism, they will fix our problems and cure climate change. When we point out that Chavez did the same thing, they say we are going to do it like Sweden. An ex-prime minister of Sweden said Bernie is wrong about their system. Apparently he does not even understand what he wants to do. I would suggest the odds are that we will be a lot more like Venezuela than Sweden if these guys are given more power. Mike McConnell Gainesville To submit a letter Send by email to letters@gainesvilletimes. com or use the contact form at gainesvilletimes.com. Include name, hometown and phone number; letters never appear anonymously. Letters are limited to 500 words on topics of public interest and may be edited for content and length. Writers are limited to one letter per month. Letters may be rejected from readers with no ties to Northeast Georgia or that address personal, business or legal disputes. Letters not the work of the author listed or with material not properly attributed will be rejected. Submitted items may be published in print, electronic or other forms. Letters and other commentary express the opinions of the authors and not of The Times. Your government officials Georgia state government Gov. Brian Kemp, 203 State Capitol, Atlanta 30334; 404-656-1776; www.gov.georgia.gov Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, 240 State Capitol, Atlanta 30334, 404-656-5030; www.ltgov.ga.gov Secretary of State Brett Raffensperger, 214 State Capitol, Atlanta 30334, 404-656-2881, fax 404-656-0513; www.sos.state.ga.us; Elections Division, 2 MLK, Jr. Drive SE, Suite 1104, West Tower, Atlanta 30334-1530, 404-656-2871, fax, 404-651-9531 Attorney General Chris Carr, 40 Capitol Square SW, Atlanta 30303; 404-656-3300; law.ga.gov School Superintendent Richard Woods, 205 Jesse Hill Jr. Drive SE, Atlanta 30334; 404-656-2800; www.doe.k12.ga.us; askdoe@gadoe.org Labor Commissioner Mark Butler, 148 Andrew Young International Blvd. NE, Suite 642, Atlanta 30303-1751; 404-656-3045, 877-709-8185; www.dol.state.ga.us Insurance Commissioner Jim Beck, 2 Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, Suite 704, West Tower, Atlanta 30334; 404-656-2070; oci.georgia.gov; inscomm@mail.oci.state.ga.us Agriculture Commissioner Gary Black, 19 Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, Room 226, Atlanta 30334; 404-656-3600, 800-282-5852; agr.state.ga.us; info@agr.state.ga.us Public Service Commission, 244 Washington St. SW, Atlanta 30334-9052, 800-282-5813, gapsc@psc.state.ga. us, www.psc.state.ga.us. Chairman Lauren “Bubba” McDonald, District 4; Vice Chairman Tim Echols, District 2; Jason Shaw, District 1; Chuck Eaton, District 3; Tricia Pridemore, District 5 Bloomberg-Sanders battle could determine the Democrats’ future The Bloomberg-Bernie bat tle is almost like a comic book come to life. The two combat ants cover almost every cliche on the right-wing scorecard. The right couldn’t have invented a better candidate than Bernie Sanders. In 1971, he was kicked out of a com mune for talking too much. In 1987, he recorded a folk album. The following year, he got married and left the next day for a combination fact-finding trip and honeymoon in the Soviet Union. When he returned, he sounded a bit like Lincoln Steffens, the famous journalist who’d said of the USSR, “I have seen the future and it works.” In Steffens’ defense, he visited in 1919, two years after its founding and before most of the inconvenient mass murder and starvation. Sanders thought the Soviet Union was the future three years before it collapsed. Of course, this isn’t why most of Sand ers’ fans like him. He was on the right side of the civil rights movement when it really mattered. He’s been a consistent advocate of what he calls democratic socialism here at home. And he’s an unre constructed enemy of the economic elites, particularly the hated “billionaire class.” Which brings us to Michael Bloom berg, who sits atop the 1 percent of the 1 percent. Bloomberg is a perfect stand-in for a completely different kind of liber alism, one that doesn’t even like to call itself liberal. He headlined the launch of No Labels, an organization dedicated to getting ideology out of politics. A lifelong Democrat, Bloomberg switched labels to become a Republican to run for mayor in 2001. By his third term he was an indepen dent. Now he’s a Democrat because he’s running for president. As mayor of New York, he was a poster boy for a kind of arrogant progressive-post-par- tisan technocratic government that prizes data over feelings. The data showed that obesity cost the health care system money, and since sugary sodas contributed to obesity, Bloom berg clamped down on them. The data showed that young black men committed most of the gun homicides, so Bloomberg clamped down on them with stop and frisk. “Ninety-five percent of murders, mur derers and murder victims fit one M.O. You can just take a description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops,” Bloomberg said in 2015. In a video from 2011 that’s going around, Bloomberg offered a quasi endorsement of “death panels.” “If you show up with prostate cancer, you’re 95 years old, (we) should say go and enjoy, you’ve lived a long life, there’s no cure. We can’t do anything,” Bloomberg said. “If you’re a young person, we should do something about it. Society’s not willing to do that yet.” This isn’t why his fans like him. For a long time he was an icon of the creden- tialed upper class who saw ideological culture-war fights as so much boob bait. More recently, he’s become the liberals’ “Chicago way” response to Trump. If the right comes at you with a billionaire would-be Putin, you come back with a big ger billionaire would-be Lee Kuan Yew. Both men represent strands of liberal ism with very long pedigrees. Sanders can trace his lineage back to antiwar socialists and populists such as William