Comments on: Obama: Save $1T By Cutting Fed Med Costs

Would Pay For Health Reform By Trimming Gov't Payments To Prescription Drugmakers, Hospitals

[joule18]

Health care won't matter or won't be needed if Obama doesn't pay more attention to N. Korea and Iran. He wants to "talk" and have a better understanding, blah, blah, blah, and while he kajoles the other party to come to the table, they continue to build their arsenals and lay their plans to destroy other nations.

[rednomo]

What is this fury about? In his scant 145 days in office, the new president has not remotely matched the Bush record in deficit creation. Nor has he repealed the right to bear arms or exacerbated the wars he inherited. He has tried more than his predecessor ever did to reach across the aisle. But none of that seems to matter. A sizable minority of Americans is irrationally fearful of the fast-moving generational, cultural and racial turnover Obama embodies ? indeed, of the 21st century itself. That minority is now getting angrier in inverse relationship to his popularity with the vast majority of the country. Change can be frightening and traumatic, especially if it?s not change you can believe in.

We don?t know whether the tiny subset of domestic terrorists in this crowd is egged on by political or media demagogues ? though we do tend to assume that foreign jihadists respond like Pavlov?s dogs to the words of their most fanatical leaders and polemicists. But well before the latest murderers struck ? well before another ?antigovernment? Obama hater went on a cop-killing rampage in Pittsburgh in April ? there have been indications that this rage could spiral out of control.

This was evident during the campaign, when hotheads greeted Obama?s name with ?Treason!? and ?Terrorist!? at G.O.P. rallies. At first the McCain-Palin campaign fed the anger with accusations that Obama was ?palling around with terrorists.? But later John McCain thought better of it and defended his opponent?s honor to a town-hall participant who vented her fears of the Democrats? ?Arab? candidate. Although two neo-Nazi skinheads were arrested in an assassination plot against Obama two weeks before Election Day, the fever broke after McCain exercised leadership.

That honeymoon, if it was one, is over. Conservatives have legitimate ideological beefs with Obama, rightly expressed in sharp language. But the invective in some quarters has unmistakably amped up. The writer Camille Paglia, a political independent and confessed talk-radio fan, detected a shift toward paranoia in the air waves by mid-May. When ?the tone darkens toward a rhetoric of purgation and annihilation,? she observed in Salon, ?there is reason for alarm.? She cited a ?joke? repeated by a Rush Limbaugh fill-in host, a talk-radio jock from Dallas of all places, about how ?any U.S. soldier? who found himself with only two bullets in an elevator with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Osama bin Laden would use both shots to assassinate Pelosi and then strangle Reid and bin Laden.

This homicide-saturated vituperation is endemic among mini-Limbaughs. Glenn Beck has dipped into O?Reilly?s Holocaust analogies to liken Obama?s policy on stem-cell research to the eugenics that led to ?the final solution? and the quest for ?a master race.? After James von Brunn?s rampage at the Holocaust museum, Beck rushed onto Fox News to describe the Obama-hating killer as a ?lone gunman nutjob.? Yet in the same show Beck also said von Brunn was a symptom that ?the pot in America is boiling,? as if Beck himself were not the boiling pot cheering the kettle on.

But hyperbole from the usual suspects in the entertainment arena of TV and radio is not the whole story. What?s startling is the spillover of this poison into the conservative political establishment. Saul Anuzis, a former Michigan G.O.P. chairman who ran for the party?s national chairmanship this year, seriously suggested in April that Republicans should stop calling Obama a socialist because ?it no longer has the negative connotation it had 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago.? Anuzis pushed ?fascism? instead, because ?everybody still thinks that?s a bad thing.? He didn?t seem to grasp that ?fascism? is nonsensical as a description of the Obama administration or that there might be a risk in slurring a president with a word that most find ?bad? because it evokes a mass-murderer like Hitler.

The Anuzis ?fascism? solution to the Obama problem has caught fire. The president?s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court and his speech in Cairo have only exacerbated the ugliness. The venomous personal attacks on Sotomayor have little to do with the 3,000-plus cases she?s adjudicated in nearly 17 years on the bench or her thoughts about the judgment of ?a wise Latina woman.? She has been tarred as a member of ?the Latino KKK? (by the former Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo), as well as a racist and a David Duke (by Limbaugh), and portrayed, in a bizarre two-for-one ethnic caricature, as a slant-eyed Asian on the cover of National Review. Uniting all these insults is an aggrieved note of white victimization only a shade less explicit than that in von Brunn?s white supremacist screeds.

cont

[rednomo]

cont

Obama?s Cairo address, meanwhile, prompted over-the-top accusations reminiscent of those campaign rally cries of ?Treason!? It was a prominent former Reagan defense official, Frank Gaffney, not some fringe crackpot, who accused Obama in The Washington Times of engaging ?in the most consequential bait-and-switch since Adolf Hitler duped Neville Chamberlain.? He claimed that the president ? a lifelong Christian ? ?may still be? a Muslim and is aligned with ?the dangerous global movement known as the Muslim Brotherhood.? Gaffney linked Obama by innuendo with Islamic ?charities? that ?have been convicted of providing material support for terrorism.?

If this isn?t a handy rationalization for another lone nutjob to take the law into his own hands against a supposed terrorism supporter, what is? Any such nutjob can easily grab a weapon. Gun enthusiasts have been on a shopping spree since the election, with some areas of our country reporting percentage sales increases in the mid-to-high double digits, recession be damned.

