The Insane, and What We Don't Do About Them...

Saw this at PajamasMedia this morning:

Mental Illness and Mass Murder.

This guy says things I've been saying for a very long time; there are people out there who need help, who are a danger to themselves, but especially to others, but we never seem to get them any help, or to protect ourselves from them, until it's way too late. Everyone knows the guy (Jared Loughner, in this case) is batshit insane, but no one wants to do anything, particularly not the authorities who usually know who the walking time bombs are (they've encountered them at least once before), but mostly because of the pressures exerted by cash-strapped state budgets, civil liberties advocates, and a lot of so-called doctors with degrees but no common sense, these folks are left to their own devices with often-devastating results.

We've just had a fifteen month debate (and constitutionally-suspect vote) on Health Care in this country. At no point in this debate did I ever hear anyone, not the President, no Senators, not a single Congresscritter, mention the words "Mental Health Care", except in the context of the rising costs of the standard prescription anti-depressants for the self-absorbed and clueless(which don't fucking work after a few weeks or months, and which do nothing at all for schizophrenics and other violent mentally ill).

We wasted 15 months arguing about how to put bigger tits on an aging Baby Boomer at government expense. We argued about how to ensure that Ricardo and Lupe can get the insulin they need, despite having broken the law and entered the country illegally. We argued about the health problems caused by gross obesity in people who are eating a steady diet of Hot dogs, Wing Dings and Dipsy Doodles entirely funded by Food Stamps. All we have done is have an argument about how to give all of those folks even more silicon implants, more insulin, and another heaping helping of government-subsidized Double-Fudge-Marshmallow-Swirl...with Caramel... without them having to pay for it, or accept the consequences of their actions.

And Our Congress wrote a 3,000-page bill which none of them read; none of those folks has Clue-fuckin'-One about what it says, or what time bombs are contained within it, but somehow they passed it through a suspect "Reconciliation"process, which apparently, has reconciled no one. In fact, it only made people angrier. They did it for base political reasons, and all the talk about compassion and caring is a load of bullshit.

Go on and get fat of Food Stamps; you won't have to pay for your heart attack, thanks to Uncle Sam! Take these $300 drugs for your erectile dysfunction because we want 75-year-olds to be able to fuck like teenagers, and then faint and end up in emergency rooms because of problems with low blood pressure; The Government will pick up the tab! Enjoy your free insulin; even though you've come here illegally from another country and pay no income taxes, and have brought measles, whooping cough, malaria, dysentery, and polio back with you.

The libtards patted themselves on the back for finally making Universal health care a "reality" (such a reality that it doesn't kick in until 2014, and then will be severely underfunded and drive up deficits and public borrowing), but they were aiming at the wrong targets (no pun intended, and I'm certain Dick Durbin will scream like a menstrual banshee about my extreme right-wing use of a violent military analogy in the context of a political debate ).

What Obama Care aimed at was a two-part charade of mere appearances; it wants to give The Poor (only in America could The Poor be grossly fat, own cellphones and drive SUV's) the illusion that they had the same things as The Rich, in this case, medical insurance. Technically, everyone has access to medical insurance -- it's just that you have to work in order to pay for really good medical insurance. In the democratic (small 'd' intentional) party world of race and class warfare, it is positively dangerous to insist upon this so-called "work ethic" or point out that our free-market capitalist society works this way, or to even speak of either. In the meantime, the real health issues this country faces are conveniently papered over, or dismissed entirely.

The second-part of this great scam was to cater to the insanity of an aging generation (the Baby Boomers) which is positively obsessed with it's health and ability to screw well into heir 90's, that usually already possesses health insurance, but just doesn't want to continue to pay for it as costs increase. That costs increase because of this obsession with their health and fear of dying, an inevitability, is not spoken of. Giving the impression that we were doing something nice for the "downtrodden", and garnering votes for it, was more important. It's nice to be able to be selfish while appearing generous with other people's money, huh?

One of those problems that went unexamined is how we treat the mentally ill, and more specifically, what we do with the really dangerous ones. No one wants to tackle that question, because we don't really give a shit about the mentally ill -- until they shoot a Congresswoman -- and then the response to the tragedy is to have a debate about banning the use of crosshairs in political advertising. We are cursed with the dumbest, most short-sighted, most self-absorbed and clueless politicians and media in the Solar System. These people couldn't tell the truth to save their lives -- even to themselves -- so it's no wonder they miss "Bigger Picture" issues like Wandering Gunmen who Hear Voices...and whose mental instability is generally known, acknowledged, and then goes untreated for lack of funding or stupid theories about how far Civil Liberties can be pushed.

One has the right, apparently, to go untreated, or with the ability to forego the medications that will (might) keep your symptoms under control, and if it happens to step all over my right not to be murdered in the street by a gun- or sword-wielding douchebag whose cocker spaniel says I'm sending coded messages to him through his fillings, then that's just too bad; just the price we pay for upholding an iron-clad Constitutional Principle.

Only a fucking lawyer (the next batch of lunatics we should lock up) could argue, and then sleep soundly at night, that letting the destructive moonbats of our society loose is an exercise in purest liberty.

The truth of the matter is that if we weren't absorbed by questions of how to give medical insurance to those who won't work for it, won't pay for it, and will simply misuse and abuse it once they have it, we could have had a much-more useful debate about how to lock up and treat the Jared Loughner's of the world, and save someone's life. Without the Jared Loughners, the emergency rooms would be a little less full, and so would the cemeteries.