SELECT YOUR VOTE

Lanny Davis: The Dangerous Joining of the Far right and Far Left

Has there ever been a better example, at least in recent years, proving that the extreme left and extreme right share more in common than those on they claim to be on their own side of the ideological divide when it comes to the issue of health care?

– on the far right — the shouters shouting down other people who wish to speak at town meetings, whacko "birthers," and liars inventing "death panels" and obscenely and recklessly mentioning Adolph Hitler and Nazi symbols to scare people; irresponsible radio and TV talkers who use hate words and name-calling as a substitute for debating the issues civilly; and

–on the far left, including the most vicious posters on the so-called liberal blogosphere, threatening businesses with one or more executives who offer personal ideas for achieving national health care reform different from the Administration’s or Democratic congressional leaders’ versions (full disclosure: I support all of President Obama’s core principles for national health care legislation, though I still have many unanswered questions); hateful emails, phone calls, blogs, and personal attacks, distorting alternative ideas different from the Administration’s approach and attacking the motives of those airing them; and intolerance for anyone who disagrees, including personal invective and demonization of those with different views.

When the far left and the far right join in the Politics of Hate and Demonization, it is time for the vast center-left and center-right of this country to speak up and call them out equally.

It is time for responsible liberal and conservative political leaders and talk show hosts to denounce these extremist haters who stand in direct opposition to President Obama’s call for respectful discourse and debate and who threaten our democratic traditions and institutions.

Silence is no longer acceptable by responsible liberals towards the reckless far left or by responsible conservatives towards the reckless far right.

Silence is complicity.

>>Fred Barbash: I second this. See also David Biespiel.

Brian Katulis: The morning began here in Kabul with a massive explosion near NATO headquarters in one of the most secure parts of the city. I’m here as part of an international delegation organized by Democracy International to observe the presidential and provincial elections next week (DI has an excellent website on the elections here.

Security tops a long list of concerns about these elections. This is probably one of the most dangerous and complicated elections the world has ever seen - as Ambassador Richard Holbrooke said in a press briefing last month, "It’s an extraordinary thing to hold an election in the middle of a war." Indeed. At a small gathering in a private home last night, I met journalists and aid workers who have years of experience in the country and no one could predict what’s going to happen in the next few days.

>>Fred Barbash: See story on this explosion.

Who’s Saying What:  

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Dean Baker:  It is remarkable how the media insist on squeezing the health care debate into its framing, even when contradictory evidence is being screamed into its face. The media framing is that we have an ideological battle between those who want a larger role for government in health care (the Obamites) and those who don’t (the townhallers).
However, if any of the reporters ever listened for a second to what the angry people at the townhalls are screaming, they would realize it has nothing to do with a small government role in health care. In fact they are arguing for just the opposite.
The "death panel" story, which obviously has great salience among the townhall crew, even if it has no basis in reality, is that the government will not pay for certain types of health care. That is probably worth repeating a few times so that even a Washington Post editor can understand it.The death panels are about the government not paying for care. In other words, the townhallers are upset because they believe that the Obama plan will cause Medicare and other government programs to not pay for types of care that they currently cover. This means the townhallers want a bigger role for government — more government spending on health care — not a smaller role. This fact may be inconvenient for reporters that can’t understand the world except as a battle between big government liberals and small government conservatives, but it is the reality. They should start getting it right.

David Biespiel: With respectful political discourse all but a fantasy in today’s polemical era–though the Arena, thanks to our revered editor, is a substantive calm in a continuous internet of partisan storms–I’ve wondered lately if maybe, just maybe, the art of poetry might, just might, catalyze a more civilized political engagement among us.

Recently, I read–I won’t say where–one conservative pundit chastise his liberal opponent for ascribing "venal motives" to all conservatives for supporting the profits of health insurance corporations. However just a few days earlier that very same conservative called all liberals "vicious" for attacking Governor Palin during the general election in 2008 — which, from where I sit, wasn’t vicious but sexist. It was the uncharitable comments made by prominent advisers inside the McCain campaign that were vicious.

