posted by perkiset on Aug 28
Just how insane have we become over the health care “debate?” How much of it is real, and how much has been programmatically developed by the right wing?
BrainDonkey pointed me in the direction of a Washington Post article that I think asks a lot of great questions and points out just how crazy things have gotten. A quote:
In Michigan, meanwhile, the indelible image was of the father who wheeled his handicapped adult son up to Rep. John Dingell and bellowed that “under the Obama health-care plan, which you support, this man would be given no care whatsoever.” He pressed his case further on Fox News.
In New Hampshire, outside a building where Obama spoke, cameras trained on the pistol strapped to the leg of libertarian William Kostric. He then explained on CNN why the “tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of tyrants and patriots.”
It can be found here, and is worth the read: In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition
The point of the article is that people are really, really acting out wildly. IMO, this is because the Republican strategists have gotten a hold of the Third Reich’s propaganda techniques (which we saw also during the Bush presidency, repeatedly): Scare people such that logical thought no longer applies.
I believe that these people are honestly concerned about our country. I believe they have our best interest at heart. I know that they have been lied to, repeatedly, and have been injected with an irrational fear of that which they do not understand, so they act out accordingly. It is from this standpoint that the Republican and right-wing cabals have the most to atone for: blatant lies and misrepresentations, simply for the betterment of their political position - not for the betterment of society or even their constituency.
Knowing that most people will make decisions based on a context built from motivated reasoning, if the right wing can assume that many of their constituents would naturally start from a more angry or self serving or patriotic or righteous standpoint, then simply giving them reasons to validate their baseline feelings is enough to create the illusion of a logical answer. But if that natural path is then enriched with fearsome notions that penetrate below their pre-frontal cortex and get into the most basic of human emotions, you have a wolverine in a corner. Scared, pissed off, willing to jump and strike at anything because they are afraid.
It would be great if we could actually have a debate about health care. But the problem is that the right wing has whipped up so much fear, so many emotions tied to the health of a grandson, the possibility of a dark, menacing “government entity” coming to unplug grannie, that we can’t even have one. What we need to do is start talking more and more about what health care reform DOES, rather than playing D against lies, distortions and what it doesn’t do.
