Tag Archives: disinformation

opposition to extraordinary needs

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I’ve just read a powerful op-ed piece in the Arizona Daily Star in support of the President’s program of health care reform. It’s a good, strong piece full of passionate thinking and based in personal experience. The writer is Sarah Garrecht Gassen, the daughter of a friend and co-parishioner here in St. Louis. The heart of it is the author’s experience trying to find health insurance in light of the fact that she has used a prosthetic leg since she was three years old.

Gassen’s concern in this piece is primarily with reform of the insurance system, particularly with changing the familiar practice of denying coverage because of pre-existing conditions; though her anger with people who are willing to ignore “the failings of our existing health-care system because someone somewhere told them President Obama is a socialist or some such nonsense” extends beyond that one set of issues. I had thought this was relatively safe territory, believing that the clear middle-class interest in insurance reform would ensure the success of this part of the President’s program. But I fear I was wrong.

The comment thread following Gassen’s piece is filled with attacks on her and her ideas. Many of them are just flaming, but not all. One merely observes sarcastically,

Sorry about your leg Sarah. I had a similar problem when I tried to get auto insurance the day after I wrecked my car.

Damn insurance companies.

Here’s another, this one a serious ad hominem:

Sarah is a liberal journalist with no background or expertise in health care. Yet she has the pulpit and the ink to spew her opinions. She is so biased her pieces abound in poor judgement, but she can’t really help herself. This is what is frightening about these people. Be afraid, be very afraid.

But the most dismaying comment comes from a person who speaks without apparent malice—I give it entire.

I am very sorry for your prosthetic leg situation.

However, I am tired of people such as myself on the right being accused of fear mongering.

If you want truth, the truth is much of what you hear from the right is the end result of much thought about how a government health care system will affect the country. We are not stupid as some might think and we have the right to our opinions just as much as any person on the left. I may not agree with the left, but I don’t accuse them of being non-thinkers.

Another thing I am tired of is that people with extraordinary needs are being used to set the precedent for why we need nationalized health care.

Truth be told, those people are a small percentage and I don’t think it is right to turn the entire health care system over onto its’ belly because of the few.

I have concern about the ever-increasing “me me me” mentality in this country…”the government should pay for this, the government should pay for that.” To heck with the entitlement mentality.

Finally, there are a number of very charitable organizations from churches to doctors and hospitals whose sole purpose is to assist those who need it

It’s been my thought that the struggle for consensus on health care involved persuading independent voters, those who voted for Obama in the general election because of perceived economic interest, that health care reform would benefit them, particularly that requiring insurance companies to cover everyone for a reasonable cost would benefit them.

It’s this thought that I am re-examining. I have no idea how representative the comments to Sarah Gassen’s op-ed may be of the opposition to health care reform, but if they are broadly representative I’m more worried than I was. When people who seem rational can characterize their fellow citizens who would simply like to be able to buy health insurance for a reasonable cost and be covered for their pre-existing conditions, as deadbeats possessed of an entitlement mentality, we’ve hit a new low, indeed.

one-way hash

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In today’s New York Times. Charles Blow makes a point about discourse that I’ve seen made around the media for some time now. We’ve been told that the President is too cerebral. In fact that critique was close to the heart of the Clinton campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2008. Here’s Blow’s version:

Conservatives speak in bumper stickers. Obama speaks in thesis statements. In fact, he sometimes seems constitutionally incapable of concision.

He also seems to display a disdain for irrational excitability and confronts it with either princely dispassion, mocking disbelief or stirring oratory that speaks more to posterity than to the people in front of him.

I think Blow is right to the extent that the sloganeering arguments contained in sound bites like “Death panels. Death books. Taxpayer dollars for abortion. Kill Grandma. Take away choice,” have had an impact, or at least seem to have had an impact. Blow follows the common procedure of linking these slogans with polls showing voter confusion and antipathy to the health care proposals that are presently before the congress. Bit I’m not sure I like Blow’s prescription for dealing with that success.

In American debates, and particularly in this debate, facts are not sufficient, no matter how eloquently spoken. We want to be moved by passion and conviction and determination and faith. We coalesce around simple ideas like right and wrong, and for many, yes, good and evil.

Some may dislike this simplicity and wish it were different (I am among them), but in politics you have to play on the field where the game is.