The partisan culture war is real. And: It is ill-mannered. Mockery and vilification are pre-eminent–political language today often seems little more than thrust and parry, which likely is an understatement. That’s where poetry and politics part ways. But poetry and politics share an interest in rhetoric, for sure. The former is for emotional and psychic transformation, while the the latter is for civic persuasion, sometimes manipulation, certainly power.

Today, it’s not enough to question the ideas of the other. Their motives must be suspect, even amoral. Soapbox conservatives tag all liberals as elites, while bullhorn liberals gnash that all conservatives are racists. To both I say, bunk. Blue collar union families are hardly elitists; independent suburbanites who voted to elect Barack Obama are not racists. It is not that hard, as your mother or former kindergarten teacher would remind you, to listen respectfully and speak with generosity and fellowship. Though it’s not hard either sometimes to fail at so simple a calling.It’s not that the political center cannot hold, as W.B. Yeats once feared. It’s that the center is silenced. Inflammatory words (the most recent, "death panels") dominate. Reasoned thought based on human experience has been almost banished–and it has flat-lined on political entertainment TV shows and in the blogosphere.

So I ask, can poetry do anything about that? If poets, as Percy Bysshe Shelley says, are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, then might poems be our unacknowledged laws? What is the future of our patchwork American cultures–yes, cultures–if the language of civic engagement is only a nasty dagger for continuous partisan warfare?

In answer, if you’ll indulge me–because everyday on this page I turn from poetry to address politics–a poem by Wilfred Owen, an English poet and soldier, widely regarded as one of the leading poets of the Great War era (he died just seven days before the November 11, 1918 armistice between Britain and Germany). His poem "Strange Meeting" captures a sudden encounter in the afterlife between two soldiers who had killed each other in battle the day before. It fiercely dramatizes the difficult idea that we destroy our mutual spirit, fair competitiveness, generosity, and republic of thought if we always treat those whose ideas differ from ours as only venal or vicious.

"Strange Meeting" by Wilfred Owen

It seemed that out of the battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which Titanic wars had groined.
Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall;
By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.
With a thousand fears that vision’s face was grained;
Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
"Strange, friend," I said, "Here is no cause to mourn."
"None," said that other, "save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also, I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour,
And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.
For by my glee might many men have laughed,
And of my weeping something has been left,
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
Now men will go content with what we spoiled,
Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress.
None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.
Courage was mine, and I had mystery,
Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery:
To miss the march of this retreating world
Into vain citadels that are not walled.
Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels,
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.
I would have poured my spirit without stint
But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.
Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.
I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now …"

Steve Steckler: Obama’s Counterproductive Counterattack: Why Arguing A Bad Case Will Only Inflame The Jury

Yesterday President Obama began his town hall counteroffensive in Montana, perhaps hoping to ignite a prairie fire against their senator, the most reasoned Democratic health care voice in Congress. Meanwhile, the AFL-CIO plans to spend at least $15 million in its campaign to preserve the cost-inflating tax subsidy of employer-based insurance and its hope of having someone besides its members pay to cover the uninsured. Not to be left out, MoveOn.org announced a viral disinformation campaign of its own. Their mutual folly is compounded by a shared delusion, namely that opposition to the House bills is rooted in either misinformation or aversion to reform itself. They are wrong.
The anger originates from the fundamentals of the public option, its step-wise and subsidized hegemony over their private insurance market, and the emerging recognition that the plan’s avowed cost control can only be achieved as it has in the countries lionized by its supporters: budget-based limitation of the range, frequency and timeliness of medical services.It is a frequent Democratic tactic of this political debate and a symptom of liberal vanity in general to characterize all opponents as dumb, duped or duplicitous. While Obama and other House bill supporters may hope that using a softer voice will finally make an apparently unconvincing argument convincing, others, including MoveOn and the like, won’t be able to help themselves because they really DO believe that efforts to stop a replication of the Medicare fiscal debacle is just an insurance industry plot. The tone-deaf quality of their conviction and their inability to appreciate the true source of concern is guaranteed to inflame the fast-growing protest.

