How Obamacare and Benghazi affect Syria

By Tom Quiner

“If you like your current health insurance plan, you can keep it.”

How many times did candidate and president Barack Obama say that his plan, Obamacare, wouldn’t affect your current health insurance coverage? Who can count that high?

Even more, he promised to lower our insurance premiums by $2500 per year by his second year in office.

He didn’t shoot straight with us on either score. Premiums went UP $2500 per year for the average American under Obama instead of dropping, a $5000 PER YEAR miscalculation by the shyster from Chicago.

Forgive the harshness of my rhetoric, but my use of the pejorative seems fitting. Not only have my health insurance premiums skyrocketed under Mr. Obama, but I’ve learned in the past ten days that I will not be able to keep my current coverage after next year, because of Obamacare, despite Mr. Obama’s pledge to the contrary.

I purchase a high deductible health savings account. Obamacare considers this type of coverage as a “junk” policy. I will be compelled to buy a fancier and more expensive product that will probably cost double or triple my current policy. If I can’t afford it, you will have to subsidize it.

I contacted my insurance agent to find out more about the new products that will be available to me. They can’t even tell me yet because they don’t know. The new Obamacare bureaucracy isn’t able to dispense information to the marketplace on a timely basis.

Obamacare: strike one.

What about Benghazi? What does it have to do with Obamacare and Syria? Stick with me.

When our ambassador and other Americans were killed in Benghazi, the president immediately blamed it on an offensive, anti-Muslim film produced by an American. In other words, he blamed us, America. We now know that the president knew immediately that it was, in fact, terrorism. He stuck to the story for ten days, even though he knew it was a lie.

Benghazi: strike two.

The president now wants the American people to support a military strike on Syria. Honorable people can support this action. Honorable people can disagree.

Here’s the case for a strike on Syria:

1. It will create a deterrent to Syria AND Iran to cease and desist the use and development of weapons of mass destruction.

2. The strike is necessary for the U.S. to maintain credibility in light of the president’s pledge to “do something” if Assad crossed a “red line.”

Mr. Assad crossed a red line last year. Mr. Obama’s credibility is already in the toilet with his ongoing dithering. And isn’t Iran and their ongoing nuclear program a bigger issue than Syria? Wouldn’t that be the first place to start if the president was truly serious about WMDs?

I know some good people who are sickened by the recent holocaust in Syria. I am, too. These good people reiterate the pledge made more than a half a century ago of “never again,” never again would the world allow the mass killing of groups of people as the Jewish people experienced at the hands of the Nazis.

But we have. Here’s a recap …

Cambodia:  more than three million men, women, and children were exterminated by the communist government, Khmer Rouge, in the 1970s.

Rwanda:  500,000 to one million killed in 1994.

Uganda:  more than 200,000 killed in the 1980s.

Sudan:  2 million (and counting) killed starting in the 1980s.

Kurdistan:  tens of thousands Kurds killed by Saddam Hussein in the 1980s.

This list, unfortunately, merely scratches the surface of state-sanctioned mass murder since the U.N. General Assembly officially forbade it in 1951.

In other words, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, as the U.N. calls it, has been ineffective in the eyes of the millions who are dead due to genocide SINCE international law made it illegal.

This leads me back to Syria. I don’t trust Barack Obama’s integrity. I don’t trust his intentions. And perhaps even worse, I think he is inept. I find it hard to support a military strike with a man like this at the helm.

Strike three.

Obamacare and Benghazi are but two examples of his lack of integrity, his dishonest intentions, and his ineptness. I could produce more, far more, but these two suffice.

Some good conservatives think we should support the president on this new American adventure in the Middle East.

I am not one of them.