Please take a moment to read the editorial Time for leadership on health reform.
Go ahead, I'll wait.
Done? Good, let's deconstruct.
The president's error - which has seriously damaged the cause of health care reform - came in ceding responsibility to a Congress that has proven itself consistently incapable of tackling difficult issues.
An interesting observation and one that Rush Limbaugh has been repeating daily: Obama has no health care plan. He has a campaign slogan and he’s good at attacking straw men, but the only “plans” are found in proposed legislation. The one furthest along is the House plan HR 3200 which is over 1000 pages long.
Health care reform was never going to be easy, but the White House's retreat is making it more difficult. In the absence of leadership from President Barack Obama, fear and anger - some of it real, some of it cynical and manufactured - rushed into the void.
Really? You have to give the Virginian Pilot editors credit for belaboring the obvious.
Taking over one-sixth of the nation’s economy was never going to be easy? But it had to be done within the first six months of this administration? Taking responsibility for the health care of 300 million Americans should be done in the virtual twinkling of an eye? The permanent transformation of the role of government to the people in the most intimate parts of their lives needed to be rushed so that Obama could sign a bill by the August recess?
Help me Oh-be-Won Obama, you're my only hope.
And that fear and anger; what part of it is cynical and manufactured? The part that said that if we did not pass this legislation NOW, the economy would collapse? The part that said that that doctors were amputating your feet to make $50,000?
There's no question that the violent backlash has been exacerbated by political opportunists, by anti-tax activists, by a health care industry that sees its riches threatened. Anyone who doubts the organization behind the opposition hasn't been paying attention to modern politics.
And here emerges the ever-ready boogie man of every member of the MSM, the Evil Industrialists. Drag out and pillory the straw villain du-jour: Big Tobacco, Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Coal. Hey guys, how about Big Media? You know, the guys who are destroying the planet by distributing waste paper that will choke landfills wrapped in those bad plastic bags that you love to demonize via your monopoly in one-newspaper towns? But I digress.
So when reality pokes its head in, let’s see who those EEEEVILLLL corporations are lined up with. Why none other than Oh-be-Won Obama who has them all collected in the “Death (to granny) Star.” While the foam flecked idiots on the Pilot’s editorial board were calling for help, they neglected to notice that Big Pharma, Big Medicine (AMA), Big PR Firms (Obama aide Axlerod), Big Old People (AARP), Big Business, Big Hospitals, and Big Labor were contributing about $25 million in political payoffs and protection money to Team Obama. To what end? To run a gigantic sales campaign against the average Americans who are communicating via the Internet and volunteering to show up at town hall meetings for the privilege of being smeared by the media as unruly mobs and Nazis, to being beaten to a pulp by union goons, and by the Democrats in Congress as un-American as they register their protest to this power grab by Big Government and the Left.
Even so, the organic worries have been undeniably real. Instead of acknowledging and doing their best to assuage those fears, supporters of reform have too often dismissed opponents as irrational, as unwitting tools of talk radio, the anti-government cabal and the insurance industry.
Take a bow, Virginian Pilot, you were right there smearing and vilifying with the best of them. But maybe the reaction from your customers made you realize that there is a limit to how much you can insult them.
And that contempt has helped turn what might have begun as mere apprehension into a barely controlled rage.
But the temptation to take a late hit is just too great, isn’t it? So the protestors are not upset, they’re not angry, they are barely controlling their “rage.” That’s what a villainous mob exhibits: rage. How very clever.
Some town halls have been dominated by Medicare recipients railing against government health care, by men and women using the opportunity to express disgust with every change in the past 40 years.
Maybe they have learned that – to save money – their reimbursement may be cut. And fewer doctors will be willing to take them on as patients. Maybe they have experienced the long waits, the hurried exams, the quality of care that government underpaid doctors provide. Maybe they understand that when Big Government takes over it shoulders everyone else aside.
Ridiculous rumors about what the health reform bills contain - death panels, taxpayer-funded abortion, mandated euthanasia - have spread to the point that there's no recalling them, no matter how wrong they are.
This is a wonderful illustration of exactly why the MSM and Team Obama have lost credibility: take the concern that people express, hold it up, and laugh at it. Ridicule the people for their beliefs. Don’t explain, don’t discuss, just ridicule. The reason for the ridicule is that the facts are not on their side. The House bill may not have establish groups called “death panels” (that would be politically insane) but it does have provisions for adminsitratiors and boards that determine the kind of care that can be provided. And the cost of the care does enter into the equation. So it’s inevitable that some people who are ill will be denied the treatment that they want because they are too old or too sick. And the decision will not be theirs, or their relatives or the doctor treating them or the hospital they are in … it will be the Government. Call the panels what you will, but to some it will be a “death panel” from whose decision there is no reprieve.
Abortion is discussed here.
Instigators carry loaded guns to presidential events,
“Instigators?” In New Hampshire, as in Virginia, guns can be carried without a permit if they are carried openly. Gun rights activists have made a show of exercising their rights right here in Norfolk, to the dismay of the Virginian Pilot for whom the constitutional right to keep and bear arms is one of those silly anachronisms that should be written out of the constitution by the courts. But it’s a great way of branding people who protest ever bigger and more intrusive government as nuts.
