BILL MOYERS: And now to the people who refuse to let democracy
work. The people who hate government so much they’ve shut it down.
Unable to abide by the results of democracy when they don’t win, they
turned on it.
Republicans
have now lost three successive elections to control the Senate and
they’ve lost the last two presidential elections. Nonetheless, they
fought tooth and nail to kill President Obama’s health care initiative.
They lost that fight, but with the corporate wing of Democrats, they
managed to bend it toward private interests.
So we should be clear on this, Obamacare, as it’s known, is deeply
flawed. Big subsidies to the health insurance industry. A bonanza for
lobbyists. No public option. And as The New York Times reported this
week, “Millions of Poor Are Left Uncovered by Health Law.” Largely
because states controlled by Republicans refuse to expand Medicaid.
As far as our bought and paid for legislative process goes, Obama’s
initiative made it through the sausage factory. Yet even after both the
House and Senate approved it, the president signed it, and the Supreme
Court upheld it, the Republicans keep insisting on calling the law a
“bill,” thumbing their noses and refusing to accept that it is enacted
legislation.
Now they’re fighting to prevent it from being implemented. Here was
their order of the day on Thursday from the popular right wing blog
RedState.com:
“Congressmen, this is about shutting down Obamacare. Democrats keep
talking about our refusal to compromise. They don’t realize our
compromise is defunding Obamacare. We actually want to repeal it. This
is it. Our endgame is to leave the whole thing shut down until the
President defunds Obamacare. And if he does not defund Obamacare, we
leave the whole thing shut down.”
Once upon a time when I was a young man working on Capitol Hill, it
was commonplace that when a bill became law, everybody was unhappy with
it. But you didn’t bring down the government just because it wasn’t
perfect. You argue and fight and vote and then, due process having been
at least raggedly served, on to the next fight.
That was a long time ago. Long before the Tea Party minority, armed
with huge sums of secret money from rich donors, sucked the last bit of
soul from the Grand Old Party of Abraham Lincoln. They became
delusional. Then rabid. Like this:
SENATOR STEVE KING: If Obamacare is ever implemented and enforced, we
will never recover from it. It is an unconstitutional takings of
God-given American liberty.
BILL MOYERS: That’s false, of course. Just like those right-wing
talking points that keep grinding through the propaganda mills of Fox
News:
AINSLEY EARHARDT on Fox and Friends: Thanks to Obamacare, doctors
will be forced to ask patients about their sex life, even if it has
nothing to do with the medical treatment that they are seeking at the
time.
BILL MOYERS: Not true.
MICHELLE MALKIN on Fox and Friends: That healthcare plan puts a
discount on the lives of elderly people and would result in the
redistribution of health away from the elderly and the infirm to other
special favored interests and patients.
BILL MOYERS: Again, not true. Nor is this, from the multi-millionaire fabulist Rush Limbaugh:
RUSH LIMBAUGH from the Rush Limbaugh Show: What we now have is the
biggest tax increase in the history of the world. Obamacare is just a
massive tax increase, that all it is.
BILL MOYERS: That’s just a tiny sample of the lies and misinformation
perpetrated by the right with the song and dance compliance of its
richly paid mouthpieces. Sarah Palin set the bar for truth at about
ankle height with those fictitious “death panels” that she still insists
will decide our rendezvous with the Grim Reaper.
SARAH PALIN on Cashin' In: Of course there are death panels in there,
but the important thing to remember is that’s just one aspect of this
atrocious, unaffordable, cumbersome, burdensome, evil policy of Obama’s
and that is Obamacare.
BILL MOYERS: Despite what they say, Obamacare is only one of their
targets. Before they will allow the government to reopen, they demand
employers be enabled to deny birth control coverage to female employees.
They demand Obama cave on the Keystone pipeline. They demand the
watchdogs over corporate pollution be muzzled, and the big, bad
regulators of Wall Street sent home. Their ransom list goes on and on.
The debt ceiling is next. They would have the government default on its
obligations and responsibilities.
When the president refused to buckle to their extortion, they threw
their tantrum. Like the die-hards of the racist South a century and a
half ago, who would destroy the Union before giving up their slaves, so
would these people burn the place down, sink the ship of state, and sow
economic chaos to get their way. This says it all, they even shuttered
the Statue of Liberty.
Watching all this from London, the noted commentator Martin Wolf, of
the capitalist friendly Financial Times, says “America flirts with
self-destruction.”
This man is the biggest flirt of all, Newt Gingrich. It was Newt
Gingrich who twenty years ago spearheaded the right-wing’s virulent
crusade against the norms of democratic government. As Speaker of the
House he twice brought about shutdowns of the federal government once,
believe it or not, because he felt snubbed after riding on Air Force One
with President Clinton and had to leave by the backdoor.
It was also Newt Gingrich, speaker Gingrich, who was caught lying to
congressional investigators looking into charges of his ethical
wrongdoing. His colleagues voted overwhelmingly, 395 to 28, to reprimand
him. Pressure from his own party then prompted him to resign.
Yet even after his flame out, even after his recent bizarre race for
the presidency bankrolled with money from admiring oligarchs, even after
new allegations about his secret fundraising for right-wing candidates,
Gingrich remains the darling of a fawning amnesic media.
NEWT GINGRICH on Crossfire: I’m Newt Gingrich on the right.
BILL MOYERS: On CNN.com the other day he issued a call to arms to his fellow bomb-throwers, “…don’t cave on shutdown.”
At least let’s name this for what it is, sabotage of the democratic
process. Secession by another means. And let’s be clear about where such
reckless ambition leads. As surely as night must follow day, the
alternative to democracy is worse.
© 2013 Public Affairs Television, Inc
Journalist Bill Moyers is the host of the new show
Moyers & Company,
a weekly series of smart talk and new ideas aimed at helping viewers
make sense of our tumultuous times through the insight of America’s
strongest thinkers.. His previous shows on PBS included
NOW with Bill Moyers and
Bill Moyers Journal. Over the past three decades he has become an icon of American journalism and is the author of many books, including
Bill Moyers Journal: The Conversation Continues, Moyers on Democracy, and Bill Moyers: On Faith & Reason. He
was one of the organizers of the Peace Corps, a special assistant for
Lyndon B. Johnson, a publisher of Newsday, senior correspondent for CBS
News and a producer of many groundbreaking series on public television.
He is the winner of more than 30 Emmys, nine Peabodys, three George Polk
awards and is the author of three best-selling books.
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