The Hippocratic Oath and Hypocrisy: Free Speech in the Era of Obama's Nanny State

Following the passage of the health care bill, Florida urologist Jack Cassell exercised his first amendment right to free speech and posted a sign on his office door which reads, “If you voted for Obama, seek urologic care elsewhere.  Changes to your health care begin right now, not in four years.”  Dr. Cassell expressed his frustration with a bill that he believes will irrevocably harm if not ultimately destroy the health care system as we know it in this country, specifically the care he gives his patients.  Although Dr. Cassell, a registered Republican, did not refuse to treat anyone – including Obama voters, which he acknowledged would be unethical – patients who dare tread past his sign will visit a waiting room stocked with a variety of conservative pamphlets opposing Obamacare.  “This is what the morons in Washington have done to your health care. Take one, read it and vote out anyone who voted for it,” a waiting room sign reproves. 

In response to Dr. Cassell’s sign, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), the same congressman who suggested Republicans’ only answer to the health care is for the sick to “die quickly,” has now attempted to further quell opposition to Obamacare and the president’s far left politics of redistribution.  Most troubling, Grayson has pulled out the proverbial and all too often unfairly employed “race card” and alleged that Dr. Cassell’s sign is tantamount to a refusal to treat black people.  Rep. Grayson told the Sentinel that Dr. Cassell’s behavior disgusted him. “Maybe he thinks the Hippocratic Oath says, 'Do no good',” Grayson said.  “If this is the face of the right wing in America, it's the face of cruelty. ...Why don't they change the name of the Republican Party to the Sore Loser Party?”

While Rep. Grayson’s comments undoubtedly malign Dr. Cassell, I believe this is part and parcel of a more insidious agenda of the Bolshevik left in this country to systematically suppress free speech, especially political in nature, and to construct an “enemies of state” list.  The Fox News network is one such enemy that has met squarely with the opprobrium of the Obama administration.  President Obama has himself called Fox “troublesome” and “vitriolic” in an interview with CBS’ Harry Smith: 

OBAMA:  When you listen to Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck --

SMITH:  It's beyond that.

OBAMA:  It's pretty apparent and it's troublesome.  But keep in mind that there have been periods in American history where this kind of vitriol comes out.  It happens often when you've got an economy that is making people more anxious and people are feeling as if there's a lot of change that needs to take place.  But that's not the vast majority of Americans.  I think the vast majority of Americans know that we're trying hard, that I want what's best for the country.

Maya Angelou has said, “If someone shows you who they are, believe them.”  Barack Obama attended Jeremiah Wright’s church for twenty years and absorbed his bitter, racist, and anti-American rhetoric, yet it is Fox News he deems “troublesome,” not the “damning” of the country he claims to love.  Like Peter, Obama denied his relationship with Wright, but his speech betrayed his disavowal.  On the campaign trail, Obama told us who he was, but we did not believe him:

“You go into these small towns of Pennsylvania like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them and they fell through the Clinton administration and the Bush administration, each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are going to regenerate and they have not.  And it's not surprising, then, that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustration.”

It’s not so much that this administration is against free speech; they are simply against the speech of those who refuse to fall in line with their agenda of “fundamentally transforming America” through the premeditated obsolescence of self-reliance.  Keith Olbermann spewed hate speech at the Bush administration from NBC for eight years, told President Bush to “shut the hell up,” because “someone had to,” and he didn’t have the “creativity or presence of mind to throw a shoe at him.”  Olbermann called on President Obama to prosecute former President Bush for war crimes.  Yet, the liberal media and their cronies in Washington remained silent as he utilized his pulpit to incite violence against then President Bush and Vice President Cheney.

President Obama has indeed divided this nation, but I believe that that is precisely what he came to do; while his propagandized campaign so artfully crafted an image of the future president as the great unifier, his fourteen months in office are instead a reflection of a man who came to divide and conquer.  Obama is who he said he was, and he is doing what he said he would do.

Evidence abounds that our first amendment freedoms are under attack, and there is no better example than the aspersions this administration and the lame-stream, State-controlled media have cast on the tea party demonstrators.  Despite any actual evidence, despite countless organized and peaceful protests, the tea partiers have been branded with the twenty-first century’s scarlet A.  On the day the health care bill was signed, Congresswoman Pelosi, in nothing short of a calculated photo-op, accompanied the Congressional Black Caucus to the Capitol building amongst a sea of tea party protesters.  Beneath the city of Washington exists a labyrinth of rails, the Metro system.  There was no reason, other than for the imperious pomp and circumstance to which this administration has crowned itself entitled, for Rep. Pelosi, et als., to walk above-ground to the Capitol. 

This wanton display, so patently self-aggrandizing, I conjecture, had a deeper motive to incite violence, or at the very minimum, to create a scene that would send a thrill running up Chris Matthews’ leg.  Undeterred that an altercation did not, in reality, occur, the administration fabricated one.  Racial slurs and invectives, they alleged, were hurled during the anti-Obamacare protest, the “n” word was called fifteen times, and a representative was spit upon.  The countless cameras surrounding the Capitol inexplicably failed to capture this vituperative rhetoric.  Had this actually occurred, it would have been a front-page headline across the nation, especially from those news organizations who support this administration’s proclivity for massive government expansion and industry takeover.  That it did not is a testament to the lengths this administration goes to impose its will upon a people it deems either too recalcitrant or dim-witted to realize what’s in their best interests.  After all, we have to pass the bill to know what’s in it.

More cries of racism have ensued.  Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tn.), during an Internet radio show, insinuated members of the Tea Party have an agenda of bigotry and hatred and have demonstrated a “hardcore angry side,” even “without robes and hoods.”  He alleged that the organizers have shown “opposition to African Americans, hostility toward gays, hostility to anybody who wasn't just a clone of George Wallace's fan club.”

            Americans have come to a crossroads.  The American people and tea party protesters are not radicals, as this administration and President Obama would have us believe.  The act of disagreeing with the policies and politics of a black president is not a smoke signal for racism.  We aren’t overly concerned; in fact, I believe we aren’t concerned enough.  We aren’t bitter clingers; we proudly cling to our faith and the freedoms our forefathers fought and died to bequeath, and when besmirched with false labels of racism and bigotry, we cling boldly to the Truth.  We see this administration’s socialist agenda corroding the Constitution, crippling the private sector, increasing taxes, and decreasing personal liberty, and we’re tired of standing idle.  We aren’t afraid of the bullying and intimidation anymore.  What we used to accept, we no longer will.  President Obama, you’ve shown us who you are.  Now, it’s our turn.

~elf