Joan McCarter in Healthcare Reform: What a Week Daily Kos 08/10/09 also talks about the goon squads for what they are and places the townhall shutdown movement within the context of the overall health care debate.
Our national press is paralized in dealing with something like this. They are so caught in their Beltway Village scripts that they can't report on what anyone can plainly see are Republican mobs overtly trying to prevent Democratic members of Congress from holding public meetings with their constituents without invoking their sacred but empty version of balance. Rachel Martin of ABC News (Health Care Town Hall Debates Stoke Outrage 08/10/09) tells us, "The debate over health care reform is getting louder on both sides."
James Fallows makes a very telling comment in a report about crass Republican dishonesty about Obama's health care reform effort. He quotes from the Washinton Post column by Steve Pearlstein that has gotten quite a bit of deserved attention, Republicans Propagating Falsehoods in Attacks on Health-Care Reform 08/07/09. But he introduces a Pearlstein quote this way:
Pearlstein, a longtime business and financial columnist and reporter (and last year's Pulitzer winner for commentary), is no one's idea of a predictable leftie. Thus when he says things like the following, they have weight [my emphasis]Fallows presumably meant to emphasize that Pearlstein was not someone who regularly trashes the Republican Party. But the wording is striking. Pearlstein says things that need to be taken seriously because he's "no one's idea of a predictable leftie." I don't want to make too much of Fallows wording. But it does seem to betray the standard Village notion that Respectability and Seriousness means not being "a predictable leftie."
I find this kind of thing aggravating to hear when we've got Republican mobs actually shutting down meeting of Congressmemebers with their constituents. As Joan writes in the post linked above:
It shouldn't be a surprise that a political establishment that looks at the fact that the Bush administration, led by Dick Cheney in every venal step, decided to start torturing people picked up in Afghanistan to amass false confessions about connections between bin Laden and Saddam so that they would have their "justification" for their war on choice, with nothing more than a yawn can report as straight across "news" that Sarah Palin thinks Obama is coming to kill her baby. But it still astounds that this is the new "normal." Just unfathomable.Celebrity pundits David Brooks, Erin Burnett, Jon Meacham were on Meet the Press this past Sunday Aug. 9 talking about health care and the Republican mobs. Although do I even need to mention that they didn't call them "Republican mobs"? Here's Meacham:
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. My sense is that if you ask a lot of even very well-informed people what's in this plan, I'm not sure a lot of people could really explain it. And I think that it's an unusual failure on the president's part to execute a kind of public education. I don't think he's made the case for this. And now to go to the insane point from our conservative colleague [Rush Limbaugh], now you have the extremists taking over and it turns into a very predictable, very un-Obama-like fight of the extremes, where you're going to have the folks coming in saying socialism, socialism, socialism. You're going to have the left saying that they're all crazy. And by the time it's over, what's really going to happen? And I think that's--this is, this is the opportunity. The president has an opportunity here to step in and say, "Look, we've all--it's hot, it's August. Let me explain what this plan really is." And I just have--I personally have not understood that.Remarkable. They, the respectable Villagers, are always positioned respetably between "the extremes". There are mobs shutting down Congressional constituent town hall meetings; and there's "the left" criticizing them.
What the [Cheney]? In the Villagers' whacky view of the world, is it only "the left" that is willing to criticize these mob tactics?
It's also very telling that these three "jounalists", along with their lipless host David Gregory, focused their discussion on process issues. After months where Big Pundits openly displayed their boredom at an issue like health care reform, which to celebrity journalists is little more than an annoyance, they talk about how Obama hasn't provided the right kind of leadership and information.
In this case, the Airhead Pundit brigade is hiding behind a claim which actually has some truth in it. Health care reform right now looks like the Big Game for his administration politically. Passing a solid health care reform would put Democratic concepts of active government on a firmer political footing than they've been since the 1960s. If it goes down, I personally would still expect him to try again. But whether he does or not, a failure would start a Republican-friendly feeding frenzy among the Villagers.
In Faith Healing 08/09/09, Digby has some worthwhile thoughts on how the media scripts and the reality of health care reform as a process problem for the Democrats are playing themselves out.
Tags: accountability for torture, republican party
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