I’d have to go for the birthers. As TWDuke said; their entire conspiracy theory makes no sense.
The “death panel” people are more paranoid than stupid; nations have done things just as bad to weed out those they considered unfit ( Nazi Germany obviously comes to mind ). But there’s no reason to think that a present day American health care system is going to systematically kill the old or mentally disabled any more than Canada or Britain’s does. And we already have health care rationing by the corporations.
It’s not just that: they think she flew back with the new-born Barack shortly afterwards. They have no idea how expensive plane travel was back in the early 60s, or how far apart Kenya and Hawaii are.
(I travelled with my famiy between England and Australia the year that Barack Obama was born: we went by ship, because that was cheaper than travelling by air in those days, and it took 3 to 4 weeks each way).
The other crazy thing about this conspiracy is that if you wanted to line up a person to be President nearly 50 years from 1961, would you go for an African American baby? This was the middle of the civil rights movement, when they were just aiming to get black people the vote. Martin Luther King Jr might have had a dream about black and white equality, but would they really have planned around getting a specific African American baby elected as President? This at a time when being Catholic counted against getting Jack Kennedy elected!
True, but that would have stepped on my ripping off either TDS or Colbert. I skimmed the entire stimulus bill in about 15 minutes - almost all boilerplate and tables.
I think those moaning and groaning about the length of these bills are those who have trouble making it through reading the back of a cereal box during a (long) breakfast.
The idiot group does not consist of those who think the healthcare bill is bad policy, but those who think it includes a death panel. Surely you’re not equating these two groups?
If health care proponents disrupted meetings of Republican legislators because they were convinced the bill promised them eternal life or some such nonsense, they’d be just as idiotic. Luckily, no one on the for side appears to be this stupid.
The health care bill has a provision for Medicare doctors to get paid for discussing living wills, health care proxies, hospice care etc. Maybe from Alaska that loooks like a death panel.
Tough call, but I’d have to give the edge to the Birthers, who are flying in the face of plain historical facts rather than of the details of a policy-work-in-progress.
Right now it is often the case that the lawyer and client discuss end of life medical care without the doctor who is actually going to be doing it involved. I blush to admit that’s exactly what we did. Perhaps the right-to-suffer crowd who believe on forcing someone in pain and near death to hang on as long as possible don’t want this discussed at all. The Rep who put it in, I believe, is from the state where it is legal to assist someone choosing to end it, so I can see why he’d want it paid for, but it will be a useful provision for everyone.
Either way, it’s truly scary to know these people exist. I am more scared for America’s future now than I was during the Bush regime. Not because of Obama, but because Obama’s presidency is really bringing these people out of the woodwork in full force.
It’s like when I would go into my kitchen in the middle of the night and turn on the light and see cockroaches scurrying away. Even if I kinda knew they were there before, not having to look at them constantly gave me some peace. But now that the light is shining full force, it’s nothing but fucking cockroaches everywhere and it’s nasty.
Any health insurance system - public, private, or mixed - is going to have some mechanism for allotting resources. At some point, this is going to involve groups of people making life-or-death decisions. The fools are those who believe there are “death panels” in one system but not in another. But health care and insurance are undeniably complicated and confusion and frustration are inevitable. The birth-certificate controversy, on the other hand, is utter nonsense manufactured from raw grade A stupidity, dishonesty, delusion, and sour grapes.
I think a better analogue would be if they were convinced that the bill promised unlimited free health care for all. I can’t say no one on our side is foolish enough to believe that, but if they do they aren’t as numerous, loud, and assholish about it.
Well, the “death panel” loons at least have one foot in reality. Okay, a pinky toe in reality. When it comes to a health care system of any kind everyone won’t be able to get what they want and someone somewhere will have to make the ugly life and death decisions far removed from the emotional reactions the patients. So if you stretch the concept to the breaking point that’s their “death panel” and of course they have to ignore the fact that we have them already and will have them no matter how health care shakes out.
So based on the idea that “death panels” have at least a vague association with reality and the birthers do not I not have to give it to birthers. Yeah, the health care protesters are loud and obnoxious now but America has a long history of wrong-headed, loud, and obnoxious protesters from both sides so I can’t hold that against them.
Know what would be cool? A bunch of people with some wound makeup, etc., dressing up as if they were at death’s door, and when one of the protester’s refuses to shut up, surround him yelling, “you want us to die!”
In other words: This version corrects a mistake in the original editorial which demonstrated that our entire premise was complete horseshit. We regret the error.
No, the 9/11 “Truthers” top the Birthers, and the Truthers are topped by the Holocaust deniers.
But between Birthers and Death Panelists, Birthers win the So Stupid You Can Hardly Believe It Award, but DPs are more dangerous. They might actually have an effect on the health care debate.
Of course, they often overlap. The scary DP who was wearing a gun strapped to his leg before President Obama’s town hall meeting today was a DP and a Birther.
I am so fucking sick of all these pubbies saying that both sides have their loons. Here is the difference: loons on the left are isolated and derided by the Democratic Party; loons on the right are their elected officers like Bachmann.
This is a great opportunity, folks, and I don’t get why we’re not all over it. In the future, some of these people will deny that they ever called Obama a baby-killer, or an old-person-murderer, or raved about his foreign birth, or opposed UHC as fascistic socialism, but now they’re willing to go on the record, get filmed saying so with spittle flying, etc. Now’s the chance to record this stuff, and to keep it for use in future political campaigns. Maybe some of them will run for office in districts where enough voters in 2018 will no longer care about this stuff, but it’s going to be very difficult to win office in most places where 50% of the voters not only disagree wtih you but have reason to think you’re a batshit-paranoic or a total demogogue. Keep 'em talking, I say: campaign fodder for decades to come.