Clearly. I'm rarely one to be overly dramatic, but shit-yourself fear is definitely called for when it comes to this health care reform bill (HR 3200).President Obama simply will not stop until we are all dead.
He pines for that glorious day when he can finally rest, bloated and lethargic atop an enormous mountain of human bones, laughing evilly as he slowly begins to digest the meat of more than 304 million of us.
Welcome to the new United Socialist States of Death--Population: one. Barack Obama. Victory!
You may have seen these ignoramuses on TV lately.
They tend to be rude old ladies in hideous hats. They have a penchant for Obama-as-Hitler art, and crashing town hall discussions with unintelligible rants inspired by psychopaths with microphones. They are faithful to Jesus Christ, Dale Earnhardt's ghost, and worst of all, Glenn Beck.
God bless these hardworking, empty-headed sons of bitches, but they are the oblivious pawns in a manufactured melodrama designed to scare the shit out of America's beloved grandparents, and anyone else dumb enough to take the bait.
What's ironic, of course, is that Rush Limbaugh and Fox News--America's Patriotism Police--are now terrorizing America's real patriots. The brave adapters who improvised and ultimately endured through the Great Depression and sacrificed everything for the sake of not just our own freedom but that of the entire world during World War II are now being besieged by a fear-and-smear campaign waged by the rabble rousers some of them unfortunately rely on for information.
During the past several months, the media has called Obama's nutty critics 'tea baggers' and 'birthers.' Now we have these town hall disruption squads spewing their death panel nonsense. Essentially, they're Joe The Plumber. They're dumb white folks who've been scared to death by shitbag entertainers and fear-mongerers masquerading as journalists.
Don't get me wrong, I have no pity for the dimwits who are consistently duped by such blatantly obvious hypocrite-douchebag-racists.
But the only thing reminiscient of Nazism here isn't a health care bill or a new administration's philosophy, or the "liberal media's" coverage or non-coverage of it all, but rather this Obama-is-a-Nazi-hellbent-on-murdering-America's-old-people propaganda campaign, custom-designed to terrorize both our senior citizens and our bigoted, Bible-humping belt (read as: the paranoid people with all the guns!).
The mindless lunatics disrupting town hall meetings across the country are not part of a wider, naturally-occuring phenomenon. A few screaming old ladies does not a dissatisfied Middle America make. It's not a "movement" at all. These retards receive their "town hall blitz" instructions from a Website called ResistNet.com at the urging of talking turds like Limbaugh and Beck.
The FreedomWorks commenters are tame by comparison with those found on ResistNet, a project of Grassfire.org. Using a social-networking platform, Grassfire claims some 400,000 members who are dedicated to "resisting" the "Democratic agenda," which, by their lights, includes "open borders" and "taxpayer-funded abortions."
A 501(c)(4) nonprofit, Grassfire has been named as a "stealth political action committee" by Public Citizen. Its founder and president, Steve Elliott, has held up MoveOn.org as a model for where he would like to take his organization.
ResistNet, has become a major hub for turning out hard-core right-wingers to health-care town hall meetings. The organization took in $1.5 million in 2007 (the most recent year for which information is publicly available).
It's difficult to find out much of anything about Elliott; he manages to keep a very low profile. But SourceWatch and Public Citizen report that Grassfire is represented by the Washington public relations firm Shirley & Bannister, whose principal is Craig Shirley, the man who gave us the Willie Horton ad of the 1988 presidential election.
Shirley promoted the movie Stolen Honor a Swiftboat-style smear piece made about 2004 presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. Today, Shirley's clients, according to the Shirley & Bannister Web site, include the National Rifle Association, author Ann Coulter, religious right co-founder Richard Viguerie, and other religious right figures.
But Shirley & Bannister retains ties to GOP establishment figures; its Web site bears an endorsement from William Kristol, who served in the administration of the first George Bush, who happens to be the candidate whose campaign reaped some of its victory from Shirley's Horton ad.
The firm also promotes the books of former Rep. Joe Scarborough, R-Fla., (now of MSNBC) and former George H.W. Bush speechwriter Peggy Noonan (who promised us a "kinder, gentler nation") -- books published by Rupert Murdoch's HarperCollins.
I strongly suggest reading the whole piece. Basically, this latest non-threat was brought to you by the man who dreamed up the Willie Horton ad, which terrified a crime-obsessed, less racially cool country (the L.A. riots were still four years away) into voting for George H. W. Bush by plastering the airwaves with the image of a bad-ass black man and a scary story. This is classic Republican political strategy.
Want more proof that the health care scare is bogus? Take it away, Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich! Both were very much for end-of-life counseling (a.k.a advance directives), but now call them death panels and assert that the United States government is brazenly trying to implement euthanasia for old folks, the way Hitler did with Jews, gypsies, the handicapped and homosexuals.
