The American Spectator

p> THE LEAST AMONG US br> Re: Jeffrey Lord’s Night of the Brain-Dead Congressmen : /p>

Jeffrey Lord’s “Night of the Brain-Dead Congressmen” is an entertainingly written piece that unfortunately misleads on a key point.

Congressmen Stark and Waxman and CMS have no authority to “restrict the use” of ESA’s. What they are doing is to restrict the grounds on which Medicare will pay for their use.

So what’s at issue here is not whether ESA’s can be prescribed, but whether taxpayers will be coerced into paying for them under the Medicare program.

p>Most conservatives at least give lip service to the idea of getting Medicare and Medicaid spending under control. Let’s face the fact that this will require that some services, to some patients, will have to be curtailed. br> — Bob Danielson /p> p> Mr. Lord proposes that the two Congressmen in his article, Reps. Stark and Waxman, are brain dead. I can probably accept that characterization, but I have a serious query for Mr. Lord, or anyone else out there in the blogosphere. If these Congressmen are brain dead, what does that say for the majority of the voters in those districts that have been re-electing them over and over and over again? Are those voters brain dead, or are they even farther gone than that? And what about Pelosi, and young Kennedy, and Maxine Waters, and at least two dozen more just in the U. S. House of Representatives alone? And what about the voters in those districts that keep electing them? Now let us aggregate the U. S. Senators that suffer the same malady, along with their voters. Keep in mind that in each case the majority of voters in each of these jurisdictions, of their own free will, elected these people. Now what should we glean from this regarding a very significant plurality of the American electorate? I submit that that is a truly scary thought this All Hallows Eve. br> —