A Cadillac Exemption From a Cadillac Tax From an Edsel Administration

This past Sunday marked the first time President Barack Obama graced a Washington, D.C., church with his presence since Oct. 11, but apparently it was not to sit in a pew and worship. Instead, he was doing the sermonizing and politicking — gloriously intermingling church and state as only liberals are allowed to do in this country.

Don't get me wrong; I'm no scold when it comes to the church-state separation mania, which I think has been grossly expanded by liberals not to preserve the constitutional protection of religious liberty, but to selectively suppress it. But here I am digressing before I've even gotten started on the main focus of today's rant.

Instead of quibbling over the propriety of Obama's turning the church service into a political rally for health care, let's focus on the outrageous substance of his message.

He told the congregants at Vermont Avenue Baptist Church that Obamacare would help more than 30 million Americans — "men and women and children, mothers and fathers" — to get health insurance. "This will be a victory not for Democrats," he said. (He's got that one right.) "This'll be a victory for the United States of America." (Yes, once he and his party get thrown out on their ears for this monstrosity.)

But it's another one of his statements that really sticks in the craw: "This'll be a victory for dignity and decency, for our common humanity."

Oh? How dignified is it for Obama to cram this extraordinarily unpopular scheme, replete with backroom deals and political payoffs, down Americans' throats? How decent of him is it to have made (and broken) an insincere pledge to televise these health care negotiations on C-SPAN, only to have his arrogant press secretary, Robert Gibbs, glibly duck all questions about it?

How common does Obama think our humanity is, when he's always abusing the power of his office to select certain categories of that humanity as winners and others as losers?

Does he think union members are more common, say, than nonunion members? Or are some workers, in the words of George Orwell's "Animal Farm" — a fitting analogy for this socialist administration — more equal than others?

I think that goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway, because some people remain too stubborn to hear.

Obama first proposed a "Cadillac tax" on health plans whose benefits were more generous than he, in his dictatorial discretion, could tolerate.

This tax was un-American enough in its own right, as well as a breach of his promise not to interfere with patient choice and the quality of health care, because it would use the tax code to encourage uniform coverage and prevent employers and individuals from operating in a free market.

But even this good socialist couldn't apply his principle of equal treatment for the entire proletariat. It seems the other Marxist imperative of glorifying union workers had to trump the principle of equality.

Just outside the reach of C-SPAN's video cameras, Obama agreed to exempt union workers from this Cadillac tax until at least 2018 — at the estimated cost of $60 billion. What possible justification does he offer for this unjustifiable act? None; he doesn't have to justify himself. He is the flawless post-partisan, post-racial, post-George W. Bush president.

It's a good thing for him that he has exempted himself from scrutiny just as he is exempting unions from his Cadillac tax. For there is no rationale to set unions aside for special beneficial treatment any more than there was for the bribes to Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska and Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana — other than that Obama is in bed with unions and wants to reward them and swell their ranks with our money.

How's he going to make up for that $60 billion shortfall? No problem. Just applying his "common humanity" principle again, he'll extend the 2.9 percent Medicare payroll tax to capital gains, and according to The Washington Times, he'll extract $15 billion more from hospitals and $10 billion more from pharmaceuticals. There must be no rush in the world that compares with transferring billions from certain groups to others with a flick of the presidential pen.

To borrow another word from the Obama vernacular, can you imagine the audacity of this guy's lecturing us about decency, dignity, common humanity and health coverage for the "uninsured," when he has turned this entire health care issue into a poster child for Chicago-style political corruption and payoffs?

Oh, the sweet irony of an overdue comeuppance courtesy of the commonwealth of Massachusetts.

David Limbaugh is a writer, author and attorney. His book "Bankrupt: The Intellectual and Moral Bankruptcy of Today's Democratic Party" was released recently in paperback. To find out more about David Limbaugh, please visit his Web site at www.DavidLimbaugh.com. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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