- Sister Toldjah - https://sistertoldjah.com -

Maybe you should rephrase that, Madame Secretary?

When a majority of those surveyed believe that “socialist [1]” is an accurate description of President Obama, saying that opponents of his health-care program need to be reeducated [2] is perhaps not the best choice of words:

In an interview before the latest Kaiser results were released, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told ABC News that the sustained opposition to the Democrats’ health care reform efforts has mainly been a function of “misinformation.”

“Unfortunately there still is a great deal of confusion about what is in [the reform law] and what isn’t,” Sebelius told ABC News Radio on Monday.

With several vulnerable House Democrats now touting their votes against the bill, and Republicans running on repeal of the law, Sebelius said “misinformation given on a 24/7 basis” has led to the enduring opposition nearly six months after the lengthy debate ended in Congress.

“We have a lot of reeducation to do,” Sebelius said.

Get it? Opposition can’t be based on a principled objection to a statist takeover of the health-care system, the insertion of federal bureaucrats into the most intimate decisions about one’s medical care, or the tremendous economic costs this “reform” imposes. Nope, it’s got to be “misinformation” fed to gullible rubes, who need “reeducating.”

Presumably again and again until they get it right.

I assume Secretary Sebelius is unaware of the disturbing associations “reeducation” brings to mind, such as the reeducation camps in Soviet Russia, Maoist China (especially during the Cultural Revolution), and Vietnam, to name just a few totalitarian hell-holes. Now, obviously she didn’t mean “put them all in camps [3] and subject them to reprogramming as in Clockwork Orange [4],” but the choice of words is unfortunate and culturally clueless.

It’s also revealing, because it shows once again the arrogance and condescension toward the common people that lays behind the progressive-statist mindset: “Government experts know what’s best for you, Citizen peasant, so trust us and let us tell you why you’re wrong to oppose us.”

Come November 2nd, 2010, Secretary Sebelius and her colleagues will be the ones getting a real –and needed– reeducation.

COMPARISON: If you find yourself reminded of the votes a few years ago over the proposed EU constitution and the attempts to force nations [5] that rejected it to vote again until they approved it, you’re not having hallucinations. The statist attitudes of our (Social) Democratic leaders and the European Union governing classes really are that alike.

(via Reason [6])

(Crossposted at Public Secrets [7])