Lashing out at the town hall protesters, playing the race card, whining about angry white men and whispering ominously about right-wing militias is almost always a sign of liberalism’s weakness — a failure of the imagination.
The left, broadly speaking, has been attacking conservative talk radio and all it allegedly represents for the better part of 20 years now. When Bill Clinton needed a convenient villain, he attacked Rush Limbaugh. When Bush emerged victorious from the Florida recount, liberals concluded that what they really needed was their own version of Limbaugh. Last March, at the first sign of resistance from congressional Republicans, Obama immediately complained that the GOP was Limbaugh’s lap dog, and both the White House and much of the press corps went into anti-Limbaugh campaign mode.
It’s funny how these supposed champions of the Enlightenment can’t grasp that people can disagree with them for honest reasons. Instead, we simply must be Limbaugh’s automatons, which is to say racist, fascist thugs.
In addition to the slander, such complaints are monumentally, incandescently lame coming from a party that controls Washington. Indeed, according to liberals themselves, these evil-mongers are a tiny minority, a bunch of “Astro Turf” frauds. So why not ignore them and get on with the work you were elected to do?
Well, because they can’t — or won’t.
One of the reasons the term “Obama-care” has become a journalistic convention is that there is no bill. You can’t talk about Obama’s actual healthcare plan because there isn’t one. There are a bunch of competing bills, proposals, ideas swirling around the halls of Congress like flotsam in a sewer. As even Robert Reich, Clinton’s Labor secretary, recently conceded, the failure to put forward a concrete proposal allows opponents to pick from a menu of scary ideas and possibilities, all of which can be labeled Obama-care.
Please read the whole thing. It is devastating. Support for ObamaCare is genuinely eroding among voters the Democrats need desperately to stay in power. The independents are turning away in droves with some 2/3 now opposing the schemes.
That is why (as I have pointed out again and again) the Democrats are pulling out all the stops to demonize, denigrate, dismiss or destroy anyone who speaks out against the plan(s). That is why the left and the media are deliberately conflating unrelated items in an effort to “prove” the critics are wrong.
Obama has stated he wants a panel to decide who gets the hip or who gets the pills. Obama himself has stated he wants to cut funds (or produce “savings”) from Medicare and Medicaid to fund the new ObamaCare edifice to be built in his image. Obama has himself stated in the past that his ultimate goal is single-payer (socialized) health care.
These are not inventions of Obama’s critics. The attacks and misdirection are being used to distract people from those ugly truths bobbing around down there beneath the surface in the sewer that is Washington.
But it gets worse …
Republican Congressman Spencer Bachus told the Tuscaloosa News: “Social Security could face default within two years.”
The date that Social Security outlays exceed revenues has moved up due to the recession. It was supposed to be 2017.
For years, Progressives have been telling us that this date was meaningless because there is a file full of T-bills in West Virginia which were the IOUs the government has been issuing in lieu of spending the “excess” Social Security revenue as part of the budget.
Well surprise .. surprise .. the date is not meaningless.
This was mentioned in the past, but some were proud to do nothing (go to 0:54)
“One of the reasons the term “Obama-care” has become a journalistic convention is that there is no bill.”
An absolutely true statement. I am still hard pressed to figure out why it’s even being called “Obamacare” since he has had nothing to do with writing the proposed bills. He has not made any concrete proposals or offered any plan. As he did with the Spendulous Package he simply told Congress, “I want a Health Care Reform Bill” on my desk by mid-August. He did not dictate a single provision that it should contain nor any procedures for implimentation. He made a few vague suggestions as to what he’d like to see in the bill like some kind of public option to compete with private insurance and some kind of prohibition to keep insurance companies from denying coverage for pre-existing conditions or canceling people when they become ill – all ideas designed to destroy the private health care insurance industry – hardly enough ideas to fill over 1000 pages of the proposed House bill. Basically what we have seen since January is that Obama governs by delegation. He floats a few vague ideas and tells everyone else to do all the work while he runs around continuing to campaign – I suspect because it’s the only thing he knows how to actually do.