The centerpiece of the conservative argument against health care reform.
This morning I tried to attend a health care town hall forum in Chelmsford, Massachusetts hosted by Congresswoman Niki Tsongas. Although she’s not my representative, I happened to be in the area and I figured I’d check it out. Unfortunately I couldn’t get in because the turnout was far higher than I had expected. It wasn’t long after I got in line—futilely awaiting entry into Chelmsford’s town hall—when I realized that the same sorts of kooks who had been poisoning health care forums in Florida, Ohio, and other swing states with their bombastic and intimidating vitriol, were out in full force here in this liberal district.
I do not call these people kooks because they disagree with me on this issue, but rather because of their methods. Instead of advancing a coherent argument against Obamacare, these protestors resort to yelling—literally yelling, that the government is going to euthanize old people and that Obama is a modern day Hitler. It’s total off-the-wall fearmongering. No need to introduce facts into the discussion when you can just scare the shit out of the ignorant masses by telling them that Obama wants to turn America into Logan’s Run for sexagenarians.
So as I was standing in line, reading all of these signs, listening to this propaganda, and reading a pamphlet from the Lyndon Larouche crowd with a Photoshopped picture of Obama and the Fuhrer yukking it up with some Hitler Youth on the cover, my urge to call someone on this bullshit was coming to a head. I noticed a man of about sixty walking toward me with a sign saying that under the proposed reform bill, once Americans turn sixty-five, the government would decide whether to euthanize them or not, or some such idiocy. He had an impressive beer gut and was wearing a hat indicating that he had been in the navy. I didn’t care that he was old or a veteran, I wanted to say something, and I did. I laid it on thick: “You’re a propagandist. You should be ashamed of yourself. You’re a disgrace to the conservative cause.” To which he replied that he wasn’t a propagandist, ashamed, etc., before pulling the, I-was-in-the-military-for-thirty-seven-years card, as if somehow that bolstered his ridiculous claims. To my extreme disappointment, as soon as he said this, several people around me said, “Thank you” to him for his military service, despite his contemptible lie that the government is going to kill people’s grannies. Reasonable people can oppose health care reform, but reasonable people do not use lies, hate, and Nazi comparisons to do it. They do what one well-mannered anti-reform attendee did: hand out serious literature from reputable sources about the large costs of the proposed reforms, and engage others in spirited, but civil debate on this important problem.
But the navy guy—who by the way, received government health care for those thirty-seven years he was in the service—wasn’t even the worst. There was actually a group of younger people holding a large picture of Obama with a Hitler mustache (see above), and it was from this group I picked up a pamphlet of “Act Now To Stop Obama’s Nazi Health Plan,” with a picture of Obama and Hitler on the cover, with the Fuhrer smiling at the president, because after all, being buddy-buddy with a black liberal is exactly what Hitler—the ultimate white supremacist—would’ve done.
Remember how, during the previous administration, a few fringe liberals would make Bush-Nazi analogies, and conservatives like Rush Limbaugh and Fox News would go apeshit? Apparently, it isn’t ok to call the president a Nazi or Hitler if he launches an unprovoked war and shows contempt for civil liberties and the U.S. Constitution, but it is ok when he’s attempting to reform healthcare by making it cheaper and more accessible. But honestly, I’m not nearly as disturbed by showmen like Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, as I am by these everyday people who despise the democratic process so much, that they endeavor to shout down their elected representatives and their fellow citizens who hold opposing views. These people like to scream, “This is America,” as if they favor freedom of speech and open debate. Newsflash: they don’t. They don’t want a real debate, which is why they act like complete assholes in forums where they’re actually welcome to ask questions of their representatives.
While in line, a totally ignorant sixty-something year old woman starting talking to me for no reason, telling me how there was a provision for eugenics in the health care reform bill. I asked her where this provision was. She assured me that it was in there, saying, “When people get older, the government won’t allow them to have certain operations.” Of course, this isn’t eugenics, which I would recommend for this woman if she were of child-bearing age, but perhaps she meant euthanasia, although even this isn’t accurate. What she was really going for was the phrase “rationed care,” which we actually already have in this country with private insurers. My own sense is that any government-run health care system in this country will be measurably more accommodating than many private insurance companies.
No sufficiently well-educated society would allow such rank hypocrisy, lies, and exaggerations to pass as legitimate objections. But here in America, where thinking is optional, the grossest transgressions against truth and even mere consistency in argument and standards may be committed with no one blinking an eye, or worse, with people nodding in agreement at the lies and distortions emanating from a mob so short on serious ideas and alternatives for what is being proposed, that screaming and intimidation is their “strategy.” If in fact, “This is America” as these degenerates insist, then never have I been more ashamed to call myself one of its citizens.
- Max
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