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Friday, August 14. 2009

No Laughing Matter

Did you see the woman on the news, crying so melodramatically, “I want my country back!” Whenever that clip is played, I laugh. And then there are the violent ones, screaming at the various senators and congressmen and women with self-induced rage, shouting nonsense about the country becoming “Russia” or some other socialized country.

Most of the screamers at these townhall meetings got their direction from the right, most especially from organizations funded by lobbyists representing the health insurance industry and the big pharmaceutical companies. I’ve gotten the e-mails myself with instructions on how to disrupt the meetings and keep others, including the senators and Representatives, from speaking.

There’s little or nothing “grassroots” about the demonstrations. FreedomWorks is the lobbying firm representing Pharma and the health insurance industry. Their chairman is former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey and they have had representatives, like their Vice President for Public Policy Max Pappas, on TV programs, like Hardball with Chris Matthews, bragging about their role in disrupting the town hall meetings of Democratic senators and representatives.

Pappas said they have an e-mail list of over 400,000 people they contact and that FreedomWorks will “… tell them when the events are.”

You can read the entire transcript Here.
 Remember during the general campaign last year when Republicans went after ACORN, the community organizing group, claiming ACORN was signing up voters illegally and had too much influence over then Candidate Obama? This isn’t even ironic, it’s hypocrisy.

And now we have a poster girl for this nonsense: Katy Abram. She is the symbol of stupidity in America, most specifically stupidity from the right. She paraphrases a quote from a deceased Japanese general, a phrase no one really knows for sure the general, Isoroku Yamamoto, actually said or wrote: “You have awakened a sleeping giant.”

Before that Abram, 35, said she had never been interested in politics and that she was speaking against the “systematic dismantling of this country.” She said it wasn’t about “left and right,” but when she started her statement to Senator Specter, it was specifically about left and right, when she said she was an American, but first and foremost a conservative.

Hannity, on FoxNews interviewed the woman and his interview was cozy and warm. She wasn’t asked to explain herself. She claimed the “people” were calling her on her cell phone and calling her a racist. And then she admitted it only happened once.
 Of course Hannity lied when he said Nancy Pelosi called people like Katy Abram Nazis, but that’s par for Hannity and most of his Fox cohorts.

The real interview of Abram came this past Wednesday (Aug.12) on Hardball with Chris Matthews (MSNBC) when Lawrence O’Donnell, filling in for Matthews, actually asked the tough questions. In the course of the interview, Abram explained that she and her family liked their health care plan, which had a $5,000 deductible, and she didn’t want to be forced or coaxed into a single-payer health care plan.

O’Donnell, a former staffer for the Senate Finance Committee, asked her if she believed President Obama when he said people who like their health insurance can keep it. She said “No” and then claimed she heard, on TV, the president say that it might take five years, but the U.S. would eventually have a single-payer system. When told the president said that, she was adamant that Obama did say it … err … maybe back in 2002.
 President Obama as famously said several times it would be nearly impossible to move America to a single-payer system because the current system, such as it is, is so embedded in the U.S. economy the disruption in the lives of citizens would be catastrophic.

The entire interview is pretty good (Click Here to watch the YouTube clip) because it spotlights just how ignorant these protestors are when it comes to the facts concerning the health care plans (currently there are at least five versions) being considered by Congress. They think it’s socialized medicine and that there is a provision that creates “death panels” that will determine who lives and who dies.

The breadth of ignorance displayed by these protestors is breathtaking. The seniors, people on Medicare, are the most baffling, They don’t want socialized medicine, although Medicare is a single-payer system and none of them — NONE — would want the government to end that program. What concerns them most though are the “death panels.”

The idiot from Alaska, Sarah Palin, claimed that’s what the provision in one of the House bills was when in fact the provision allows doctors to get paid by Medicare for giving patients information about Advance Directives. When I had my heart surgery a doctor explained the Advance Directive to me, a living will, and the importance to my family to know what my intentions are should I fall into a coma or become vegetative.

The hypocrisy for Palin though is she declared, as governor, April 16th, 2008 to be Healthcare Decisions Day to encourage everyone in Alaska to make Advance Directives.

Palin is no stranger to flip-flopping and hypocrisy. She was for Alaska’s bridge to nowhere until she became a vice presidential candidate and she was all for earmark money until she got on the national scene.

Every American should have an advance directive, not so much for the patient, but for the family or friends faced with the possibility that we may not be able to speak for ourselves at the end of our lives. Filling out the forms was a sobering reminder that life is finite and the best thing for my family is to tell them exactly how I would like to be treated should I not be able to communicate my wishes at the end.

President Obama singled out for praise three Republican senators who were working for a bipartisan health care bill, one of those being Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa. The next day Grassley told his constituents they should be afraid of the “death panels.” He later went on to brag that his role in the Senate finance Committee wasn’t to find a bipartisan compromise, but to put his “finger in the dike” and slow down the process so groups like FreedomWorks could organize their anti-health care reform campaigns.

The insanity though isn’t just on the inside of the town hall meetings. When the president did his meeting in Portsmouth, NH, a man showed up with a sign that paraphrased Thomas Jefferson: “It’s time to water the tree of liberty.”
 The entire quote from Jefferson, written when the Constitution was being drafted, is: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

The man, William Kostric, also had a licensed firearm strapped to his leg and the meaning was absolutely clear: it was time for armed revolution against the government, specifically the Obama Administration.

When questioned by Matthews on Hardball, Kostric couldn’t or wouldn’t explain what the symbolism of the sign and his packing a gun meant.

Things are getting crazy out there and yes, maybe some of these melodramatic screamers are laughable, but when people start making threats, as William Kostric did (and several congressmen and women have received death threats), then maybe it’s time to dial back the town hall meetings. It won’t be funny when a representative or senator is murdered.

Posted by Tim Forkes in NEWS and POLITICS at 12:01 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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