Joe Conason: ‘Socialism’ and Sham in the Senate

[babylonsister]

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20091001_socialism_and_sham_in_the_senate/

‘Socialism’ and Sham in the Senate

Posted on Oct 1, 2009

By Joe Conason


Listening closely to the politicians with the most clout in the debate over health care, it is startling to discover how little they actually seem to know about the subject.

Ignorance rules, even among the bipartisan group of senators known as the “Gang of Six,” who supposedly have immersed themselves in the details of this life-and-death issue for many months. If they understood even the most basic facts about how the United States and other advanced countries provide and finance medical care, they simply could not utter the stupid comments that regularly emanate from their lips.

Every catalog of mindless remarks about health care must include at least one rant by Charles Grassley, the Iowa Republican who has wasted the country’s time by pretending to seek a bipartisan solution when he simply wants to stall or kill President Barack Obama’s proposed reforms.

Not so long ago, Grassley alleged he had been told that “government-run” systems in other countries would have denied treatment to Sen. Edward Kennedy for his ultimately fatal brain tumor because he was 77 years old. That statement drew outraged attention from British doctors, who believed that the Iowa senator was talking about their practices. “Jaw-droppingly untruthful,” protested the chairman of the British Medical Association, who said he found such attacks astonishing.

Sen. Mike Enzi, the Wyoming Republican who has connived in the Gang of Six farce, has made similar ominous comments about the medical rationing and reductions in care that would ensue from a “government-run option.” He often says something like this while making speeches in which he also claims to be defending Medicare for seniors—which indicates that he doesn’t understand that Medicare is, in fact, a “government-run” program.

It is hard to believe that any United States senator could truly be so obtuse about our own government-run system, having voted on Medicare finances and regulations annually for years. Yet these same geniuses don’t seem to realize that they have also authorized and financed one of the most thoroughly socialized medical systems in the world—the highly successful, respected and innovative Veterans Health Administration.

snip//

Can they really be that dumb? Or do they just assume that we are?

[bemildred]

1. They are not dumb, they are liars. nt

[chimpymustgo]

2. Indeed. K&R.