For those wondering how the Neocons roll, it is pretty simple. They pass out their talking points. Wendell Potter has shown how he did it when he was with Cigna. The GOP picks up the points from the lobbyist and then passes them out to their loyal commentators and wholly-owned news organizations like Fox News and anchors like Lou Dobbs on CNN. They eventually filter down to all the lesser Right Wing talk-radio scum and even filter down to the Right-Wing sewer-dwellers on the Internet.
If you were on another planet recently and haven’t seen or heard the kinds of things written and spoken about a President and the lies, heightened and increased by the amounts of money being spent by the Health Care Lobby, then buckle up. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. There is an entire plan that will try to kill health care, from the big guns all the way down to the small ones. Which brings up Michelle Malkin.
Michelle Malkin is a right wing speaker, author and blogger. To give you an idea of who she is, she wrote a book that took the position that the government internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War was justified. She apparently figured that being an Asian-American herself would help her credibility and therefore the sale of her book. As a Right-Winger, she apparently feels that she is allowed to simply neglect all the information that does not prove her point.
For example, during the Supreme Court considerations of the reasons for internment raised in the Korematsu case, documents showed that racism in the military (and probably also impatience with tracking down spies at such a critical time) in the early 40s played a very large part in the internment of perhaps the most patriotic of all our various ethnic groups! Certainly the 442nd, a Japanese unit, proved that contention. As a very highly decorated unit with some spectacular successes, they were extremely brave and Patriotic and willing to die in large numbers for their country. As to the Japanese-Americans being spies, after many years…and probably still…not one incident was ever recorded of Japanese-American espionage or sabotage.
The facts notwithstanding, Michelle Malkin made her case, and wasn’t it coincidental, as a Right Wing speaker, someone who makes her living pandering to the fruits and nuts on the Right, that she made her case during the height of the controversy over the Bush Administration’s attempt to justify Guantanamo.
So now, Michelle Malkin is going after health care reform. Her attitude, in her own words is: “We have the momentum to kill Obamacare.” As if Obamacare is some kind of epithet. Of course, we should hope that it never goes away as a kind of reminder of this exceptional piece of legislation. The Democrats should have called Medicare, “JohnsonCare” so that the millions of Senior citizens who have been helped by Medicare never forget the debt they owe to an enigmatic President whose populist side won out and made him demand, unremittingly and relentlessly, that senior citizens be provided high quality health care that they could afford after retiring.
Here’s what is laughable about Michelle Malkin, and frankly all the other Right Wing bloggers who must shoe-horn any ridiculous, lobbyist-sponsored theories into intelligently planned, people-oriented legislation. They simply sound…stupid.
As one example only, Malkin uses the logic of a four-year-old to describe how the hugely successful “Cash for Clunkers” program was a complete failure and people should be fired. (Apparently also the numerous GOP House members who spent so much time on the floor praising it and urging its reauthorization.)
For those who don’t know, the Government offered an incentive between $3500 and $4500 on top of any other offers to be subtracted from the price of any new, energy-efficient car. The program was so successful in creating new car sales that over 250,000 new cars were sold in a week. Well, for a program that was scheduled to take much longer because NO ONE was buying cars, it took the government by surprise. A pleasant surprise, because we now have discovered a trigger to at least one consumer area that can be manipulated and one that will lead to more U.S. manufacturing.
Remember…the point of the stimulus is to restore consumer spending that will lead to a return to growth in other sectors. The stimulus bill itself does not deal immediately with consumer spending in the roads and bridges program, the education program or the state block programs. The state grants were simply designed to put fire and police and teachers and others, who had been laid off, back to work. So, here we find a way, maybe simplistic, but a way that works immediately to generate one of our hardest hit industries, one that will have huge multiples of employment when we can restore it to something like its normal market size.
The government is now not only involved in an intensive effort to get the auto dealers paid all the discounts that they fronted. Now, a new round of $2 billion to be released soon was overwhelmingly voted by both Parties on the last day of Congress before the summer recess.
Here’s what Right-Wing blogger Michelle Malkin says:
“In private sector business, there are just as many execs
who have been fired because they didn’t plan for what to do if a sale went “too well” as there are who created sales programs that didn’t work at all.”
Well, Ms. Malkin, if you can find one, we’d like to talk to her. Better go back to business school. Or get an I.Q. transplant.
