Josh Marshall introduces the hammer to the nail:
The health care debate is now being driven by a perverse nonsense feedback loop in which the Palin/Limbaugh crowd says all sorts of completely insane lies, gets a lot of… how shall we put it, impressionable people totally jacked up over a bunch of complete nonsense, and then Fox brings one of them, Mike Sola, on the air to basically lose his mind on camera.
And then Mike becomes evidence of popular fear, terror, outrage at the president's plan. Which becomes more grist.
I don't think the Democrats have lost the message war because I see no evidence that even close to a majority of Americans believe completely preposterous things like this. But journalists have no capacity to deal with this stuff. In any sane civic discourse Sarah Palin's comments about 'death panels' would have permanently written her out of any public debate about anything. But even though very few people actually believe this stuff, the entire debate gets knocked off the rails by this sort of freak show which allows the organized interests who want to prevent reform to gain the upper hand.
Not that I'm necessarily pessimistic. I see some signs that this latest outburst of freakery may be starting to backfire on the GOP. We'll have to watch and see.
Here's Mike Sola on Fox, an appearance in which he threatens Pelosi and Hoyer "thugs"who he believes visited him in the night, and goes out with this stunner: "We are American citizens who want one thing: to be heard before you put us down."
ADDITIONAL: Wow–that started something. For the record, my own view is that the most realistic and helpful option at the moment is a public option as a competitor to, not replacement for, the current system. So Mr. Sola can do whatever he wants, and so can everyone else, instead of remaining captive to the current profit-driven system.
RUSHING IT THROUGH:
From Business Week, 2006:
The U.S. has flirted with some kind of national health policy six times over the past 100 years, only to see the reform impulse wither each time. For instance, a key plank in Theodore Roosevelt's losing Presidential campaign of 1912 was national health insurance. President Harry Truman tried again after World War II, but he was thwarted by a potent combination of political forces, including the vehement opposition of the American Medical Assn., which was determined to defend doctors' incomes against the threat of "socialized" medicine.
ME GOTTA GO: The realistic version–proposed lessening of insurance industry profits over 3 days, 3 years or 3 centuries plus lots of lobbying money equals misinformation campaign agitating well-meaning but gullible people into shutting down debate rather than engaging it, thus protecting profits. This is a manufactured "backlash" based on well-planned scaremongering and there's plenty of documentation to prove it.
I mean, someone convinced Mr. Sola up above that he's going to actually be killed by healthcare reform, for heaven's sake. He's hardly alone. Who did that to them? Why?
Most people, even our pal Joe down below, apparently, really do agree on this premise: A healthcare industry in which profit can be increased by denying coverage could use some improvement of some kind. It's in everyone's interest–conservative, liberal, Marxist, libertarian, insane–to engage in the debate about how to improve it. Only one group of people benefits from not even having the debate: the healthcare insurance industry. Too bad for all of us that they're succeeding. Though I don't think their crazy minions are going to prove worthy allies in the end.
PS: Our friend Joe says "Whether or not protests have been 'orchestrated' to any extent is irrelevent."
There's nowhere you can go from there really. If it doesn't seem problematic that an industry in danger can orchestrate fake grassroots efforts to make the danger go away no matter the cost to average, well, joes, there's no ground left for agreement. I prefer my democracy to be informed by people, not business interests and not people who've been frightened by business interests. Period.
No one seems to dispute that a large majority of Americans wants healthcare reform. These folks are fighting a different battle than they think, but they fight it with great furor nonetheless.
I'm off work for the rest of today, but I'm sure the endless train of justifications for changing nothing will continue unabated below. Enjoy the show!
UH-OH!
The installation of a new and better captcha to combat the ever-rising volume of spam commentary seems to have obliterated current commentary. Using the magic of the internets, however, I was able to retrieve the comments from just before the changeover took them out. If any others have gone missing, our apologies.