The question, Shepard Smith said on Fox last week, is ?if there is really a way to put a hold on? those who might run amok. We?re not about to repeal the First or Second Amendments. Hard-core haters resolutely dismiss any ?mainstream media? debunking of their conspiracy theories. The only voices that might penetrate their alternative reality ? I emphasize might ? belong to conservative leaders with the guts and clout to step up as McCain did last fall. Where are they? The genteel public debate in right-leaning intellectual circles about the conservative movement?s future will be buried by history if these insistent alarms are met with silence.

It?s typical of this dereliction of responsibility that when the Department of Homeland Security released a plausible (and, tragically, prescient) report about far-right domestic terrorism two months ago, the conservative response was to trash it as ?the height of insult,? in the words of the G.O.P. chairman Michael Steele. But as Smith also said last week, Homeland Security was ?warning us for a reason.?

No matter. Last week it was business as usual, as Republican leaders nattered ad infinitum over the juvenile rivalry of Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich at the party?s big Washington fund-raiser. Few if any mentioned, let alone questioned, the ominous script delivered by the actor Jon Voight with the G.O.P. imprimatur at that same event. Voight?s devout wish was to ?bring an end to this false prophet Obama.?

This kind of rhetoric, with its pseudo-Scriptural call to action, is toxic. It is getting louder each day of the Obama presidency. No one, not even Fox News viewers, can say they weren?t warned.

Frank Rich New York Times

[joule18]

It would also be nice if the press would get their admiring noses out of Obama's backside and report on what he is truly doing right or wrong. Why seems to be no desire for the debate of both parties, etc.

[joule18]

Whatever is done, there shouldn't be a big rush like there was to pass the stimulas bill. We must get it right the first time because it it more costly to fix a broken system later.

[skyk-2009]

American politics is a sham
Posted by jeffpzzzzzz at 5:21 AM : Jun 14, 200

If you hate our nation and our system so much why stay? I love my country, my fellow citizens and those who WE voted for to represent us. I love MY Government and the Americans who go to work everyday to keep it and all we stand for going. Does it need improvement, well yes and I think we improved it greatly in the last election.

[skyk-2009]

The doctors and hospitals pay more for liability insurance and they pass the costs on to us. Don't brush off facts as "talking points" so you don't have to face the truth. You are so delusional.
Posted by joule18 at 5:19 AM : Jun 14, 2009


As was the point of my post, which as you in the fringe right always do, you never addressed is simply that the ONE PERCENT that those suits cost is NOT going to solve the problem AND the INSURANCE COMPANIES that are denying coverage and payments at the same time they are jacking up prices are IN NO WAY effected by those claims. We have a system that cost us MORE than any on the PLANET and we can NOT cover all our people. Anyone with a brain should see that something is wrong. By the way, have you looked into that law suits filed in those OTHER nations to see if OURS is out of line? TIME to scrap a system that has not nor does not work.

[skyk-2009]

Just a few points that seem to go unnoticed or you lemmings just don't care.
imprisonrove-funny, but I live on the Canadian border and my goodness, Canadians come over here in droves for health care that is rationed in Canada. Guess I don't understand your rant. I do know that certain things like Lasix eye surgery may be cheaper in Canada but members of powerful unions such as the teacher's union and others already have that covered. I listen to Canadian radio all the time and many, many Canadians don't want us to got the socialized route because it would negatively affect them.
As for solely blaming Gingrich, well, do think your dems had a hand too. Then again, typical lib, dems can do no wrong.
Posted by xlib at 4:44 AM : Jun 14, 2009

Can you give me the name of ONE Canadian who has come to this nation for health care? I've never met one and I've seen the polls in the CBC where over 80% of them say they wouldn't trade their system for ours... NO WAY. Now I have seen American's going to Canada for care, by the BUS LOADS, and I've seen states who tried to pass laws allowing THEIR states to go to Canada for drugs... never the reverse. IF you can operate your search engine YOU TO can find out FIRST hand how CANADIANS really feel about their Health Care System and WHY businesses prefer that country over ours. TRY it instead of listening to the tired old talking heads on TV.

[joule18]

I've heard them and NO RESULTS. The cost continue to go up and here we are with people like you pushing the same tired old excuses. FIX the system and leave the talking points to those who make a lot of money with them.
Posted by skyk-2009 at 5:07 AM : Jun 14, 2009

The doctors and hospitals pay more for liability insurance and they pass the costs on to us. Don't brush off facts as "talking points" so you don't have to face the truth. You are so delusional.

[skyk-2009]

What has your congress done in since 2006? NOTHING!
It's about time that people like you and members of your party grow a set and take responsibility.
Defund the war!! Oh yea, the messiah is going to have us out by next year, right.
Posted by xlib at 5:00 AM : Jun 14, 2009

Trickle Down is dead, its finished and so is the Republican Party. They have NO ideas, they have NOTHING but sitting there saying NO to everything the President wants to do and he IS doing a lot to reverse Trickle Down and move us away from the failure of that policy. What do the Republican's have? The same tired old plans the same tired old policies. They continue to decline in members for THAT reason along with the Scorched Earth Politics they ran for YEARS. People are tired of the negative attacks and the personal attacks. They are tired of attacks on fellow American's and our Government. Now as I see it, you and the Republican Party can do one of two things here, you can get some new ideas and leave Trickle Down in the dust of time or you can continue to decay into a regional party.