A Rose By Any Other Name...

I caught a brief press conference this morning where President Obama officially welcomed Arlen Specter into the Democrat party.  He also took a moment to speak about the swine flu epidemic going around.  Something that stuck out to me was the fact that he carefully and consistently called it the "N1H1 flu" rather than the "swine flu".  I thought that was a bit odd, but Michelle Malkin's website provides the reasoning behind that apparently significant change:

The Obama administration—in keeping true with their penchant for changing the names of things — is trying to stop using the word "swine" in swine flu

The official line is that this is hurting the pork industry.  Okay, I can get on board with helping out the pig farming industry, but I can't help but admit that I didn't think twice about eating ham for breakfast this morning, nor will I think twice about it tomorrow or any other day in the future.  The stupid part of all this is that they apparently think that simply renaming a problem will make it go away.  It's typical liberalism - redefining words to be convenient for their current and temporary purposes.

The problem is, of course, that just renaming a thing doesn't change the thing one bit.  An overseas contingency operation will be just as deadly to America as a terrorist attack, and the swine flu will make people just as sick (i.e. not very) as the N1H1 flu.  Just ignore the substance of the issue.

The other thing that jumped out of the press conference was the utter silliness of the precautions Obama delivered with complete sincerity:

"Keep your hands washed. Cover your mouth when you cough," said Mr. Obama. "Stay home from work if you are sick. Keep your children home from school if they are sick."

Is anyone else seeing that these are some of the most brain-dead obvious common sense things that everyone should do every day anyway?  We all know what it means when health experts say we should wash our hands...that means after you go to the bathroom.  If you're so filthy and disgusting that you don't do that, you deserve to catch whatever you catch.  But, the people around you do not, so get a clue and stop being nasty.  Same goes with coughing, and with staying home when you're sick.  DUH!!!

Here's the point: Obama is substituting his own leadership for plain old common sense.  He's telling us that we're too stupid to figure these things out for ourselves, so we need to listen to him instead.  He's continuing to make as many people as dependent upon the federal government (i.e. him) as possible.  And remember the saying: a government big enough to give you everything you need is a government big enough to take away everything you have.  Even your common sense.

There's my two cents.