emergency law A nifty term used by Egyptian leaders that gives the police and military the right to strip a citizen of their human rights at any time the government sees fit. That includes unlawful arrest and imprisonment, as well as silencing opposition.
According to a new book “100 Voices: An Oral History of Ayn Rand,” by Scott McConnell, late in her life, Ayn Rand, the tea partyists’ anti-government patron saint, went on the government dole. That’s right, when the going got tough, Rand, the “every man, woman and child for him or herself” objectivist, author of “Atlas Shrugged,” the cartoonish libertarian bible that is the second-best selling book in the world, availed herself of good ol’ red, white and blue American socialism.
According to McConnell, who is the founder of the media department at the Ayn Rand Institute, a social worker he interviewed had helped Rand, who was known to the government as Mrs. Frank (Ann) O’Connor, and her husband sign up for government benefits in 1974, when Rand, a lifelong, two-packs-a-day smoker, was 69 years old and going broke from the costs of treating her lung cancer.
A freedom of information request confirmed that Ayn Rand, or Ann O’Connor, received thousands in benefits before she died eight years later. Efforts to confirm that Rand received Medicare payments were inconclusive, but, technically, Medicare is a part of the Social Security system so it is more likely than not that she did.
Here, according to the oral history, is how Rand justified her late-life conversion to socialism:
You’ve got to feel sorry for poor Dennis Kucinich.
All he wanted was a chicken wrap sandwich.
But when he took a bite, forsooth!
He hit an olive pit, cracked a tooth!
So he’s suing the cafeteria, ain’t that a bitch?
From Trump’s “stolen election” lies, we can’t get no relief,
He carps on about stolen votes, but he never names the thief.
Somebody needs to tell this guy
Americans aren’t buying his lies,
And that he’s turned us into the United States of Disbelief.
