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Lies
That Blind
Polls
prior to President Obama’s recent address to Congress on health
care showed that roughly half the people of the United States
believed demonstrable lies about their own government. Some
of the falsehoods outrage common sense, but they were and
are believed.
Around 55 percent believe that a proposed health-care bill
will give insurance coverage to illegal immigrants. In fact,
there is specific language in the bill forbidding exactly
that. About 50 percent believe that the government plans to
use taxpayer dollars to pay for abortions. Actually, current
law bans federal funds from being used to pay for abortions
except in cases of rape or incest, or to save the mother’s
life, and there are no plans to change that. Somewhat less
than half the population believes that the proposed overhaul
will bring about the government’s “complete” takeover of the
health-care system. There are no such plans, neither in the
White House nor in Congress. Astonishingly, almost half the
citizens of the United States believe their government will
coldly ration health care and set up “death panels” to decide
when “to pull the plug on Grandma.” That last phrase is Republican
Sen. Chuck Grassley’s contribution to the health-care debate.
A lot of these lies are spread by Republican “Tea Party” yahoos,
those semi-paranoid folks with perpetual grievances, who turn
up at political gatherings to detonate like jihadists. Congressman
Barney Frank correctly characterized the speech of one of
these people as “vile, contemptible nonsense.”
The most successful lying, though, is done at the higher levels
of the Republican Party. For example, “death panels” were
invented by charismatic Sarah Palin. House Minority Leader
John Boehner claims that the Democratic health bill will ration
health care. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas claims that health-care
reform is a Democratic “power grab.” Sen. Mike Johanns of
Nebraska asserts that taxpayer dollars would be used to pay
for abortions. And so it goes.
These falsehoods are believed by so many citizens because
the Republican Party has relentlessly attacked the concept
of government itself. There is now such deep and widespread
mistrust of government that almost half the populace will
credit any lie, no matter what it is, so long as it confirms
the belief that their government is stupid and evil.
Republicans, trapped in the sunny amber of ideology, still
believe in unregulated free markets. It’s been just about
a year since the world’s economy collapsed because underregulated
financial institutions, working in unregulated markets, built
a rickety skyscraper of rotten financial instruments. Surveying
the wreckage of firms such as Citibank and Bank of America,
brokerage houses like Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch, titanic
insurance companies such as AIG, big manufacturers including
Chrysler and General Motors, and thousands of smaller businesses,
conservatives still insist that the free market will do the
best job in overhauling our health-care system. The fact that
our grotesquely inadequate health care is the product of the
free market doesn’t matter to an ideologue.
When President Ronald Reagan famously said “Government is
not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,”
he wasn’t inventing a new principle. He was crystallizing,
in a powerful phrase, the Republicans’ many different ways
of objecting to government. It’s a measure of how successful
earlier conservatives had been in promoting those ideas that
even his opponents regarded the phrase as brilliant political
rhetoric. No one saw it as bizarre.
But it is bizarre. Reagan said those words in his first inaugural
address, and he wasn’t merely attacking Democrats in particular,
nor bad bureaucrats in general. He used a phrase designed
for an anarchist to assault the government of which he had
just become president. It was self-evident to the founders
of this nation that governments are instituted to secure certain
God-given rights. But in the conservative view, that’s best
left to private, for-profit business.
Reagan once wisecracked that the nine most terrifying words
in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m
here to help.” At this moment, Republicans appear to have
succeeded in demolishing the idea that our government can
aid us by, say, providing the benefits to all citizens that
are enjoyed by those insured by Medicare. Their decades-long
assault on government and their recent paranoid lies about
health-care proposals have created such mistrust that some
citizens now fear for their children when the president of
the United States urges them to attend school and study hard.
We have lost far more than a health plan.
—Gene
Mirabelli
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