By Greg Lewis

Ushering Rush Limbaugh's audience into 2010 this afternoon was regular fill-in Mark Steyn. He started off by letting us know that Rush would return to the microphone on Wednesday, and he read some of Rush's remarks following his health scare last week. Steyn mentioned that Rush said his experience in a Hawaii hospital showed that the American health care system “is working just fine.” Steyn echoed Rush's sentiment, explaining that what is wrong with government health care systems is that they allow bureaucrats to deny you treatment. (Note to Limbaugh and Steyn: Hawaii actually has “nearly-universal employer-mandated” health insurance.)

Then Steyn began to talk about a subject that would occupy him for most of the remainder of the hour: the recent missteps and controversies involving the Transportation Security Administration. Steyn said the “good news” about the TSA was that it started “profiling” people from 14 countries of interest. The “bad news” was the absolute mess that occurred yesterday at Newark Airport. Steyn criticized the TSA's “brain-dead lockdown procedures” Newark put in place yesterday and called them an “affront to liberty.”

Later in the hour, Steyn went on about the Christmas underwear bomber and the inefficiencies of the bureaucracies involved that allowed Abdulmutallab to fly even after his own father alerted U.S. authorities about his behavior.

The second hour began with a lengthy monologue based on the idea that if 2010 turns out to be like 2009, then “we're done for.” Steyn discussed how Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac represent everything that has gone wrong with U.S. capitalism. Steyn warned that if there was another year of this, plus health care reform and cap and trade, then the “dynamism” of the United States will be “slipping perilously close to the cliff” and the American dream will cease to exist. Steyn added that Rep. Barney Frank, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and President Obama are making the idea of upward progress impossible.

Staying on this theme, Steyn talked about how the United States was on the same path as Europe, creating social entitlements that would “doom” us in the long run. He also said that government health care in the United States would be worse than in Canada and the U.K. because we won't have the mitigating factor of the “equality of awfulness.”

After a commercial break, Steyn took a caller who compared the “decline” of the United States to the decline of the Roman Empire. Steyn agreed that just like in Rome, people find it hard to pick up on incremental decline. Steyn issued another warning: that Americans are choosing decline by following Obama, Pelosi, and Frank down this path.

Steyn concluded the hour discussing how he would reform health care: get rid of “third parties” (health insurers, the government) from health care and “restore” the free market in health care, a favorite argument of Steyn's we've previously countered.

The final hour (for the day -- Steyn will be back tomorrow!) commenced with our guest host explaining how health care reform could bring about the end of the United States as we know it:

STEYN: Centralized states always fail unless they are small and unless they are homogeneous. And if you look at the history of the last 20 years of the -- or so, the Soviet Union went belly up, Yugoslavia went belly up. Big countries -- big centralized nations always break up. And there was a book written on this theme a few years back that made the interesting point that if the United States had had as centralized a government as France, it would have broken up 200 years ago; that would be it. What we're trying to see now -- what we're seeing now is a federal government that is trying to impose as centralized a regime as France. And it's going to be disastrous.

Then Steyn discussed how Republicans should campaign for the midterm elections in November. Steyn asked if it would be enough for Republicans just to oppose Obama, or if they actually would have to articulate something more specific. Steyn appeared to favor the latter option, and said that the health care bill passed by the Senate “stands for” the government annexation of your body.

The hour proceeded from there with more vague complaints about “big government” and advocacy for a “free market” approach to health care. At one point, Steyn explained that the difference between American health care horror stories and those from Canada and the U.K. is that the latter are about the bureaucracies, while the American ones are about “nurses and doctors.” Then Steyn took a caller who thought the government should have some sort of mandated catastrophic coverage. Steyn disagreed and rehashed his free-market health care argument, causing the caller to hang up out of apparent frustration when Steyn asked him what the “market price” for a hernia was.

Zachary Pleat contributed to this edition of the Limbaugh Wire.

Highlights

Outrageous comments

STEYN: Centralized states always fail unless they are small and unless they are homogeneous. And if you look at the history of the last 20 years of the -- or so, the Soviet Union went belly up, Yugoslavia went belly up. Big countries -- big centralized nations always break up. And there was a book written on this theme a few years back that made the interesting point that if the United States had had as centralized a government as France, it would have broken up 200 years ago; that would be it. What we're trying to see now -- what we're seeing now is a federal government that is trying to impose as centralized a regime as France. And it's going to be disastrous. There is no reason at all why we should have one health -- a uniform health care -- federal health care plan from Maine to Hawaii.