Hypocrisy Hits A Brick Wall, Pt. Deux

Our rugged individualist may not lose his sight after all:

The Fort Mill, S.C., Republican who went public Tuesday with his plea for help paying for sight-saving surgery had raised almost $12,000 by Wednesday evening – most of it from self-described liberals and Affordable Care Act supporters saying they hope he’s learned a lesson.

That’s enough to ensure he can get the treatment he needs, said Dr. Andrew Antoszyk, an eye surgeon with Charlotte Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat Associates. After reading Luis Lang’s story in the Observer on Wednesday, Antoszyk said he’d work with Lang and with Novant Health to give him the care at reduced cost.

Wow, that’s nice.  People who this man has been politically opposed to forever kicked in to help, even after he kicked away the hand of the president who tried to help him in the first place.  Great story.  Looks like he got some free advice along with the donations:

“No one should be without medical (care) even if they have not made their own best choices in life,” wrote Steve Kadel, who gave $10. “The party of personal responsibility (has) left you hanging on your own consequences. Progressives like me think that’s just cruel. Be well.”

So, did our Luis learn anything?

“It turned into a political thing,” Lang said. “That wasn’t my intention when I reached out. This is ridiculous.”

So has he learned anything from this experience?

“I did,” he said.

“I hold the whole government responsible for this, state and federal,” he said. Greed from medical providers and the government also add to the flaws in the system, Lang said.

Does he hold himself responsible? There was a short pause.

“I do hold myself partly responsible because of the view that I had. I should have taken better care of my sugar,” he said. “Yeah, I should have had insurance.”

He noted that some donors have asked what he thinks of the fact that liberals, rather than conservatives, are helping him.

“I look at a person as a person,” he said. “People are acting from the heart, just like I have done in the past.”

Mostly, he says, he’s overwhelmed by the attention his story has gotten.

“The Charlotte Observer should give me a free subscription now,” he quipped.

Well, for a conservative, that wasn’t bad. Took SOME personal responsibility, and let’s face it, he’d rather gnaw his own legs off ahead of the inevitable amputation rather than admit liberals were right, so there you go.

He’ll live to fight (and vote against his own interests, and ours, repeatedly) another day.

Yaayyy…

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Hypocrisy Hits A Brick Wall

   The Charlotte Observer reports on the case of a rugged individualist that is finding out the hard way that choices have consequences:

Lang is a self-employed handyman who works with banks and the federal government on maintaining foreclosed properties. He has done well enough that his wife, Mary, hasn’t had to work. They live in a 3,300-square-foot home in the Legacy Park subdivision valued at more than $300,000.

But he has never bought insurance. Instead, he says, he prided himself on paying his own medical bills.

That worked while he and his wife were relatively healthy. But after 10 days of an unrelenting headache, Lang went to the emergency room on Feb. 25. He says he was told he’d suffered several mini-strokes. He ran up $9,000 in bills and exhausted his savings. Meanwhile, his vision worsened and he can’t work, he says.

Sounds like he’s one of the people the ACA was created to help- waitaminute…

Lang, a Republican, says he knew the act required him to get coverage but he chose not to do so. But he thought help would be available in an emergency.

Okay, principled opposition (up to the point where HE needed help) it is then…go on…

He and his wife blame President Obama and Congressional Democrats for passing a complex and flawed bill.

“(My husband) should be at the front of the line because he doesn’t work and because he has medical issues,” Mary Lang said last week. “We call it the Not Fair Health Care Act.”

What the?  Are you SERIOUS?

The ACA was created specifically to help people like you, you dunce.

YOU made the decision to refuse to take part, and in voting for GOP leadership at the state and federal level, voted to DENY those options to everyone in your state.

Now that that decision has bitten you in the hind quarters, you think you deserve SPECIAL treatment?

If you had happened to a single black female fast-food worker, many of your Tea Party brethren would be excoriating you, perhaps even cheering figuratively or literally, as you slowly went blind.

I won’t do that, and based on recent responses to your GoFundMe page, many others on the left won’t either.

Let me speak plainly. I do hope that you get the help you need to keep from going blind.

I also hope you manage to LEARN something from this.

Specifically, you need a better governor, better legislators, and a better SCOTUS Chief Justice.

 

UPDATE: Some notes from a Balloon Juice thread made sense of the “front of the line” quote:

Cacti says:

      May 12, 2015 at 12:47 pm

@Frankensteinbeck:

This is not hypocricy. ‘Personal responsibility’ means ‘niggers deserve what they get.’ I know this is hard to swallow for most people. You don’t want to believe in code words, because in most situations they’re so unlikely. Let me tell you a story I hope will convince you.

Recently, Ron Paul came up in a thread here and I followed a link to an excerpt from his newsletter. You know, the ones so blatantly racist he’s now denying he wrote? This one was written in the wake of the Rodney King riots, about how you have to steel yourself to kill blacks when they come for you.

It read like a laundry list of current conservative talking points. Personal responsibility, dependency on the welfare state, everything that is sometimes referred to as a dog whistle. In particular, I was impressed by their use of ‘inner city youth’. Even the phrasing about shooting black people was standard ‘stand your ground’ type arguments.

The only difference was they tacked on ‘because black people are animals.’

Three quarters of modern Republican positions and motivations are straight racism, with a paper-thin mask to keep them from being booed and called names in public. This guy is mad that the government was giving to blacks what should rightly go to him.

QFT

Mr. and Mrs. Lang are cheesed off that all of the blacks and browns don’t have to dutifully take their spots at the back of the bus, now that Mr. Lang needs a seat.

Damn.