Here's then Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's remarks from April 16, 2008, a day she declared "Healthcare Decisions Day:"
WHEREAS, one of the principal goals of Healthcare Decisions Day is to encourage hospitals, nursing homes, assisted living facilities, continuing care retirement communities, and hospices to participate in a statewide effort to provide clear and consistent information to the public about advance directives, as well as to encourage medical professionals and lawyers to volunteer their time and efforts to improve public knowledge and increase the number of Alaska's citizens with advance directives.
WHEREAS, the Foundation for End of Life Care in Juneau, Alaska, and other organizations throughout the United States have endorsed this event and are committed to educating the public about the importance of discussing healthcare choices and executing advance directives.
So just last year Palin was encouraging the citizens of Alaska to have the end-of-life counseling now suggested in the health care reform bill. Of course, she's since changed her mind and now considers end-of-life counseling "downright evil." Last Friday, the former governor wrote on her Facebook page:
"The America I know and love," she wrote, "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."
And Newt Gingrich did the exact same thing. On July 2, he wrote:
More than 20 pAdvance directives don't sound nearly as scary as death panels, but they are the same exact thing. Before being so against it, Palin encouraged the people of Alaska to educate themselves and make end-of-life plans; Gingrich praised a comprehensive end-of-life planning approach, going so far as to write that it "empowers patients and families to control and direct their care."ercent of all Medicare spending occurs in the last two months of life. Gundersen Lutheran Health System in La Crosse, Wisconsin has developed a successful end-of-life, best practice that combines: 1) community-wide advance care planning, where 90 percent of patients have advance directives; 2) hospice and palliative care; and 3) coordination of services through an electronic medical record. The Gundersen approach empowers patients and families to control and direct their care. The Dartmouth Health Atlas has documented that Gundersen delivers care at a 30 percent lower rate than the national average ($18,359 versus $25,860). If Gundersen’s approach was used to care for the approximately 4.5 million Medicare beneficiaries who die every year, Medicare could save more than $33 billion a year.(FULL STORY: Health Care Rx: Across the Country, Some Systems Are Getting It Right – Newt Gingrich (7/2/09).
But, you know, that was like six weeks ago.
Here's what I think is interesting. Nobody winced when we went and invested more than $674 billion in a backward shitbox of a country. None of these knuckleheads bitching about money today cared at all when our government was pissing it away like drunk sailors in port, slaughtering 100,000 Iraqi civilians and more than 4,000 American boys for reasons unclear.
In America, spending money hand-over-fist is fine so long as it's spent on DEATH. Ironically, if you want to spend money on CARE (life), all the "pro-life" people go apeshit. It's a hazy line--if there even is one--between pro-life and pro-war (pro-death).
And, of course, none of this is even really about health care reform. It's about race. And power. And fear.
In a situation similar to last week in Portsmouth, N.H., cameras caught a protester with a pistol holstered to his leg outside of (yesterday's) event with the president.(FULL STORY: Scott Foster, NBC)
This is the result. Knuckleheads at presidential events.. with loaded weapons. Yesterday it was pistols; today it's assault rifles and pistols with extra ammo!
A man carrying an assault rifle (PICTURED RIGHT) outside the Phoenix Convention Center where President Barack Obama was speaking today [Tues., Aug. 18] has renewed concerns about protesters bringing firearms to presidential events..Well, I sure hope nothing crazy happens now that the crazy people are sufficiently riled up. Thanks for all your dedicated, patriotic "work," though, Glenn, Rush, you other FOX shitheads.. Hell of a job.
Now I leave you with my favorite Barack Obama related quote I ever read. I feel it hits the nail on the head regarding simple folks' feelings about our president. It's a compilation from a couple of folks in Iowa:
A few paces away, I catch up with a man named Ron Saucier and a woman who would only identify herself as Mary. Ron says his problem with Obama is the integrity thing. "He exaggerates too much," Ron says. "He's not honest."
"OK," I say. "What does he exaggerate about?"
"Well, like that time he was saying he had a white mother and a white grandmother," he says.
I ask him how this is an exaggeration.
"Well, he was saying . . ." he begins. "As if that qualifies him to . . ."
Despite my repeated prodding, Ron seems unable or unwilling to say aloud exactly what he means. Finally, his friend Mary, a grave-looking blonde with fierce anger lines around her eyes, jumps in, points a finger and blurts out one of the all-time man-on-the-street quotes.
"Look, you either are or you aren't," she says.
"And he aren't," Ron says, nodding with relief.
(FULL STORY: Matt Taibbi, "Full Metal McCain," Rolling Stone--June 6, 2008)
