Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) takes Republicans to task for lying to the American people:
When it turns out there are no death panels, when there is no bureaucrat between you and your doctor, when the ways your health care changes seem like a good deal to you, and a pretty smart idea, when the American public sees the discrepancy between what really is, and what they were told by the Republicans, there will be a reckoning. There will come a day of judgment about who was telling the truth.
It may already be coming true. A new CNN/Opinion Research poll shows that support for the health care reform bill has risen six points since early December. And Obama’s approval rating has also increased by six points. Even more telling is only 40% agree with Republicans that the bill is too liberal. My guess is that most people who are against the current health care reform bill are so because either they think it does not go far enough, because they have been influenced by the disinformation campaign against it, or because they believe that Congress has become too deadlocked to do anything meaningful. It will be interesting to see if Democrats are able to use these sentiments against the Republicans, after they actually get the bill passed.
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Call me a cynic, but I don’t think this day of reckoning is coming.
I mean, who called out Reagan for not telling the truth about Medicare?
“Write those letters now. Call your friends, and tell them to write them. If you don’t, this program I promise you will pass just as surely as the sun will come up tomorrow. And behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country, until, one day… we will awake to find that we have socialism. And if you don’t do this, and if I don’t do it, one of these days, you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.”
This is Reagan in 1961 speaking out against Kennedy’s Medicare bill…Medicare–! Fast forward to 2009: there are a heck of a lot of freedom-loving, anti-socialist seniors who dig Medicare and who’d vote for Reagan again if they could. You know what happened? Revisionist history.
Same thing with Social Security…
Just goes to show what the impacts of media propaganda have on ‘democracy’ – what a joke. Rampant misinformation campaigns and ‘representatives’ of the people who are in the pocket of industry. What a sham democracy is, no wonder nobody votes anymore. You never hear that in the media though do you? Like corruption is normal, people expect politicians to be corrupt.
This video has been removed … no doubt by the FBI or whoever
or the link changed…..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAHJt5b5Ex4
While Effis is right about our having become accustomed to propaganda, I don’t think any of us have given due justice to Sheldon Whitehouse’s genuinely moving and well-articulated speech.
I updated the video to a copy that works (for now).
Ok, he makes a few good points but I think it’s unlikely that the public will ‘remember’ that Republicans lied to them and make up all that ‘death panel’ stuff. Media should take care of that but memory is so short these days and there will be other urgent negatives to focus on to dismiss claims that its working better after the bill is passed.
Thoughtful how his characterization of the senate is reminiscent of that other senate just before the fall of the Roman empire …..