In the first place, the arguments contained in the conservative sound bites are “one-way hash” arguments. There’s a good discussion of this type of argumentation at FactCheck.org. By my reading the cleverness of the conservative sound bites (all of which are what Huck Finn calls “stretchers” and many of which are outright lies) isn’t that they are beautifully simple as Blow claims. The problem is that they are difficult to answer seriously because the answers are complicated. And the slogans succeed, I believe, because brute populist appeals tend to favor conservative causes in today’s political climate, appealing as they do to naive individualism and to the residues of nativism and racism that still plague our social life.

Blow’s analysis invites a war of sound bites. I think that’s a losing proposition for progressives like me and for the President as well. I also think that if we do pass a health care bill and the President gets to sign it into law, there will remain a great deal of irrational opposition to it, just as there is still irrational opposition to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, even from many Americans who benefit from these programs.

One might wish that the Republican Party would abandon its determination to appeal to the worst in people. That seems unlikely, especially in the present political climate. So, yes, it’s fairly urgent for progressives and other democrats to learn to counter that appeal effectively. I don’t know how to do that, and I don’t think Mr. Blow does either. But the President and his team have a pretty good record countering it so far, and they learn fast. I’m anxiously awaiting the President’s health care speech.

forget the greedy guts

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I am perhaps more than ordinarily sensitive to bullying when it comes my way or affects a person or an institution I love or admire–and of course I would never engage in bullying, myself. So when I read a piece somewhere last week that likened he tactics of right wingnut wackos to bullying I thought, Aha! Today I can’t remember where I read that piece, but when I went looking for it on the net, thinking I’d find a spate of writing about my guy being bullied, what I found was the opposite.

The President is accused of bullying everybody from hedge fund managers to the military government of Honduras. And now, today, he is being accused of attempting to indoctrinate school children with un-American, socialist ideas. I’m thinking we’ve all heard this before, but with President Obama it’s worse than the lies and smears directed against Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt never had to see himself represented as a “witch doctor,” with associated wingnut comments and pseudo apologies. Roosevelt never had to see himself represented as a monkey.

So it’s with great pleasure that I read an email from an old friend and high-school classmate this morning, who likes Obama and thinks all the media hype is just sound and fury. My friend, David Steinman, is a retired physician who supports health care reform. He is also a Christian gentleman. Here is what he says:

Obama knows that graphically describing the greedy guts of the current mess inflames the non-thinking masses who already are full of fear and loathing; more precisely inflames self-appointed talking heads whose followers are full of bluster—” Who is this non-American talking rot about the best system in the world?” I think that Obama knows how to make “soft pedals” work. That’s part of his specialness.

He avoids “Wagnerian emotions” by choice. I think he understands the Jewish mistrust of robust style and bad policy, as, in my imagination, a man of color in the White House might best figure.

I like Obama’s Rope-a-Dope Style [ from Ali’s wearing down of his opponents ] while in Obama’s case the opposition getting in their licks and spending down their energy is also showing their lack of concern and wisdom regarding the issue.

I remain convinced that health care reform is not going away and that Obama, in waiting for others, in this case congressional leadership, to forge the bills, remains the force for change, paltry and retarded as those on the far left may feel it to be.

Lyndon Johnson viewed politics as the “Art of the possible.” I see Obama in that light.

I am reading the world with a bit more hope after getting Dr. Dave’s email this morning. May it be as he says it is.

I’ve taken it down

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I’ve removed the “I stand with Obama” about health care link I had posted here. Apparently both the end of life provisions and the public option have been abandoned by the administration.

Mike Allen at Politico suggests that the public option was always a mere bargaining chip and quotes Marc Armbinder of The Atlantic about angry liberals, of whom I guess I am one.

If you equate health care reform with a public option, then, well, health care reform is dead to you. There are a lot of angry liberals tonight. They are within their rights to feel aggrieved.

Whatever may be the future of the health care debate, so called. the move to reform our health care system has now been so demagogued by the wingnuts (who can now include Charles Grassley among their numbers) and so mired in payoffs to the medical-industrial complex, that the entire mix has become toxic.

And the President, instead of leading, instead of providing clarity, caves.

It’s a great disappointment, but no less I suppose than my disappointment with the President’s validation of Bush policies on detention and the rule of law, with his willingness to force major auto manufacturers and their subsidiaries with their hundreds of thousands of workers and retirees into bankruptcy whilst propping up major banks with billions in undeserved federal dollars and rewarding venal bank executives with huge bonuses as recompense for their venality, with his adoption of the factory model of education, emphasizing test scores and rote learning at the expense of independent thinking.

I have a deal of thoughts about all this, but tonight I’m just angry. So I’ve removed the link.