Have you ever had to deal with health care companies? Most of us have. It's common for them to deny legitimate claims. My wife and I have a method. We always tried to pay what we thought was our co-pay at the doctors office. That way if we ever got a medical bill in the mail we knew not to pay it. We knew we were seeing it because there was an error of some kind. Probably our health care provider denied a claim or didn't pay all that they should have.
I'm dealing with it in a big way with Aetna right now. I've been fighting with them for 5 months to get compensation that is due to me. I'm amazed at their incompetence. And I also have noticed that their incompetence always serves to improve their profit margins. Is it strategic incompetence?
Here's Charles Krauthammer in a debate prior to the presidential election in 2008 telling us the Democrats plan for troops in Iraq. Have a listen.
It's unequivocal. Hillary and Obama will immediately begin troop withdrawals. Well, that's pretty incompetent. Even I knew that was silly. I had listened closely enough to know that they were calling for troop expansions in the region.
So while Obama wasn't really promising that he'd scale back the wars his critics were pretending that he was. Is Krauthammer this incompetent? Or is he a genius?
Because think about what Krauthammer gets with Obama. An expansion of the wars. More mercenaries. Now we have due process free assassinations for US citizens. The surveillance continues. Guantanamo stays open. War opponents vote for Obama based on an expectation, delivered by Krauthammer, that Obama was somehow different from Bush. Krauthammer has in Obama everything he could want in a war mongering president. And it's the liberals that delivered it to him. Sure, he'd have preferred McCain, but this isn't bad.
Pretending that mainstream Democrats are liberals is really useful for the right wing.
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Except of course, that troops are being withdrawn from Iraq here soon...
Its a kind of symbiosis. Democrats fake left to get votes and co-opt progressive demands, and the right pretends that the Democrats are the Leftist they really are not.
Obama's withdrawal followed the Bush timetable, but he fought that tooth and nail. He tried hard to stay but needed immunity for US soldiers. That is, they need to have the right to kill with impunity. It was tough for the Iraqi government to permit that. Remember how Wikileaks recently revealed that US troops executed an entire family, including infants and grandmothers, and the military cooperated by dropping bombs on the home to cover up evidence and lying about what happened? Those disclosures made it difficult for the Iraqi government to grant immunity, so Obama is leaving with regret, then turning around and pretending we should applaud the fact that he's withdrawing combat troops.
So Krauthammer's portrayal is just wrong.
...with that said, troops ARE leaving Iraq.
Some troops are expected to leave eventually regardless of who won the presidency. The unequivocal difference between McCain and Obama according to Krauthammer was the immediate withdrawal of troops under Obama.
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