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Truth and lies—a difficult distinction

A few days ago, The Morning Call detailed Pennsylvania residents’ interest in and confusion about the issues surrounding health care reform.

And while I’ve previously made my feelings known about the behavior of Republicans through all of this, it was a comment about “Republicans’ success at pointing out problems with Obama’s plans” that gave me pause.

Pointing out problems? Is that what you call what conservatives, corporate shills and their minions were doing all summer long at those town hall meetings?

Threats of death panels, Soviet-style rationing and forced euthanasia are not “problems,” they are outright lies.

Mindless demonstrators showing up at orchestrated rallies, sometimes armed, carrying signs comparing health care reform to Nazi death camps and the President of the United States to Hitler, Satan or an African witch doctor are not “problems,” they are abominations.

And a roomful of senior citizens screaming at the top of their lungs that they don’t want any part of government-run health care, but that the government had better keep its hands off of their Medicare, well, that’s just sheer stupidity.

Just for the record, none of the plans making their way through the Congress has ever been “Obama’s plan.” The administration, while expressing generalizations about what they would like health care reform measures to include, has basically turned over the responsibility of working out those details to Democrats on Capitol Hill, a move that has been criticized by many for making the whole process more complicated and drawn out than it could have been had the president taken the lead.

And while this wasn’t the focus of the piece in question, the story glosses over that, up until a couple of weeks ago, Republicans didn’t even have a reform plan of their own. Their only plan was to delay and derail Democratic proposals in an effort to maintain the status quo for their corporate donors and damage the administration in an attempt to regain power for themselves. And when House Minority Leader John Boehner finally did release the so-called GOP “plan,” it turned out that it would result in even more Americans becoming uninsured.

While Republicans have again demonstrated through all of this their willingness to obfuscate, distort, lie and throw the welfare of Americans under the proverbial bus when necessary in an attempt to achieve personal and political gain, often with the assistance of those who’ve been used and exploited by them in the past inexplicably coming back for more, if even the media is incapable of making the distinction between truth and lies, what chance to everyday Americans have?

November 20, 2009 at 10:30 am

--Tammy Alonso

Tags: Health Care Reform

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