Health Wars (8/6/09)

I'm telling ya, a really good psychiatrist could make a career out of analyzing this woman's dreams:

I can't top AP's analysis, which is first rate when he's not stuck in Eeyore mode:

Riddle me this: Isn’t the point of astroturfing to create the perception that your viewpoint is more popular among the grassroots than it really is? It’s a tactic to boost your legitimacy, in other words: Good, hard-working Americans have seen the wisdom of your position and rallied passionately to your side. But if this is all a big ‘turf op orchestrated by the GOP, why on earth would Republicans be sending people out carrying signs with swastikas? There’s no faster way to delegitimize yourself as a crank, even if the swastika on the sign is meant as a derogatory symbol for the Democrats’ socialist aspirations. It’s Godwin’s law in action. Which means Pelosi’s theory is that the GOP has organized a massive covert PR campaign … aimed at discrediting itself? This is the steel-trap mind that’s helping to plan your medical coverage in the decades ahead.

Tiny little troubling detail: there's no evidence, anecdotal or especially video, of any such swastika perephenalia. Which any smart Dem would realize in a heartbeat and tailor their accusations to reflect the fact that these fake Nazi plants are REALLY covering up their swastika tattooes underneath those Armani duds.

You know, like these sharp dressers who can barely repress their goosestepping behind alibis of leg tremors, Parkinsons, and restless leg syndrome:

Oh, wait, I'm sorry, these are the geezers whom Red Barry is planning to eventually throw out into the snow with a pallet of Alpo to keep them company when he takes their Medicare away from them. My mistake.

Which didn't prevent the New Hampshire Democrat Party from "interpreting" the grey lineup above as being representative of "thugs" who need to be "pushed back" from "disrupting" Dr. Chicago's "gracious" health care "gift" that (ahem) "may" someday wind up with a Barrycrat issuing orders to the aforevidded blueheads to report to their nearest "end of care" clinic for their Final Injection.

And Obamunists wonder (privately, of course) why they're fourteen points in the, um, red on health care with voters 55 and older even in polls not taken by Scott Rasmussen.

In fact, that may be the most breathtaking marvel amongst a host of them this week. You haven't heard any Dem, from the White House on down, uttering a peep about polling, have ya? Because the trend of EVERY poll is dramatically downward, and the BarryCare debacle is the millstone 'round their necks. Yet after having dug a sizeable political hole for themselves already, their reflexive, instictual reaction is to attack the voters, many of whom hung the chad for them and their tin god only nine short months ago. How DARE they act like citizens entitled to have a say in their own fate, much less that of their country! Don't they know their place by now?!?

Evidently the rather day-glo-obvious-to-everybody-but-them insanity constituent-defecation is dimly occurring to individual Donks here and there, judging by Arkansas Democrat Senator Blanche Lincoln's lunge for the PR Bounty picker-uppers:

“It’s so sad, because it’s diminishing to the process, it’s diminishing to our outcome,” Lincoln said in a conference call with reporters. “I think it’s sad that they choose to do that. I think it’s un-American and disrespectful.”

A few hours later, Lincoln issued the following statement: “Although I do believe that some of these protesters are disrespectful of other citizens in the audience who truly want to ask questions about health care, I shouldn’t have used the term ‘un-American.’ I support the right of every Arkansan to speak out and have their voices heard. I would just ask that we all continue to work in a constructive way to rebuild our economy and fine-tune out health care system so it works for all of us.”…

Betcha didn't know Senator Lincoln is up for reelection next November, didja? Just like you deduced without having to ask that she doesn't really believe that ordinary American citizens exercising their constitutional rights to free speech, free assembly, and petitioning their government for redress of grievances - all overtly enumerated rights in the founding text, BTW - are "unAmerican," and hasn't ever since she got doused with the fountain of fecal matter that hit the fan precisely "a few" hours earlier. Linc's colleagues Ben Cardin and Claire McCaskill managed to avert such verbal incontinence, and neither of them are up until 2012.

Blasphemers. They, too, will taste the wrath of the Chosen One:

Top White House aides gave Senate Democrats a recess battle plan on Thursday, arming the lawmakers with tips for avoiding disastrous town hall meetings while showing them polling on popular aspects of the reform effort…

They showed video clips of the confrontational town halls that have dominated the media coverage, and told senators to do more prep work than usual for their public meetings by making sure their own supporters turn out, senators and aides said.

And they screened TV ads and reviewed the various campaigns by critics of the Democratic plan.

“If you get hit, we will punch back twice as hard,” Messina said, according to an official who attended the meeting…

“They are just helping us understand the fringe that is trying to mess up our meetings,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV).

Check that second vid above. It doesn't get any more innocuous and Norman Rockwellesque than that, Senator Pencil-Neck. If people who, in Jim Geraghty's phrase, "look like they've received birthday greetings from Willard Scott," are now defined as "the fringe," what does that make you and your fellow bottom-feeders? Charles Manson clones?

It's always tempting in such moments to get rhetorically carried away oneself, and it is prudent to keep ones emotions under wraps lest one partisanly overplay one's analysis - a vice to which, astonishingly though it may be to you, even I have fallen victim in the past. But there really does seem to be a watershed, even epochal moment coming. Barack Obama has put his administration and its congressional allies on a collision course with the American people over his centerpiece domestic objective. Put even more baldly, he has declared war - politically, at least so far - on his own country. If he can batter, bludgeon, and bully the dissident elements of his own camp into obeisant submission and succeed in shoving this salami-sized poison pill down our throats, he wins the war because he will have taken away not just our health care, but a great deal of our popular sovereignty as voters along with it. The choice will be stark: vote for him and his party or, without much exaggeration, you will die. But if the "Blue Dogs" decide that B.O. is on a kamikaze run on which they would prefer not to accompany him, the bill goes down in the same flames that its HillaryCare predecessor did, and....

What then? Obama will have sacrificed his "hopenchange" mask and burned every bridge to every voter he bilked into electing him last November. Even with the superluminal velocity at which political time passes, would self-reinvention as a Clintonoid triangulating centrist even possible? Or could he just bide his time, counting on the ACORNized 2010 census to gerrymander his party back the power it loses next year and himself into a second term three years from now?

Or is he simply so blinded by a lifetime of extremist sychophants worshipping him like Caligula could only have dreamed of that he's not capable of believing that he can ever be defeated? And if he does come to see defeat as a real possibility, will that simply drive him to ever greater extremes of repression?

It would seem that we already have the beginnings of our answer: