Health Care and the Wingnuts (Joe Conason)

[swag]

http://www.observer.com/2010/opinion/health-care-and-wingnuts

Listening to right-wing talk radio on the day after Congress passed health care reform, Bill O’Reilly was stunned. To him, the hosts and the callers sounded “crazed” as they shrieked about “the end of the world, we’re socialist now, we have to take the country back.” Maybe the Fox News host hasn’t been listening, but there has been plenty of crazy in the air now for many months on his network and elsewhere on the airwaves.

Going too far for Mr. O’Reilly is going very far indeed, but the madness of the conservative reaction has yet to abate. His friend and colleague Glenn Beck declared that health care reform means “the end of prosperity in America forever … the end of America as you know it.” Bill Hemmer, another Fox host who probably needs medication, has suggested that the legislation will send Americans who don’t have health insurance to prison. The Washington Times editorial page compared the bill to the Black Death, and the Drudge Report put up a headline suggesting that its passage is the equivalent of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

On the radio, Rush Limbaugh, the past master of extremist chatter, told his listeners that the bill is an “utter disaster” that represents “the destruction of America as founded.” With its new regulation of insurance companies, he warned, this reform will inexorably lead to the destruction of the private health care industry and bring down the health care system, because the real plan is for government to take over all medical care. Lesser wingnuts in print and on the air scream that this bill means government will take over the entire economy and control everything we do—and even that the costs of health care will somehow result in “global Armageddon.”

Stirring up such lunacy almost worked for the Republicans, who came close to stopping health care reform again. Each episode of reform versus reaction has seen them go further and further in falsehood and demagoguery, and each time they have prevailed until now. But this time, with reform signed into law, they may suffer the consequences, when their own lies come around to hit them like a boomerang.

. . . mofd