Leading With Their Chin

Obama and House bill supporters have hurt themselves and the overall cause of reform in numerous ways, but here are my top five:

1. Cost Control By Any Other Name: First, they gratuitously emphasized the need for cost control and then proffered laughably weak explanations of how a public option would accomplish it without using the same or worse gatekeeper techniques to which its anti-insurance industry campaign (e.g., weepy testimonials of denied care in carefully staged town hall meetings) has been directed. Electronic recordkeeping will be nice, but it hardly requires a government health plan, unless one has a fondness for vacuum tubes. And insurer profit, net of taxes, is a negligible portion of total health care costs. That leaves limiting services or making lower-paid government employees of high-paid medical professionals. Americans are clear they don’t like the first one and Obama won’t talk about the second.

2. A Dishonest Claim About Honesty: Obama has said repeatedly that the biggest reason for a public option is to “keep private insurers honest.” The obvious assumption in that statement is that private insurers are not honestly competing with each other, that they are colluding to set premiums at higher levels and/or limit coverage to lower levels than a truly competitive market would achieve. Yet not once since Obama’s inauguration has he asked Eric Holder and the Justice Department to investigate such collusion. Is it because it doesn’t exist, and therefore there is no need for a public option?

3. Revealing and Inexplicable Silence: House bill supporters have been revealingly silent on two huge issues that are the top concerns of employers and doctors, respectively, one of them related to Item #2 above: the ability to purchase insurance across state lines and modest medical malpractice reform. The opposition to malpractice reform can be traced to the Democratic party’s steel-cable linkage to the medical tort bar, but opposition to interstate purchases of health insurance is simply puzzling, especially in light of Obama’s competition argument.

4. Our Way or the Highway: They pretend against all logic that portability, broadened coverage, cost mitigation and coverage of pre-existing conditions can only be had through a federal government plan, yet numerous health policy organizations and many moderate Democrats have offered counterproposals that do exactly that. In fact, it is possible to have a public option that accomplishes none of these goals! Accordingly, saying the public option is the only way to reform health care is like claiming the only way to remove an appendix is with a chain saw.

5. Medicare or Bust: The collapse of the first four arguments is invariably followed by a passionate offering of a fifth, that everyone likes Medicare and that the public option is the same as offering Medicare to everyone. This pitch is especially startling coming from Democrats, since Obama has already fingered Medicare’s relentless cost growth (ignoring Social Security for the moment), including a double-digit increase last year, as one of the greatest fiscal threats the country has ever faced (before Obama’s presidency ends, Medicare will become a large and direct draw on the federal budget). Moreover, doctors and hospitals have complained for years that Medicare reimbursements do not cover their full costs, forcing them to shift the residual to privately-insured patients and to bill more aggressively. Finally, Medicare has consistently blown past the worst-case cost projections made at each “reform” interval of the past forty years. Why should anyone believe the Administration’s budget claims about a clone, especially when they’ve been so reluctant to say how the original will be reformed? If public option supporters are relying on the Medicare example to sway informed voters, their cause is already lost.

Good Versus Evil, or Just Power Politics?

At some point in their attempt to cast the debate as one merely between good and evil, Obama, AFL-CIO town hall reps, and even MoveOn zombies will be confronted – as the town halls are starting to do – with the inconsistency of their argument, mismatch between problem and solution, and pretense that new millions can achieve unfettered access to care at no expense or service diminution to the currently-insured or middle class taxpayers. Persisting in these lines of attack, especially the one that slanders any opposition to the House bills as opposition to reform itself, will surely energize and enlarge the public movement on behalf of a centrist alternative, which the House bills demonstrably are not.

