Selling a Lie

It is amazing how the US media never seems to have the will to uncover the lies told by the Republicans. Here's Paul Krugman in a NY Times op-ed doing yeoman's work to set the record straight:

''Don't cut Medicare. The reform bills passed by the House and Senate cut Medicare by approximately $500 billion. This is wrong.'' So declared Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, in a recent op-ed article written with John Goodman, the president of the National Center for Policy Analysis. ...

Now, Mr. Gingrich was just repeating the current party line. Furious denunciations of any effort to seek cost savings in Medicare -- death panels! -- have been central to Republican efforts to demonize health reform. What's amazing, however, is that they're getting away with it.

Why is this amazing? It's not just the fact that Republicans are now posing as staunch defenders of a program they have hated ever since the days when Ronald Reagan warned that Medicare would destroy America's freedom. Nor is it even the fact that, as House speaker, Mr. Gingrich personally tried to ram through deep cuts in Medicare -- and, in 1995, went so far as to shut down the federal government in an attempt to bully Bill Clinton into accepting those cuts.

...

The bottom line, then, is that the crusade against health reform has relied, crucially, on utter hypocrisy: Republicans who hate Medicare, tried to slash Medicare in the past, and still aim to dismantle the program over time, have been scoring political points by denouncing proposals for modest cost savings -- savings that are substantially smaller than the spending cuts buried in their own proposals.

And if Democrats don't get their act together and push the almost-completed reform across the goal line, this breathtaking act of staggering hypocrisy will succeed.

It is pretty clear to me that the Republicans will succeed. The Democrats are pathetic. This is a tragedy. Here's an article by Krugman pointing out that the current course in the US is leading to a spiral of out-of-control costs increases for insurance.