Jennings Bryan and Eugene Debs, as well as to reformers such as Jane Addams. Bloom berg’s antecedents can be found in democ racy-skeptical “disinterested” progressive pragmatists such as Walter Lippmann, Oliver Wendell Holmes and the “Wiscon sin School” economists. Usually these two strands intertwine and overlap. (Barack Obama had a foot in both camps; he was both the anointed leader of a mass move ment and the overseer of the Affordable Care Act, with all of its data-driven ration ing.) But when stripped to their purest elements, one camp is all about solidarity and people power, and the other is about technocratic expertise. Like Trump, both men are beneficia ries of our hollo wed-out political parties, which are incapable of performing the gatekeeper function of the nomination process. And that raises the stakes of their con test. Trump has transformed much of the GOP in his image. Too weak to protect their own brand, the Republicans have adopted his. If either Sanders or Bloomberg wins the nomination, it will be interesting to see if the same thing happens to Democrats. If it’s Sanders, will they become a populist party of Social Democrats? If it’s Bloom berg, will the Democrats become the party of bureaucratic authoritarianism? Again, Democratic politicians normally straddle these two tendencies. There are, of course, other options for primary voters. But the choice between these two is zero-sum, and if either man wins, the Democratic Party could end up making a choice that will define it as much as Trump has come to define the GOP. Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. JONAH GOLDBERG goldbergcolumn@ gmail.com DANA SUMMERS I Tribune News Service Young Dems lose interest in freedom I happened to listen the other day to then-Sen. John F. Kennedy’s opening remarks in his debate with then-Vice President Rich ard Nixon during the 1960 presidential election cycle. Kennedy, the Democratic Party candidate, recalled that Abraham Lincoln, in the 1860 presidential elec tion cycle, said the great question facing the nation was whether it could exist “half-slave and half-free.” In the 1960 election, said Kennedy, the issue was “whether the world will exist half-slave or half-free.” “Whether it will move in the direction of freedom, in the direction of the road that we are taking... will depend in great measure upon what we do here in the United States,” he said. How things change. The Democrats’ candidate in 1960 headlined freedom as the issue defining his campaign. Now, 60 years later, Democrats are moving down the road to nominating a socialist, push ing freedom as an American ideal out of the picture. It is astounding that many Democrats are ready to cast aside the core value that has defined our nation, for which so many have fought and died. One major part of the story is our youth. Support for the two parties is divided by age. In 2016, a majority of those under age 44 voted for Hillary Clinton. Fifty-five percent of those ages 18-29 voted for her, compared with 37% for Donald Trump. Trump received the majority of those 45 years and above. It is our youth that is enamored with socialism and the socialist candidate. In a recent Pew Research Center poll, 40% of Demo crats ages 18-29 expressed preference for Sen. Bernie Sanders to be their party’s candidate, compared with 25% of those 30-49,13% of those 50-64 and 10% of those 65 and over. In a Gallup poll, 51 % of those ages 18-39 expressed a positive view of capitalism and 49% a positive view of socialism. Among those 40-54,61% were positive about capitalism compared with 39% for socialism. And those 55 and over, 68% were positive about capital ism compared with 32% for socialism. What’s driving these young Democrats to the far left? Niall Ferguson of Stanford Univer sity’s Hoover Institution and consultant Eyck Freymann suggest, in an article in The Atlantic, “The Coming Generation War,” that the capitalist America that worked for earlier generations is not working for these youth. “They face stagnant real wages” and carry a large burden of student debt, they say. It’s a generation “to whom little has been given, and of whom much is expected,” they continue. I think it is just the opposite. It is a gen eration to whom much has been given and from whom little is expected. When Kennedy ran for president in 1960, America’s youth still faced a mili tary draft. In 1960,72% of Americans over 18 were married, compared with 50% today. According to Pew, 78% of those ages 18-29 say it is acceptable for an unmar ried couple to live together, even if they don’t intend to get married. Over the decade 2009-2019, there was a drop of 16% among those ages 23-39 who identify as Christian and an increase of 13% of those self-identifying as reli giously unaffiliated. And that age group doesn’t vote. Since 1980, the percentage of eligible voters in their 20s who voted in presidential elections has averaged between 40% and 50%, compared with 65% to 75% of those over 45, Ferguson and Freymann report. We have a generation of American youth today who have grown up in a cul ture of legal abortion and same-sex mar riage, with little sense of responsibility to God and country. Freedom is about personal respon sibility, and these youth do not seem to be interested. They appear, rather, to be very open to the idea of turning their lives over to be run by a 78-year-old socialist. Such values among our youth do not bode well for our future. Meanwhile, the best near-term solu tion is keeping the nation under Republi can control. Star Parker is an author and president of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education and a columnist for Creators. STAR PARKER www.urbancure.org (The Srtnes Founded Jan. 26,1947 345 Green St., Gainesville, GA 30501 gainesvilletimes.com General Manager Norman Baggs EDITORIAL BOARD Editor in Chief Shannon Casas
