“Sure enough, President Obama is now facing the same kind of opposition that President Bill Clinton had to deal with: an enraged right that denies the legitimacy of his presidency, that eagerly seizes on every wild rumor manufactured by the right-wing media complex.
“This opposition cannot be appeased. Some pundits claim that Mr. Obama has polarized the country by following too liberal an agenda. But the truth is that the attacks on the president have no relationship to anything he is actually doing or proposing.”
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Not many folks have a problem with health care reform except for the big corporate health care interests and the crazy Town Hall Shouters that they instigate. The health care industry is finding these people and sending them out there (and even paying some of them, I am told), in order to keep health care reform from happening, even though most Americans are for it.
It’s like what they tell you to do if a bear is coming toward you– make yourself look bigger. The health care industry is trying to make their sympathizers look like a bigger proportion of the population than they actually are. Loud they are. Rageful they are. But not representative. And they do not deserve our attention.
The Town Hall Shouter Campaign against Health Care Reform is all about corporate health care interests trying to convince Congress people and the American people in general that the majority of Americans are against health care reform. It just isn’t so. The corporate health care interests are spending over a million dollars a day, I am reading, in order to create this impression, and that includes gathering up and mobilizing these crazies to be Town Hall Shouters. Some of them are even paid to do this, I am told. And a paid job is hard for many people to resist, in an economy like this one.
If a corporate special interest group can’t convince the American people to agree with them, their next line of attack is to try to convince Congress and the American people that most Americans are on the same side of the issue as corporate special interests are, even though they are not. Then people get all focused on what the Town Hall Shouters are saying, instead of being focused on how to move forward with health care reform and campaign finance reform.
And then they might get Congress to vote down the bill, if these corporate interests convince Congress people that their constituents are against the bill. And if Congress votes down the bill, or waters it down so that special interests are still allowed to rob the health care consumer blind, then voters may not protest this as much, and will not be as likely to vote their Congress person out of office for it, if voters mistakenly believe that most of their neighbors were against health care reform.
Basically the corporate health care interests want to convince Congress and the American people that pro-health care reform folks are just a tiny minority. They want to bully the majority– by shouting us down and silencing us and convincing us (and our Congressional Representatives) that we are a tiny powerless minority.
We are actually a majority. So let’s not be a silent majority. Let’s stand up for ourselves here.
If the corporate special interests find that their propaganda has failed in getting people to agree with them, then they have a Plan B. Plan B for special interest propagandists is not telling people what to THINK– but telling people what to THINK ABOUT– e.g. to think about and discuss town hall shouters, and to discuss them as if they are the important folks, as if they are the majority.
Let’s not do that. Except for brief corrections of factual errors, let’s think and discuss how to best move forward on the most effective health care reform possible. And then after that, let’s get some campagin finance reform.
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