When I was about 10 years old one of my female teachers heard a classmate call another little gump a “fuck.” After the teacher berated the curser she concluded: “Calling someone a wretch is the worst thing you can say about anybody.”


wretch
(noun)

1. A miserable, unfortunate, or unhappy person.

2. A person regarded as base, mean, or despicable: “a stony adversary, an inhuman wretch” (Shakespeare).

I can think of more precise names for Xavier Becerra, but wretch will suffice in polite company:


How to weigh the rights of the individual versus the authority of the government?

That question became trickier over the past 18 months. In an otherwise free country, governments forbade us from gathering to worship, instructed us not to congregate with our families, forced businesses to shut down, and even ordered us to wear masks while going about our business outdoors.

The contagion and lethality of the coronavirus stretched to its limits our notions of personal autonomy and duty to one’s neighbor.

Federal, state, and local governments took a central role in subsidizing the development, manufacture, and distribution of vaccines. Some governmental entities are even considering requiring the COVID-19 vaccine for certain purposes.

Again, there are tough questions involved here, questions that the public, the press, and our government officials need to debate and discuss in the coming weeks, months, and years.

Leave it to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra to take a tough and nuanced debate and make it simplistic, political, and stupid.

Becerra is, of course, unqualified for his Cabinet job. We believe nearly everyone in the Biden administration understands this. He was appointed to serve as a cultural warrior — a lieutenant to the vice president and top culture cop, Kamala Harris. Becerra's record as a lawmaker and as California’s attorney general was similar to Harris’s: He saw his job as prosecuting the people with “bad” politics, notably pro-lifers and Catholic nuns.

So when Becerra took to the airwaves last week to defend President Joe Biden’s bad wording about “door-to-door” vaccine administration, it was no surprise that he presented the administration's position in the worst possible light.

“We need to go to community by community, neighborhood by neighborhood, oftentimes, door to door — literally knocking on doors to get help to the remaining people protected from the virus,” Biden said last week.

This may have been simply poor wording by the president. His administration now claims the “we” wasn’t federal officials but health authorities and community leaders. And the “door-knocking” it promised supposedly didn’t involve interrogation or coercion but more of an offer: Hey, we have a vaccine right here. Would you like it?

But that wasn’t Becerra’s line.

Asked on CNN whether it’s “the government's business knowing who has or hasn't been vaccinated,” the cultural warrior turned Biden proxy replied, “Perhaps we should point out that the federal government has spent trillions of dollars to keep Americans alive during this pandemic. So it is absolutely the government's business. It is taxpayers' business if we have to continue to spend money to try to keep people from contracting COVID and helping reopen the economy.”

The answer was both stupid and clarifying.

It was stupid for all the reasons listed above. It was clarifying because it revealed one of the Left’s motivations in expanding federal spending: It wants more control over your life.

Every time Democrats say they want the government to pay for something, they mean they want the government to control that part of your life.

Becerra revealed that he and his ilk want the government to be your health insurer so that the government can micromanage your diet, your exercise, and probably your family size.

They want the federal government to fund education from pre-K through college so they can dictate the curriculum.

They want to pay the piper so that they can call the tune. Big government is the Trojan horse for an all-out culture war.

When Becerra was nominated, we called on Biden to withdraw him. Biden still claims to be a unifier, so he ought to fire Becerra and replace him with someone who knows health, not just culture war.

The wretched Xavier Becerra wants to control your life
by Washington Examiner, |
July 10, 2021 01:01 AM

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/o...trol-your-life