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Want to know the latest RNC talking points, but don’t feel like listening to Lou "Birther" Dobbs, Rush "Birther" Limbaugh, or Glenn "Really Birther" Beck? Go to www.politico.com, where the smears have the coarse and overtly racist language stripped from them before they see print (or rather, pixels). There are plenty of examples to choose from, but this post is going to confine itself to taking apart just one, Glenn Thrush’s opus "5 Things to Watch During Recess".
Thrush’s First Thing: "When your product is hard to sell — and health care reform has proven to be the Edsel in the White House showroom — it’s not a bad idea to single out a bad guy, and fast." Thrush links to a prior Politico piece to back up his "Edsel" claim. What neither his piece nor the earlier piece mentions is that one of the two polls cited in the earlier story, the July 29 CBS/New York Times poll, shows that Americans trust Obama to come up with a good health care plan far, far more than they trust the Republicans on health care: 55% trust Obama, compared to a measly 26% level of trust for Congressional Republicans.
Thrush’s Second Thing: "If there’s one metric that may determine the outcome of the whole fight, it’s President Barack Obama’s once stratospheric approval rating, which has been falling along with the popularity of the health care plan." Umm, except that the stratospheric approval rating is still pretty stratospheric, and in line with the typical leveling-off most new presidents experience in the first months after inauguration. And again, one of the very polls The Politico has been using to push its RNC-approved storyline on Obama’s popularity is the same one that shows that Americans trust him over Congressional Republicans on health by a more than 2-to-1 margin.
Thrush’s Third Thing: "The Republicans have a relatively easy task in fighting health care reform — paint a vision of a post-reform health care apocalypse, rationed services and power-mad government bureaucrats taking away individual choice and even determining the quality of end-of-life care for seniors."
Ahem. The Republicans, even with massive assists from RNC talking-points transmitters like Rush Limbaugh and The Politico, are, as I’ve noted twice already, far less trusted on this issue than is President Obama. What part of that is so hard for Glenn Thrush to understand?
Thrush’s Fourth Thing: Ooooga Booooga! Tea Baggers Gonna get ya, Democrats!
At least Thrush here acknowledges that the off-the-rails tea baggers are at best a double-edged sword for the GOP. There’s already been one instance of a mock lynching of a Congressman, and we can expect the crazy to really ramp up; the scuttlebutt on the far-right underground, according to the folks I know who monitor these people, is that they are planning really insane, and possibly violent, acts for the months of August and September. Does the GOP really want to see more things like the Nancy Genovese incident?
Thrush’s Fifth Thing: Oh, woe! Max Baucus’ dream of Grover Norquist date rape bipartisanship is in trouble! What will the Democrats do?
How about passing one of the bills that, unlike Baucus’ baby, isn’t a co-op sellout and actually has a real public option in it? Then they could reconcile the bugger and Bob’s your uncle. Sheesh, do I have to think of everything for these people?
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Addendum to point the 3rd: Remind Thrush that we already have rationed health care and decisions made by greedy insurance companies
Sorry, which bill has the “real” public option in it? We keep asking about that — to no avail. Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?
Little do the Gopers realize that the violence that will probably happen at one or more of these tea bag socials, will do more harm to those opposed to reform, than it will the public option.
Speaking of Public Options, don’t we already own an insurance company? I think it’s called AIG.
The Decider revealed the Republics’ constant strategy once: “You Have To Keep Repeating Things To Catapult The Propaganda”. Perhaps they should bring him out of mothballs to help.
even a blind pig finds an acorn sometimes, and the GOOPers are right on one thing – the plan is an Edsel . . . though maybe I could update that to Obamacare being a Pontiac Aztec.
mandated enrollments to the profit-driven insurance oligopoly! what a nightmare.
That would be this:
(more at TPM
Politico is either stupid or Politico is bought and paid for by the sleazy astroturf ‘Swiftboat’ cretins of the Republican party.
I find it interesting that the folks who started Politico are ex-Washington Post toasties.
Acorns did not fall too far from the tree, neh?
Politico is owned and operated by the Albritton family, who owned Riggs Bank, bankers to despots, tyrants, drug dealers, and Bushes for generations.
Chris Matthews is no slouch, either (paraphrase, just now): “Aren’t people worried about this end-of-life counseling, haven’t they convinced themselves it is really about euthanasia?” No attempt to clarify what it is, just putting it out there, right, Tweety?
Why choose?
He never left. Just because he’s not on the TEEVEE doesn’t mean he’s not here.
Aside from neo-fascists posing as Republicans, the corporate media is the problem.
No kidding!
It’s amazing how much weird stuff comes into your mailbox when one of your closest friend’s blood relatives runs a gun shop. It was really interesting before he figured out how to do blind copies; he was one of the habitual right-wing e-mail smear forwarders, as are his buddies, and none of them ever used the blind-copy function either. I once traced an e-mail smear all the way back, about fifteen or so forwards, to the College Republican who’d first sent it.
Glenn Greenwald sussed that back in May of 2007:
Oh, yes: Allbritton was a close personal friend of Pinochet. But there’s more:
The threat of violence is rising, no doubt. And all it takes is one…
Exactly. The prospect of another Oklahoma City or anthrax attack is not out of the question. Hell, in 2003 there was William Krar and his girlfriend in Noonday, Texas, cranking out cyanide, suitcase and pipe bombs (among other things) and distributing them to right-wing militia groups nationwide; he only got caught because one of his deliveries got sent to the wrong address. Never heard of him or his wide network of like-minded buddies, right? Yet when some lone idiot with a Koran thinks he can take down the Brooklyn Bridge with a simple blowtorch, the GOP/Media Complex gets its undies in a bunch.
Oh, and here’s another poll that has bad news for the GOP — news that you won’t be reading at Politico, much less seeing on the evening news or hearing on drive-time radio.
Like it!
Why, damn it, why is it that nobody on TV mentions that most Americans support health care reform? It’s a madness that’s infected every newsroom; nobody mentions the damn polls!