Ever since the threat of health care reform energized the American people to talk up, the MSM has been telling us to sit down and shut up. Of course to sit down and talk in dulcet and respectful tones means that the MSM can ignore you, but that's the idea, isn't it?
According to the graduates of
Close-Cover-Before-Striking School of Journalism and Basic English, the role of the public is to vote Democrat, repeat MSM talking points and pay more taxes. When that same public dares express ideas of its own it is labeled an “unruly mob” unless it happens to be a Left Wing unruly mob in which case it morphs into a group of concerned citizens speaking truth to power.
In
Still 'Crazy' -- And Proud of It, P.J. takes on not just the Washington Post but the entire lemming-like herd of "independent thinkers" who all think alike – with fierce independence - about nationalizing health care.
Us right-wing nuts sure is scary! That's the message from the Washington Post. To put this in language a conservative would understand, the fourth estate has been alarmed once again by the Burkean proclivities of our nation's citizens. The Post is in a panic about (to use its own descriptive terms) "birthers," "anti-tax tea-partiers," and "town hall hecklers."
Accompanying the Perlstein screed was a sidebar by Alec MacGillis explaining how "health care reform is not that hard to understand, and those who tell you otherwise most likely have an ulterior motive."
Health care reform is so simple it takes bills in excess of 1000 pages of legalese which its principal backers in Congress proudly tell us they have not read and can’t understand – but “trust us” it’s for the good.
All you town hall hecklers, calm down and go home. Never mind that Alec MacGillis is a rat, something that's evident by the sixth sentence of his piece: "Fixing [health care] could be very simple: a single-payer system." And never mind that his writing is more than uninformative, it is informationally subtractive. Read him and you'll know less than you know now about what the government is going to do to you and your doctor. Read him carefully and you'll know nothing.
And ideas like this never have any negative consequences like the exodus of Canadians needing health care who cross the border to get it rather than waiting months or years - or forever - for treatment.
P.J is known for his sense of humor and recounts another story of rationing and shortages:
But calm down and go home, because the Washington Post said so. This is exactly the joke that used to be told in the Soviet Union. An old guy's wife tells him to go to the butcher shop and get some meat. He goes to the butcher shop and stands in line for hours. Finally the butcher says, "We're out of meat." The old guy blows his top. He yells, "I am a worker! I am a proletarian! I am a veteran of the Great Patriotic War! I have fought for socialism all my life, and now you tell me you're out of meat! What kind of a system is this?! You are fools! You are thieves! . . . " A big man in a trench coat comes up to the old guy and says, "Comrade, Comrade, not so loud. In the old days you know what they would do if you said such things." The big man in the trench coat makes a pistol motion with his hand. He says to the old guy, "Calm down and go home." The old guy shrugs and leaves. He comes back empty-handed, and his wife says, "What's the matter, are they out of meat?" "Worse than that," says the old guy, "they're out of bullets."
What's interesting and informative is that here in Virginia, Thomas Jefferson is a God to the Left. A quote by Jefferson is supposed to end all discussion, until ...
Perlstein, for all the highness of his dudgeon, doesn't catch the nuts saying anything very nutty. The closest he gets to a lunatic quote is from a "libertarian" wearing a holstered pistol who declares that the "tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of tyrants and patriots." And those are the words of lefty icon Thomas Jefferson.
Now all of a sudden a quote by Jefferson is the mark of a deranged madman! How I wish the MSM would make up what passes for their minds.
He ends:
Why is the paper intimidated by dissent that's tame even by Adlai Stevenson standards? ... No doubt it's always alarming to the know-it-alls when ordinary people decide they'd like some say in ordinary life, when regular folk tell the know-it-alls to take their fishwrap and go blog themselves.
I'll tell you why. People who work for the paper don't do it for the money - or the job security - they do it for the power and, like the money and the job security, the power is slipping away.
Which is a nice segue into a story in the
Virginian Pilot about Senator Webb. It appears that Webb’s support for the health care plans currently being rammed through congress may be waning. It could be the letters and e-mails he has been receiving. He is not willing to meet with his constituents in “town-hall” style meetings but will meet with the friendly editors at the Virginian Pilot and in closed meetings with members of the Chamber of Commerce.
But outside of a friendly audience of supportive editors and business leaders who are too polite to raise their voices, here is Jim Webb’s view of the rest of his constituents:
“ I don't need to go to a town hall meeting and have a thousand people screaming
to say that we've been able to listen to them."
Jim Webb, a man of the people …. Not! It reminds me of the threat that Obama made to bankers when he told them that he was the only thing between them and the pitchforks. He had in mind the head-breakers from the unions and ACORN. Webb and Democrats are afraid of grandmothers and grandfathers in sneakers and promotional polo shirts, and that’s what democracy’s all about.
Jim Webb picked up some medals in Viet Nam but he's afraid to meet the voters face to face.