Americans are beginning to see that a public option is the threatening tip of an ideological iceberg, an unnecessary diversion from real and affordable reform. We were promised honesty, but so far neither the arguments nor the numbers associated with them have added up. Already, on equally critical numbers just five months after they were released, Obama’s budget and deficit projections have been exposed as an optimistic deception. Americans are justifiably worried that the federal government cannot claw its way out of the projected red ink already on the books no matter how high it raises taxes on “the rich.” They worry that Obama is fooling himself if not them on all manner of fiscal initiatives, and that the same fudging is being used to sell a health care plan. Low as the Republicans’ credibility is right now, this Congress’s and this Administration’s is eroding even faster. Like a Madoff lawyer pleading that his client hadn’t really meant to defraud investors, they insult the jury each time they make their case for the public option.

Victory Is Still Within Obama’s Reach

Obama’s window of opportunity to claim a health care victory, to be able to boast of having achieved coverage for the involuntarily uninsured, significantly greater competition, increased consumer choice and redirected cost incentives, will only be open for another few weeks. Will his liberal minions force him to go down with the public option Titanic, its flawed design and extravagant boasts exposed by town hall meetings and drowned by its sponsors’ hubris, or will he embrace an honest reform that achieves all of his stated goals without Pelosi’s and Waxman’s expansionist baggage? Like most Americans, I’d much rather have the President succeed.

Bradley A. Blakeman: David Axelrod, the Senior Advisor to the President of the United States of America has now been reduced to the Spam Czar. A friend of mine forwarded to me the following unsolicited and unwanted spam email from Axelrod with regard to health care and town hall meetings:

THE WHITE HOUSE

“Dear Friend,

This is probably one of the longest emails I’ve ever sent, but it could be the most important.Across the country we are seeing vigorous debate about health insurance reform. Unfortunately, some of the old tactics we know so well are back — even the viral emails that fly unchecked and under the radar, spreading all sorts of lies and distortions.

As President Obama said at the town hall in New Hampshire, “where we do disagree, let’s disagree over things that are real, not these wild misrepresentations that bear no resemblance to anything that’s actually been proposed.”

So let’s start a chain email of our own. At the end of my email, you’ll find a lot of information about health insurance reform, distilled into 8 ways reform provides security and stability to those with or without coverage, 8 common myths about reform and 8 reasons we need health insurance reform now.

Right now, someone you know probably has a question about reform that could be answered by what’s below. So what are you waiting for? Forward this email.

Thanks,
David

David Axelrod
Senior Adviser to the President

P.S. We launched www.WhiteHouse.gov/realitycheck <http://www.whitehouse.gov/realitycheck/?e=11&amp;ref=text0> this week to knock down the rumors and lies that are floating around the internet. You can find the information below, and much more, there. For example, we’ve just added a video of Nancy-Ann DeParle from our Health Reform Office tackling a viral email head on”.

Had Karl Rove, (who was the Senior Advisor to President George W. Bush), sent out blast emails to millions of Americans complaining about the publics reaction to the President’s policies and encouraged citizens to chain mail his email, he would be strung up by the Democrats. There would have been calls for investigations and for his removal.

The White House has a lot of explaining to do. How did Axelrod get the email addresses of the persons he sent this email to? How many emails were sent out? Who made the decision to do this? What is the White House doing with the email lists and the information that was gathered? What information do they have on Americans they sent emails to beyond just their email addresses. Did they pay for lists? If so, whom did they pay and how much was spent?

I find it very troubling that the most senior and trusted advisor to the President would be reduced to the Billy Mays pitchman for the White House. What’s next? Will they be selling “Orange Glo” and “Oxy-Clean” on the White House Website?

>>Fred Barbash: On this subject, see this Fox News item.

Fred Barbash:  

>>Fred Barbash: