Hate Politics in America

Sitting north of the US, I peer across the border and find what is happening in politics down there to be obscene. What I can't believe is that the radical right gets to ride roughshod over the truth and nobody reins them in. Unbelievable.

Here's Paul Krugman's latest op-ed in the NY Times. He tries to grapple with this situation:

“I am in this race because I don’t want to see us spend the next year re-fighting the Washington battles of the 1990s. I don’t want to pit Blue America against Red America; I want to lead a United States of America.” So declared Barack Obama in November 2007, making the case that Democrats should nominate him, rather than one of his rivals, because he could free the nation from the bitter partisanship of the past.

Some of us were skeptical. A couple of months after Mr. Obama gave that speech, I warned that his vision of a “different kind of politics” was a vain hope, that any Democrat who made it to the White House would face “an unending procession of wild charges and fake scandals, dutifully given credence by major media organizations that somehow can’t bring themselves to declare the accusations unequivocally false.”

So, how’s it going?

Sure enough, President Obama is now facing the same kind of opposition that President Bill Clinton had to deal with: an enraged right that denies the legitimacy of his presidency, that eagerly seizes on every wild rumor manufactured by the right-wing media complex.

This opposition cannot be appeased. Some pundits claim that Mr. Obama has polarized the country by following too liberal an agenda. But the truth is that the attacks on the president have no relationship to anything he is actually doing or proposing.

Right now, the charge that’s gaining the most traction is the claim that health care reform will create “death panels” (in Sarah Palin’s words) that will shuffle the elderly and others off to an early grave. It’s a complete fabrication, of course. The provision requiring that Medicare pay for voluntary end-of-life counseling was introduced by Senator Johnny Isakson, Republican — yes, Republican — of Georgia, who says that it’s “nuts” to claim that it has anything to do with euthanasia.

And not long ago, some of the most enthusiastic peddlers of the euthanasia smear, including Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, and Mrs. Palin herself, were all for “advance directives” for medical care in the event that you are incapacitated or comatose. That’s exactly what was being proposed — and has now, in the face of all the hysteria, been dropped from the bill.

Yet the smear continues to spread. And as the example of Mr. Gingrich shows, it’s not a fringe phenomenon: Senior G.O.P. figures, including so-called moderates, have endorsed the lie.

Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, is one of these supposed moderates. I’m not sure where his centrist reputation comes from — he did, after all, compare critics of the Bush tax cuts to Hitler. But in any case, his role in the health care debate has been flat-out despicable.

...

So far, at least, the Obama administration’s response to the outpouring of hate on the right has had a deer-in-the-headlights quality. It’s as if officials still can’t wrap their minds around the fact that things like this can happen to people who aren’t named Clinton, as if they keep expecting the nonsense to just go away.

...

What’s still missing, however, is a sense of passion and outrage — passion for the goal of ensuring that every American gets the health care he or she needs, outrage at the lies and fear-mongering that are being used to block that goal.

So can Mr. Obama, who can be so eloquent when delivering a message of uplift, rise to the challenge of unreasoning, unappeasable opposition? Only time will tell.

The history of the fight for universal medical care in Canada was bitter. But we had some leaders who had the courage to take it on and dish out the rhetoric needed to fend off the crazy claims of the right. Obama hasn't risen to that. That is tragic because it probably means that another generation will be lost before Americans get the kind of modern universal medical care which every other developed country gives its citizens.

The joke, which the crazed right keeps from ordinary Americans, is that you already have a kind of "universal" medical care: when people get so sick that they are in danger of dying, they show up at a hospital for the most expensive care there is and this is paid for by all Americans. Those hospitals don't pick dollars out of a tree to pay for this care. It comes from the government and from jacked-up medical charges. But somehow the Republican right successfully paints "universal" health care as a commie plot. So America will remain pure. And the price to be paid? America will continue to pay nearly twice what every other developed country pays for medical care and America will continue to get worse care, shorter lives, longer waiting lines, and more waste than any other country. Just so the right wing loonies can remain ideologically pure.

After this fight is over, I expect the ideological right to celebrate by attacking flouride in the water. Everybody knows that is a commie plot. Why not let Americans have to tooth decay and false teeth of the Fifties? Oh... there are such fertile fields for the crazy right to attack.