Over at ECC, I read Greg's soothing call for "objectivity" on the GOP-led efforts to thwart health-care reform:
You see, there really are two sides to every story. That doesn't mean that you can not 'pick' one of those sides, strongly believe you are right, and actually be right. It just means that every time you take a position on a matter, you had better understand that there is a different position somewhere that someone else thinks is right....
...We've never, ever seen anyone one with a leftist agenda disrupt any sort of a government meeting, have we? That's because they're nice, and people on the right are "violent" and "authoritarian." Remember a few years ago when there was a study or a few studies claiming that people leaning right are dumber than liberals? (By the way, Mark has pointed me to "studies" too...no doubt funded by tax dollars!) Who was the last Republican Presidential candidate who was not generally mocked as stupid? Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, these men are geniuses. Reagan, an amiable dunce. President Bush (W), a Yale graduate is an idiot.
Yes...how...how...reasonable! And it's...true...sort of...
But wait. What's the "other" side of the story? The outrage over the recent spate of Republican-led protests isn't about acknowledging conservative opposition to Democratic health care reform. It's about a concerted effort - by quasi-legal means - to kill reform. Not to alter it, not to influence it, not to offer compromise, or to put forth a conservative solution - or even a coherent worldview, competing ideas, an alluring image of what's right and proper. No, this is plain, politics, brutish and ugly, not meant to open the doors of democracy and debate, but to slam them closed.
And this isn't some kind of tit-for-tat: the disturbances of Baucus' committee hearings on health-care by single-payer advocates was in favor of widening debate in the hopes of forcing representatives to at least consider a powerful and beautiful idea. Those disturbances weren't thuggish or malicious or wrapped in lies and racist, nativist fury.
It's a prominent conservative repeating AM-radio canards to her gullible followers. It's Republican political operatives masquerading as "ordinary moms" at protests to foster the illusion of a seething mass. It's death threats made to union members. It's a anti-health-care-reform activist urging his followers to "carry" and "hurt badly" ACORN/SEIU members that oppose them at protests. It's a concerted effort by the Republican party to deliberately mislead Americans as to what the health care legislation actually contains.
What's it all about, anyway?
There are days when I look at the modesty of the plan -- which would cover 40 million people, impose some small taxes on the rich, curb the worst excesses of the insurance industry and not affect the overwhelming majority of people at all -- and the pitch of the rhetoric and really wish that the plan on the table was actually worth this much controversy and rage. It is evidence for the view that the difference between proposing something really ambitious and something pretty modest is that the modest plan gets you more industry support. The political mobilization and polarization will be the same either way.
Back to the Steven Pearlstein op-ed. "The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers, on the effort to reform the health-care system," writes Pearlstein, "have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage....They've become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems."
After describing what's actually in the various proposals (as opposed to the blustering hyperbole and lies supplied by the right), Pearlstein concludes:
Health reform is a test of whether this country can function once again as a civil society -- whether we can trust ourselves to embrace the big, important changes that require everyone to give up something in order to make everyone better off. Republican leaders are eager to see us fail that test. We need to show them that no matter how many lies they tell or how many scare tactics they concoct, Americans will come together and get this done.
If health reform is to be anyone's Waterloo, let it be theirs.
Sadly, the likely reform will be as Klein described it, "pretty modest," and not "worth this controversey and rage." It's hard to muster the troops to support something devoid of meaning and largely inconsequential. Unless, of course, you poison the troops with birth certificates and Red-baiting. |