… tote veiled threats on posterboard and wonder what people are worried about.
Ah, yes, those ever-useful “veiled threats” on deadly posterboard. What would the MSM do without posterboard veiled threats, the un-sourced quote and “experts say.”
Swastikas and Nazi salutes are deployed at town halls without anyone understanding the irony or acknowledging the offense.
Let’s get this put to bed. Nancy Pelosi started this swastika smear, labelling her opponents Nazis. And the Virginian Pilot continues the smear without an ounce of remorse or self-reflection. The Nazis did have a great national health care system, didn’t you know? So who’s the Nazi?
This national conversation would never have been easy; health care is far too complex for simple solutions. Unfortunately, though, nobody tried. Certainly not Congress, and until just this week, not the president.
This is bullshit on stilts. Until the people began to protest and protest loudly, there was no “national conversation” on health care. There was just the bald assertion – by the Left and its media megaphones - that the present health care system was broken and what was needed was a government take-over. The only discussing was about the details and those discussions were held well away from the great unwashed, the people who were going to be the guinea pigs in this latest adventure of Big Government.
And Oh-be-Won Obama wanted this to be the crowning achievement of his first six months in office so he gave the marching orders to congress to create the legislation while he made speeches telling the American people that if the Government did not take over health care, and do it now, America faced a financial catastrophe. It all began to sound the same:
If we did not pass the stimulus bill NOW America faced financial catastrophe, and unemployment would exceed 8% …
If we did not take over GM and Chrysler now and turn them over to the UAW America faced financial catastrophe …
If the government did not take over AIG and run the banks America faced financial catastrophe ….
America expects its political loudmouths to avoid actual debate;
Look in the mirror, Virginian Pilot loudmouths. You were once the loudest mouths around, but the little people, the ones who paid your bills but who you looked down on, spit on editorially are now getting a little louder and you hate, hate, hate it. And as we note, you don’t debate … You avoid it by vilifying and ridiculing.
But the nation elects people to lead, to find the best solutions and to work tirelessly to implement them. Instead, on health care, President Obama essentially delegated the work to people incapable of providing the necessary leadership.
Help me Oh-be-Won Obama you’re my only hope!
Don’t you people realize that you elected a pretty boy in an empty suit? What did he run on? “Hope-N-change.” “I’m not George Bush.” He ran against a field full of straw men and you cheered him on. He was as scripted as a Hollywood movie and could not talk coherently without his TelePrompTer. When he went off script he explained to a woman that he would have denied her elderly mother a pacemaker, telling her that mom should take a pill. He never had to explain his 20 years with Jeremiah “God damn America” Wright who attributed aids to a government plot to destroy black people and spewed anti-Semitism from the pulpit.
Community organizers don’t actually do anything except organize others to do the work. So you got what you asked for, and now you’re stuck with him.
The resulting 1,000-page bill is almost a parody of congressional dysfunction, back-scratching and special-interest massaging. Although it contains none of the provisions opponents are screaming about, it remains an overly complicated legislative disaster that seems certain to make some things worse.
A lie wrapped inside an insight. But we have discussed this lie before. Let’s talk about a bigger point. This bill, which the editors at the Virginian Pilot call a complicated legislative disaster, would have been signed into law by Barack Obama to the acclaim of the media in the largest signing ceremony in recorded history… if it had passed in its present form. Is there any doubt about that? Does anyone anywhere dispute that? The Pilots’ editors were demanding a bill, any bill and telling opponents to shut up and sit down. Barack Obama wanted a bill, any bill; so that he could claim he reformed health care. The fact that the bill would have been a disaster for the American people is simply not important. The success of Oh-be-Won Obama is the issue. It’s all about HIM.
Health care reform should begin with two simple goals: Increasing access and decreasing costs. Beyond that, everything else should be subject to reconsideration. It's time to renew this debate, in maturity and in good faith.
No. First, health care reform should be about improving health care for all Americans. Second, discussions in good faith will not take place on the pages of the Virginian Pilot. That has been effectively demonstrated, so shut up and sit down (How does it feel?)
Specious arguments for and against reform must be countered, not with thuggery or contempt, but with reason and calm. Reform is too important to be abandoned because we fear change, because the mob shouts, because political opportunists lie, or because it is opposed by moneyed interests.
Need more proof of the Pilot’s ability to engage in name calling and denigration of its opponents? Dragging in the "special interests" again when the funny/sad part of this fiasco is that the special interests appear to funding the Obama campaign. If the national discussion on health care ever takes place, one place it will not appear is on the pages of the Virginian Pilot. It never ends.
Someone must lead this effort to reform the nation's health care system, as surely as leaders before convinced us of the wisdom of war, of the New Deal, of Social Security, of civil rights, of Medicare. That is why we elect a president.
1 comment:
Sounds pretty fishy to me. This one will surely make the flag@whitehouse.gov site.
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