Unfortunately, folks like these are increasingly outnumbered by those human threats to national security known as the “victims” of Katrina…
“Hey, listen, back to this health care issue with HillaryCare, I told your guy there, I’ve been taking care of my wife for over 20 years through a health care nightmare, 70 surgeries, both legs amputated and $6 million. Never once have we received a dime from the federal government. What we’ve done is we’ve made choices in our lives that we would take only jobs that would cover her, we would make career choices that would cover her, everything was geared toward what we would do to make sure that her health care and our access to insurance was preeminent in our lives. Why am I being asked to subsidize those who won’t make those kinds of responsible decisions? ”
“You go back and look at Ronald Reagan, he said, ‘Government exists to protect us from each other. It oversteps when it tries to protect us from ourselves.’ You probably have seen my wife. Mrs. Bush had her open up the second night of the Republican National Convention, her name is Gracie, and we work overseas and provide artificial legs to amputees in developing countries. We’ve gone on to achieve what this country sets out to help individuals achieve, which is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, not life, liberty, and, hey, give us everything we want, get the shopping cart out and let’s go get it. It just rankles me that we are fostering a generation of people who will not take responsibility for their own lives.”
(…)
“Well, people assume that my wife is a liberal, because they assume that if you’re disabled and have all these things going on that obviously you’re a liberal, you’re disgruntled with the health care system. And when she stood up at the Republican National Convention (I think she’s the first disabled woman, by the way, or disabled person, to sing at any convention like this, disabled woman, Republican or Democrat), I think it shocked people because she’s not about taking handouts, she’s about, ‘Hey, look, I’m going to deal with the cards that I’ve been dealt with and live a productive life and live a life of meaning.’ It’s very frustrating to me to be in a position where we have to subsidize people who are not willing to make the kind of choices that she’s made.
“Now they’re looking at raising the poverty level up because we have so many people that are poor. Rush, we go to Africa. We put legs on people — we deal with people who — I saw a lady carry her husband in on her back into our clinic who was an amputee. We don’t understand poverty in this country.“