Black is white, up is down, and Republicans are
Medicare's defenders”
---Paul
Krugman
So summed up Paul Krugman in last Friday's New York
Times. (1). The Rescumlickan Party has gone 'round the bend,
from the simple dishonest of political 'spin', to the blatant
audacity of the boldface lie.
As Krugman notes, from the party that since Reagan has
despised Medicare, going so far as Newt Gingrich shutting down the
government in an attempt to force deep cuts in the program, we now
have a host of Rescumlickan office holders and office seekers
posturing as the champions of Medicare as well as certain provisions
in Obama's Affordable Health Care. Take “Josh Hawley, as
Missouri's attorney general, is part of that lawsuit against
Obamacare's regulation of insurers; but in his campaign for the
Senate, he's posing as a defender of Americans with pre-existing
conditions. Dean Heller, running for re-election to the Senate in
Nevada, voted for a bill that would have destroyed Obamacare,
including all protection for pre-existing conditions; but he's
misrepresenting himself just like Hawley is.
“And they aren't just lying about their own
position. They're also lying about their opponents'. Incredibly,
Republicans have spent the years since passage of the A.C.A. Accusing
Democrats of wanting to destroy Medicare.”(2)
Then there is Caesar Disgustus. In an opinion piece
published in USA Today, Disgustus claimed that he was defending
Obamacare's regulations preventing insurers from denying insurance or
inordinately raising rates if one has a pre-existing condition—say
diabetes, cancer, or heart disease. But Attorney General Jeff
Sessions has declined to defend the law against a suit filed by 20
Republican state attorney's general “trying to eliminate
protection for pre-existing conditions”.
Then to complete the politics as farce, Disgustus went
on to claim in the USA Today piece as well as he has at numerous
appearances 'on the stump', that the Democrats want to dismantle the
very program that they created and champion. Again, Disgustus didn't
invent this—he is incapable of inventing anything—this charge
goes back to when Obamacare was created. Obama took money from
Medicare to fund the health bill because it was money previously
earmarked under Medicare for health care. Obama was simply changing
the category in the service of administrative efficiency. But the
Scums misrepresented the transfers and claimed, falsely, the
Democrats had somehow become Republican. Oh yes, and for good
measure, he also charged that passage of 'Medicare For All' a
proposal pushed by Bernie Sanders, would reduce the United States to
Venezuela.
“As
fact-checker Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post put it, 'Almost
every sentence contained a misleading statement or a falsehood'.
Even the president of the United States isn't entitled to his own
facts.” (3)
It is said, by David Cay Johnston and other biographers
of tRUMP that he sleeps with a copy of Hitler's speeches on his
nightstand. He has learned, perhaps, only one lesson in his life; a
lesson that he applies to creating the myths and deceptions that have
served him—but virtually no one else around him—very well. If
you are going to lie, tell the Big Lie and tell it often. This is
also the lesson increasingly employed by his party of followers,
going back at least to Reagan's “government isn't the solution;
government is the problem”.
Belittling politics makes public service a lower
calling. It also makes it easier to float from fact to fiction; from
reality to some alternative universe in which Obama was born in
Kenya, subsidizing the rich will help the poor, and the Democrats are
against health care. It is the demeaning of political discourse and
the decay of the public forum. And it's in this fog of confusion that
the Scum are robbing us blind.
“An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh”
Impeach and Imprison
________________
- Krugman, Paul. “Goodbye, Political Spin, Hello Lies”. The New York Times. Friday, October 12, 2018. Page A23.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
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