Of course we can feel "responsible" to pay for medical care for a child or loved one. But that's not what Kleptocrat McCain meant. He meant it's "a responsibility" for the government to step in and pay for desired health care -- including elective sex-change surgery -- for someone who can't afford it.

Of course, given that hospitals generally allow you to pay off a bill at $10 per week forever, and that folks who claim they "can't afford" medical care often own color televisions wired for cable, cell phones, Gameboys, iPods, two cars and a motorboat, I suspect "can't afford it" usually means "had other priorities than saving for a rainy day" -- which was certainly a lot easier back before the income tax.

This is a role once played by private charity. Hospitals would take some part of the fees earned by delivering top-class care to paying customers and use it to provide second-class care to the poor at little or no charge -- the "charity patients" wouldn't get private rooms, stuff like that.

Kleptocrat McCain, supposedly a conservative, could have said, "That's the role of private charity; we need to repeal these down-the-road-to-socialism Medicare and Medicaid 'entitlements' now." But he did not.

As for Kleptocrat Obama, he could have said we have a "right to medical liberty." That would have been a wonderful thing for a candidate to say. Why didn't he?

The Bill of Rights is misnamed. It should be called the "Bill of Prohibitions." Think you have a right to a jury trail? Go down to the courthouse and demand a jury trial. They'll tell you can't have one because you're not charged with anything.

This so-called "right" is really a restriction on government. It means they're (supposedly) prohibited from killing you, locking you up, or seizing all your stuff unless they first give you a jury trial, at which they have to convince every one of a randomly selected dozen of your peers that you deserve such punishment.

True "rights" impose no obligation on anyone else. If we still had the "right to medical liberty" that Americans had before 1787 -- right up to 1913, actually -- any American could grow marijuana or cocaine for his own use or to sell to anyone we see fit; any practitioner could prescribe medications or treatments without government license. That's the way things should be, since the government is granted no power in the Constitution to infringe our medical liberties, which are guaranteed by the 9th Amendment even though otherwise "unenumerated."

But no current statist politician would tolerate "setting our people free" to that extent -- especially Fearless Drug Warriors McCain and Obama.

What Mr. Obama means is that if a doctor won't treat you or a pharmacist won't sell your medicines because you don't have any money since you spent it all on beer and lottery tickets, the government must put a gun to that person's head and require him to provide you with the "medical care" you desire, at which point the government cop, still holding the gun, will "strongly urge" the practitioner to settle for one-third of his usual fee, to be paid out of funds stolen from someone else.

This doctrine that '"health care is a right" is nothing new. It's the doctrine that drove all the best practitioners and innovators out of Eastern Europe between 1917 and 1939, reducing Soviet medicine to the point where the average male life expectancy is now 59, 17 years after those drunken boors supposedly "gave up socialism."

Know anyone who flies to Russia in search of quality medical care?

Kleptocrat Obama sighs and chuckles like it's silly for his opponents to point out the mentor at whose knee he grew up in Hawaii, the man to whom he refers in his book "Dreams from My Father" simply as "Frank," was in fact communist poet Frank Marshall Davis.

Sen. Obama sighs and chuckles like it's silly for his opponents to point out the "father" mentioned in "Dreams from My Father" was Nairobi collectivist Barack Hussein Obama Sr., who enthusiastically wrote, "There is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100 percent of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate with their income which is taxed."

Sen. Obama sighs and chuckles like it's silly for his opponents to focus on his close relationship with William Ayers, the unrepentant Weatherman co-founder who participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, the U.S. Capitol building in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972, according to Ayers' own 2001 book, "Fugitive Days." Ayers told Chicago magazine in 2001 he wishes he'd blown up more stuff.

And we haven't even gotten to the doctrines of Saul "The Red" Alinsky.

None of these connections prove Sen. Obama is a terrorist, his supporters sneer, rolling their eyes at the absurdity of the charge.

Of course Kleptocrat Obama is not a terrorist. He doesn't need to be. Instead, the velvet-voiced Obama is advancing the agenda of those four mentors by putting into play the Corleone Doctrine, that one man with a briefcase can steal more than a hundred guys with guns.

Kleptocrat Obama and his party hope to get to the same level of wealth redistribution favored by Lenin and Trostky, though they're smart enough to see this country can be led into that death pit far more smoothly by first leading to the polls enough gullible women and children trained to these doctrines by their union tutors in the youth propaganda camps with slogans such as "We're all in this together" and "The greedy rich must be made to pay their fair share," than by simply lining us up and shooting us.

The lunatics in the play "Marat/Sade" sang, "We want our rights, and we don't care how; We want a revolution now."

My personal Congresscritter, Shelley Berkley, told me last week, "My constituents are itching for a change, and they don't care what it is."

The best thing that ever happened to this crew was when the Right foolishly declared in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed of its own tyrannical weight, that "socialism was dead."

No. As the socialist python finishes swallowing our newly state-socialized banking industry, it has just conquered what was once the greatest free nation in the world, without a shot being fired.

Go ahead, tax the rich and their earnings. They will shift more of their capital to friendlier climes overseas and re-invest their profits there. You'll still be able to land a job ... if you're willing to emigrate to Indonesia.

Vin Suprynowicz (vsuprynowicz@reviewjournal.com) is the assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of "The Black Arrow." See www.VinSuprynowicz.com/.