health care: the great and civilized debate continues

[realthog]

Republican 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.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I find this entire debate incomprehensible. But I guess this is what you get when you build a society on a basis of Calvinist Puritan cruelty...

[daisytells.livejournal.com]

The more I read of their propaganda, the more convinced I am that fools and lunatics, not to mention just plain evildoers, rule the GOP. What, exactly, is their problem, anyway?

[melindadansky.livejournal.com]

Instead, I should focus on having a dialogue with all those moderate Republicans there are around.

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.

[sarcobatus.livejournal.com]

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 . . .

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 . . .

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

It's the foundation of the Family Values movement.

ME, MY FAMILY -- everyone else is unworthy and the enemy.

[daisytells.livejournal.com]

What moderate Republicans? All three of them?