House burns down, MSNBC blames Tea Party

[Patricia M. McBride]

The homeowner has paid the fee in the past and had simply forgotten to pay it. There were 3 dogs and a cat in the house that parished when the fireman refused to help. Guess we know where the fireman's hearts are.............................

• October 6th, 2010 8:12 am ET

When a house in Tennessee recently burned to the ground with the local fire department standing by refusing to put it out because the resident had failed to pay the annual $75 fee for their services, the left's most absurd partisan cheerleader in all of "journalism"--Keith Olbermann--warned his viewers (all six of them), with a straight face, that this was what Tea Party America would look like.

Usually, such an astonishingly stupid smear is so self-defeating that it requires no comment from the other side, but since the left's entire campaign strategy for Election 2010 admittedly revolves around misrepresenting the Tea Party movement's adherence to the Constitution as radical and out-of-touch, here are the two primary problems with Olbermann's bogus "argument."

1) Opposing illegal federal tyranny in no way means Tea Partiers oppose local governments collecting taxes for basic services, like fire protection, and being the ones who put out the fires.

2) Preferring free market solutions to government-run everything doesn't mean that even the most basic services must be privatized while anyone who can't/doesn't pay for something gets thrown under the bus.

Not that there is anything wrong with privatizing fire departments. It is true that government (which has endless resources and no reason to cut costs or to be efficient) pretty much always produces an inferior product to the free market.

But the obvious solution here (as pointed about by Jonah Goldberg)--whether the service is delivered by government or the private sector--is to make anyone who doesn't pay the $75 but still must be saved pay a much higher fee after the fact.

Like Alan Grayson (D-FL), Olbermann is apparently not even trying to make his bitter partisan smears make sense.

http://www.examiner.com/conservative-in-national/house-burns-down-m...