Insurance Racketeers' Poster Girl Palin Takes Aim At American Health Reform

Yes, ma'am, she's gunnin' to blow the slightest prospect of affordable health care right out of the water.

And disgraced governor Sarah Palin's pals at the NRA have inspired her to stock up on the ammo that has almost always worked for them: Fear and Loathing and some Supreme Double X OO Disinformation Buckshot. The Associated Press reports:

"Who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course," the former vice Republican presidential candidate wrote on her Facebook page, which has nearly 700,000 supporters.

"The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil," Palin wrote.

My Dear God. What on EARTH ARE WE GONNA DO, THEN???

There's only one thing TO do, obviously.

Release Palin's warriors upon town meetings and create the kind of hysteria that energized Medieval Europe's nobles to confront all the evil and witchery threatening their holy order.

What does the right-wing say to the "Obamacare Demon"?? No, you can't! The forces of status quo goodness, where sound health care still remains a privilege (hugely profitable privilege to the medical special interests) and not a right, shall prevail.....

And so it's no wonder, like the corporate medical sabotage unleashed in 1993, that the frightened and deluded--but well-programmed--"moral majority" of stage-managed protesters will make a spectacular splash on the evening news.



Yep, those "Tea Party" party folks are reaaaaaally lettin' 'em have it. The people "are not happy!"

Makes ya so proud to be an American, eh? Especially when vested corporate interests can stir up enough yokels to bury a critical issue under a cloud of trailer park methane.

As much as the Big Media can often screw things up, there are many times some of its pundits can in fact speak common sense volumes above a roaring rabble. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman summed up the whole sorry spectacle recently.

"There’s a famous Norman Rockwell painting titled 'Freedom of Speech,'" he observed, "depicting an idealized American town meeting. The painting, part of a series illustrating F.D.R.’s “Four Freedoms,” shows an ordinary citizen expressing an unpopular opinion. His neighbors obviously don’t like what he’s saying, but they’re letting him speak his mind.

That’s a far cry from what has been happening at recent town halls, where angry protesters — some of them, with no apparent sense of irony, shouting 'This is America!' — have been drowning out, and in some cases threatening, members of Congress trying to talk about health reform.

Some commentators have tried to play down the mob aspect of these scenes, likening the campaign against health reform to the campaign against Social Security privatization back in 2005. But there’s no comparison. I’ve gone through many news reports from 2005, and while anti-privatization activists were sometimes raucous and rude, I can’t find any examples of congressmen shouted down, congressmen hanged in effigy, congressmen surrounded and followed by taunting crowds.

And I can’t find any counterpart to the death threats at least one congressman has received.

So this is something new and ugly. What’s behind it?

Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, has compared the scenes at health care town halls to the 'Brooks Brothers riot' in 2000 — the demonstration that disrupted the vote count in Miami and arguably helped send George W. Bush to the White House. Portrayed at the time as local protesters, many of the rioters were actually G.O.P. staffers flown in from Washington.

But Mr. Gibbs is probably only half right. Yes, well-heeled interest groups are helping to organize the town hall mobs. Key organizers include two Astroturf (fake grass-roots) organizations: FreedomWorks, run by the former House majority leader Dick Armey, and a new organization called Conservatives for Patients’ Rights.

The latter group, by the way, is run by Rick Scott, the former head of Columbia/HCA, a for-profit hospital chain. Mr. Scott was forced out of that job amid a fraud investigation; the company eventually pleaded guilty to charges of overbilling state and federal health plans, paying $1.7 billion — yes, that’s 'billion' — in fines. You can’t make this stuff up.

But while the organizers are as crass as they come, I haven’t seen any evidence that the people disrupting those town halls are Florida-style rent-a-mobs. For the most part, the protesters appear to be genuinely angry. The question is, what are they angry about?

There was a telling incident at a town hall held by Representative Gene Green, D-Tex. An activist turned to his fellow attendees and asked if they 'oppose any form of socialized or government-run health care.' Nearly all did. Then Representative Green asked how many of those present were on Medicare. Almost half raised their hands.

Now, people who don’t know that Medicare is a government program probably aren’t reacting to what President Obama is actually proposing. They may believe some of the disinformation opponents of health care reform are spreading, like the claim that the Obama plan will lead to euthanasia for the elderly. (That particular claim is coming straight from House Republican leaders.) But they’re probably reacting less to what Mr. Obama is doing, or even to what they’ve heard about what he’s doing, than to who he is.

That is, the driving force behind the town hall mobs is probably the same cultural and racial anxiety that’s behind the 'birther' movement, which denies Mr. Obama’s citizenship. Senator Dick Durbin has suggested that the birthers and the health care protesters are one and the same; we don’t know how many of the protesters are birthers, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it’s a substantial fraction.

And cynical political operators are exploiting that anxiety to further the economic interests of their backers.

Does this sound familiar? It should: it’s a strategy that has played a central role in American politics ever since Richard Nixon realized that he could advance Republican fortunes by appealing to the racial fears of working-class whites.

Many people hoped that last year’s election would mark the end of the 'angry white voter' era in America. Indeed, voters who can be swayed by appeals to cultural and racial fear are a declining share of the electorate.

But right now Mr. Obama’s backers seem to lack all conviction, perhaps because the prosaic reality of his administration isn’t living up to their dreams of transformation. Meanwhile, the angry right is filled with a passionate intensity.

And if Mr. Obama can’t recapture some of the passion of 2008, can’t inspire his supporters to stand up and be heard, health care reform may well fail."

Well-said, Mr. Krugman.

Moreover, a grave admonition that if the real American public doesn't rally against the medical special interests and their vociferous performers, this "downright evil" current system of corporate bloodsucking will no doubt be the death of us.