She says:
“In the private sector — which the government hopes to compete with using money confiscated from the private sector (some “competition”) — when you create a sale or promotion of some sort, you must make sure you’re covered in case it is very successful.”
First of all…does anyone understand what “using money confiscated from the private sector” means? Does it mean that we took back and used some of the $700 billion we loaned to her pals on Wall Street so that they could get $900,000 incomes at Goldman, Sachs while families are being thrown out on the street for a loan of $12,000 to pay the mortgage for a year until the economy comes back?
Secondly, “make sure you’re covered” implies that we don’t have the money. Well, even though technically we don’t—anymore than we have money to fund $600 billion in defense spending—Congress did allocate this money and it will be paid to Malkin’s pals the multi-million-dollar automobile dealership owners in short order.
Then she gets on a roll with this idea and unfortunately doesn’t stop herself in time:
“The Obama administration is attempting to use the fact that the program was popular with consumers as evidence that it was a “success,” but that only serves as evidence of government incompetence.”
No, Michelle, (as Reagan would say) that means that it was popular because it was a success. If your head were not screwed on backwards, you would find the logic pointing in the right direction. People were happy because they could afford to buy one of the new, higher-mileage autos finally available from the brain-dead, automobile industry management teams finally bludgeoned by Congress into creating them.
So naturally Malkin jumps ahead, using her own faulty logic as a springboard:
“Unfortunately for Obama & Company, many people are aware that sometimes ‘too successful’ is far more expensive than ‘didn’t work at all.’”
Sorry, Michelle, but come back again next year. If a rifle doesn’t shoot the enemy coming at you, that is an example of “didn’t work at all” and you will likely die. If a rifle is “too successful” you may kill more of the enemy than you were aiming at, but that may turn out all right for you. If you don’t sell any cars at all, genius, you will go out of business in, ah, “the private sector,” where you apparently have never been. If you are too successful, it may take you a few more days to get the paperwork done, especially the second day, while you are sobering up from the celebration at the end of the first day, but you will survive and you will grow and you will be able to pay your bills.
At this point, we pause, to say that Michelle Malkin can be forgiven for not understanding about having to pay bills or mortgages. Once she learned that pandering, like that done by Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh to certain Right Wing corporate interests means you never again have to worry about paying your bills, she began to work for people like Rupert Murdoch, who would rather people die than have affordable, reliable health care. She knows that Murdoch and henchman Roger Ailes will always see that their traitorous toadies have million-dollar paydays even while the middle class falls into poverty. They could be called the “Breadline Brigade” doing everything possible to keep the middle-class down and out…onto the street.
Anyway…she goes on (and on and on):
“…when we see those same people screw up a freakin’ car sale, the mask comes off and we don’t want them messing with our health too.”
Ah, finally, there comes the health care tie-in. Of course, it wasn’t screwed up and technically it was not the government that conducted a “freakin’” car sale, but the dealers. And finally, what would offering affordable health care have to do with this? Does Michelle think that people are going to suddenly come out of the woodwork and start ransacking doctors’ offices, clamoring for a better deal on an appendectomy?
And in the end, after doing her feeble little darnedest to tie this all in so she can get in on some of that health care lobby money floating around, she says:
“…the total failure of this ‘wild success’ may well kill their dreams of National Health Care, and they know it.”
Um, Michelle do you know how that sounds? “the total failure of a wild success?” And that success is somehow is going to kill one of the four health care plans now before the Senate and the House? You do know, don’t you, that the Democrats hold an enormous voting advantage and probably can’t lose…even if what you said above made any kind of rational sense to anyone besides Sarah Palin?
Finally, here is her summary. And this I love.
“This sums up the concern of any American with an I.Q. above Tim Geithner’s shoe size: ‘If they can’t administer a program like this, I’d be a little concerned about my health insurance,’ car salesman Rob Bojaryn said.”
In deference to Rob Bojaryn, we won’t make any used car salesman jokes, but I think that Michelle might find a more authoritative source before implicating the I.Q. of a Treasury Secretary who led the effort that has kept us out of a full-blown Bush-Cheney-Malkin Depression. Especially from someone clearly motivated to make money on the failure of the Obama Administration, someone so cynical that she wants to hit the lobbyist jackpot at the sacrifice of the health of the American people, and someone who thinks that a program that sold 250,000 cars in a week in the midst of the worst economy since 1930 was a “failure.”