Shifting the Blame

I submit another reason to vote against our friends on the left, including their current presidential candidate John Kerry.

Those guys have a long-standing habit of shifting the blame for their own mistakes, failures, and disasters onto their victims and innocent bystanders. This behavior has been going on for more than 70 years.

(Sure, there are claims that Bush is shifting the blame for his own failures in Iraq to… someone else. But I’m not about to fault him for refusing to accept the blame for the actions of our enemies, especially when he told us forthrightly, repeatedly, from the very beginning that we would need much more time to destroy them than we have spent so far.)

A couple of recent examples should suffice.

Some time ago Congress passed a law providing free health care for some of our population. Some of the beneficiaries were damaging their own health and driving up the cost to be covered by the government by smoking cigarettes. Congress made no provision limiting the liability of the government in cases where the recipients of medical aid damaged their own health in this way.

According to the Clinton Administration, this was all somehow the fault of the tobacco companies – they were alleged to be responsible for costs incurred by a program passed by Congress with no input whatsoever from the tobacco companies. The administration proceeded to extort large sums of money, ostensibly to repay this cost, and the states ended up following suit.

More recently, Wal-Mart stands accused of transferring costs onto the government – because of welfare payments made to some of their lower-paid employees according to laws passed by Congress, again without input from Wal-Mart. Apparently, if you hire people that make less than the welfare threshold, it somehow becomes your fault that the government is giving them welfare payments, and never mind that they’d be getting even more welfare payments if you didn’t hire them. Extensive punitive action has not yet occured, but if this “logic” doesn’t soon get the ridicule it deserves, it’s only a matter of time.

This kind of outrageous dishonesty should not be rewarded at the ballot box.