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realthogRepublican friends keep telling me that, when it comes to the great debate over healthcare reform, I should regard extremist loons like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Chuck Grassley, Michelle Bachmann, Newsmax, WorldNetDaily, Town Hall, Steven Anderson, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, Williiam Kristol, the Washington Times, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the Washington Post editorial page, Jonah Goldberg, Andrew "Not So" Breitbart . . . and, oh, maybe a few billion other neocon commentators as just the ephemera that they should be.
Instead, I should focus on having a dialogue with all those moderate Republicans there are around.
The official GOP rather than the fruitbats, in other words.
Well, what do we have here but a brand spanky new discussion document released by the Republican National Committee, under the imprimatur of chairman Michael Steele, called 2009 Future of American Health Survey. One of its questions reads as follows:
It has been suggested that the government could use voter registration to determine a person's political affiliation, prompting fears that GOP voters might be discriminated against for medical treatment in a Democrat-imposed health care rationing system. Does this possibility concern you?
A friend, on reading this, was so incensed that he remarked: "Now that they bring it up, I'm all for it."
In a way I don't blame him. There has never been the remotest suggestion anywhere before this dishonest document of any such thing. The RNC has invented a lie and tossed it into the stockpot in the hope of frightening gullible, undereducated people.
And my friend's point is obviously a larger one. What should have been a serious debate about a monumentally serious issue -- every year 18,000 people, or three 9/11s, die unnecessarily because they slip through the cracks of the current system, so it's a problem that anyone sane would regard as worth addressing -- has been dragged relentlessly into the gutter of fallacy, smear, hysterical bunkum, racist threats of violence and general halfwitted, scaremongering Jabberwocky by one side of the argument, and by one side only. The quote above doesn't come from any of the self-designated mad-barking-wolverine outliers of the right but from the GOP's very own establishment: it's a whopper of enormous proportions, and the people who issued it know it to be so. They are not, shall we say, guilty of a mere misunderstanding.
What depresses me most is that all those "reasonable" right-of-centre friends of mine, when asked to distance themselves from such outright scaremongering and dishonesty, start changing the subject.
Which makes them, I reckon, every bit as guilty.
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Date: 2009-09-02 10:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-02 05:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-02 09:18 pm (UTC)"I guess this is what you get when you build a society on a basis of Calvinist Puritan cruelty..."
I think that also to blame is the shockingly substandard education people receive in many parts of the US. (There's a useful analysis recently published at http://www.springerlink.com/content/9u0610162rn51432/fulltext.html .) Great tracts of the US population have never learnt the art of logical thinking; hence stuff that is instantly recognizable as absolute bollocks by (for example) most of the folks who read this LJ, simply on the grounds that it clashes with established reality and/or rationality, can be accepted without question by people who have no tools available to evaluate it.
Hence (outside the political field) all the widely believed rubbish in the US about NASA faking the moon landings, the gubmint using unknown supertechnology to bring down the Twin Towers, the Face on Mars, creationism and geocentrism, Xtian fundamentalism . . . the list is pretty well endless. Of course, other nations suffer these cancers as well; but it seems nowhere (at least among the developed nations) as widespread as in the US, and not all together.
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Date: 2009-09-03 10:08 am (UTC)We have out share of such things, of course -- Diana Conspiracy theorists, Daily Fail readers....
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Date: 2009-09-03 04:52 pm (UTC)"Daily Fail readers...."
Them's the worst, in my experience. There was one of them commenting on this LJ a few posts back claiming the Fail wasn't a right-wing rag. Yes! A whole new category of Deniers!
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Date: 2009-09-02 04:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-02 09:20 pm (UTC)"What, exactly, is their problem, anyway?"
An inability to distinguish fact from fiction, and to realize that the distinction matters.
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Date: 2009-09-02 04:16 pm (UTC)I keep hearing the same thing, and you're right. There are lunatics running the GOP, and people who want to think of themselves as Republicans because they're comfortable identifying with a group keep making excuses for them, and I'm done.
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Date: 2009-09-02 09:23 pm (UTC)"people who want to think of themselves as Republicans because they're comfortable identifying with a group"
They seem to regard their support for the GOP as being something akin to being a fan of a particular football team. A lot of them, as soon as you start querying their rationale for supporting the GOP, either (a) mutter that they're not really very political or (b) start shouting extremely loudly and volubly, as if the volume level somehow makes the most godawful tripe truer than it might otherwise be.
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Date: 2009-09-03 02:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-03 04:55 pm (UTC)Or they say they're "not a fan of the two-party system" as though they've somehow been forced to align themselves with liars and thieves.
Very true -- I'd missed that one. Or there's "Well, there are extremist crazies in every political party" and then a deathly silence when you ask them to name a Dem equivalent . . .
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Date: 2009-09-02 05:20 pm (UTC)Rabid fear mongers all, I say. As for Sarah Palin, didn't her ex-son-in-law-to-be quote her as saying, "I wanna take the money and run"? I realize I am quoting out of context here, but, well . . .
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Date: 2009-09-02 09:26 pm (UTC)didn't her ex-son-in-law-to-be quote her as saying, "I wanna take the money and run"?
Well, one could hardly accept him as the most objective of reporters, could one? It does sort of fit in with some of the other stuff that's been coming out just over the past few weeks, though. I gather even some of the neocons and the fundies are noticing her habit of lying as a first resort.
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Date: 2009-09-02 06:37 pm (UTC)ME, MY FAMILY -- everyone else is unworthy and the enemy.
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Date: 2009-09-02 09:33 pm (UTC)It does seem like that sometimes, doesn't it?
By the way, who's the gorgeous babe in your new icon?
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Date: 2009-09-02 07:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-02 07:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-02 09:31 pm (UTC)At least one of them turned Democrat because he no longer was comfortable in the Republican party, probably because they treated him like a leper.
If you mean Arlen Spector, it was because the local GOPers were planning to put up against him in the next primary a "real" Republican -- full of the usual hatred, dishonesty, smear and ill-disguised racism, the works -- and he realized he was very likely to lose to this buffoon. He's gambling that personal loyalty will persuade enough voters to elect him at the actual election, whatever his party, even though he'd lose a GOP primary.
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Date: 2009-09-02 09:27 pm (UTC)What moderate Republicans? All three of them?
Ha!