"There isn't a health care crisis" -- and "Comedian" Rush and Nutso Ginny would know

"There isn't global warming, and there isn't a health care crisis."

-- "Comedian" Rush Limbaugh

"There are no Americans who don't have health care."

-- DWT "Inner Circle Loon" NC Rep. Virginia Foxx

by Ken

I have to start by apologizing. I really should open with a photo of an image that's been etched in my brain for a month now, but alas, since I don't travel with one of those nifty digital cameras, I have no photo to offer you of my own personally encountered "right-wing clown" -- yes, a real, live clown spouting wingnut gibberish. Instead we will have to make do with this audio clip of the ultimate right-wing clown, "Comedian" Rush Limbaugh,(as Keith Olbermann habitually refers to him.

Stop, "Comedian" Rush, you're killing me! Well, maybe not me, but you're sure doing your best to kill a lot of people, including many of your listeners. (Doesn't it occur to you that you'll have to keep replacing them as they die off in order to keep your ratings up?)

Checking a calendar, I see it's five weeks now since I took my frenzied two-day trip to Florida to help celebrate my mother's 90th birthday in the little assisted-living facility where she will probably live out her days -- and where she is being taken care of as if she were family, or better, since I couldn't take care of her anywhere near as well. In that time, I've scratched out any number of preliminary drafts, or draftlets, relating in one way or another to the experience, but to my best recollection I haven't actually pursued any of them to completion. While it was a good trip in a lot of ways (at any rate, I'm glad I went), judging from outward signs like this, I'm reckoning that part of me still hasn't processed it.

The image I would most like to share, however, has nothing to do with me personally, except perhaps that it's from one of those moments at which, as I suggested above, I wish I had one of them little digital cameras everybody else seems to be toting, to preserve -- for you right now, for instance. Of course I'm not sure it would have done me any good to have such a camera, since I am prepared to stand against any competition as the world's most inept photographer.* (This is a notable difference between Howie and me. He's a passionate, accomplished lifelong photographer, whereas I -- as I wrote here some time ago -- have never failed to disappoint anyone who was foolhardy enough to thrust a camera into my hands and say, "You just press this button.")

*I TOLD THE TALE OF MY LEGENDARY
PHOTOGRAPHIC INCOMPETENCE . . .

. . . two years ago in my DWT account ("DWT pays a morning call on Bill O, and learns that the incarnation of evil looks pretty scary when he fetches his morning paper--oh, those red shorts!") of my journey to the wilds of Long Island in support of activist Mike Stark's mission to stage an accountability moment outside the home of Bill O'Reilly, including the fateful moment when Mike put his excellent camcorder in my photographically hopeless hands with a similar expression of how easy the thing was to operate. Scroll down, down, down to the sidebar --

ANYONE WHO PUTS A CAMERA IN MY HANDS DESERVES
WHAT HE GETS -- JUST ASK MY (EX-) FRIEND BOB

The scheduling of the little party that Ana, the owner of my mother's ALF (and an authentic saint; with her I think I've exhausted my lifetime's quotient of good luck), was having for her was complicated by the schedule demands I imposed. Originally the party was going to be on Sunday, when I would be there all day, but for various reasons -- not least that that Sunday happened to be Fathers' Day -- we pushed it back to Monday, but since I had a mid-afternoon return flight to catch, it had to be scheduled for lunchtime, and an early lunch at that. Perhaps as a consequence, the clown was late.

Ah yes, the clown. Ana has a clown she hires for occasions like this, whose specialty is doing balloon animals, which gives great pleasure to the residents. Unfortunately, the clown arrived just as we were leaving. (Ana was driving me to the airport.) He wasn't in costume yet, but he had his clown makeup on, and he got out of his car babbling about something that turned out to be the health care reform issue.

"Socialized medicine!" the clown shouted, and this of course is the moment for which I wish I'd had a camera, or better still a video recorder. "Do you watch Rush Limbaugh?" quoth the clown. And on he went, babbling his semi-digested version of what Rush Limbaugh had had to say about socialized medicine.

Now there is, of course, a perfectly good reason why Rush is able to spout, with a straight face, an insultingly blatant lie like: "There really isn't a crisis in health care in this country." MediaMatters had a great report the other day: "Wealthy conservative media figures deny crisis in health care" (from which the above audio clip was, er, "borrowed"), which noted:

Limbaugh, the highest paid talk radio host in the country, reportedly signed an eight-year, $400 million contract with Clear Channel Communications and its syndication subsidiary, Premiere Radio Networks, in July 2008. According to The New York Times, Limbaugh's "$50 million a year paycheck represents a raise of about $14.4 million a year over his current contract, which was paying him $285 million over eight years and was set to expire in 2009."

Similarly, there's a good reason why crazed NC Rep. Virginia Foxx was able to say, as noted above, "There are no Americans who don't have health care," as ThinkProgress's Matt Corley reported yesterday:

Earlier today, several female Republican House members held a press conference today to attack President Obama’s push for health insurance reform. “The Democrat way is not reforming healthcare, it’s destroying it,” announced Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN).

They've even got an audio clip of our Ginny! So why would our Ginny say such a thing? She certainly isn't being paid Rushbucks. But the real question is why our Ginny would say any of "the loony things she does. And the only possible explanation is that she really is out of her mind.

Now to return briefly to my certified-professional right-wing clown, one reason I'm sorry not to have a picture is to show you that he was a youngish and -- even if you paid no attention to the gibberish coming out of his mouth -- an unmistakably sad-looking fellow. Talk about reinforcing the image of clowns as sad, even tragic, characters.

The image of my clown is imprinted in my imagination. And it keeps me thinking: I don't expect that, unlike "Comedian" Rush, he works for an elite, high-paying clown company. I assume, rather, that he ekes out a free-lance living, and that if he has health insurance, he pays for it himself. Which in turn leads me to guess that he probably doesn't have health insurance, and is still young enough to sustain the illusion that he doesn't need health insurance. For his sake, I hope his inevitable rude awakening is delayed as long as possible.

And I have to wonder, when that dread phrase socialized medicine tumbles out of his mouth, what does he understand by it? I do remember in his Rush-born babblings he stressed, with great alarm, the involvement of "the government." And so perhaps his image, formed by all that Rush-babbling, is the Right-Wing Noise Machine's permanent refrain, tracing back of course to the saintliest liar-imbecile of them all, Ronald "Sure, I Eat Shit but All Those Hideous Shit-Suicking Peasants Eat It Up" Reagan, that government can't do anything right.

The other day I had a disagreement with a friend about the continuing power of the old-time bogeyman phrase "socialized medicine." He was arguing that it's lost at least a certain amount of its once-paralyzing power over the American public. I wasn't so sure. I mean, I see those clips of Master Rush snarling "socialized medicine," and then I see and hear the words coming out of the mouth of my clown . . .

This notion of government incompetence touches something deep in a lot of Americans, and is held especially dear by the Far Right. And it's true, as the Bush regime demonstrated so triumphantly, that a government built on Movement Conservative principles, is incompetent. Of course, as Paul Krugman diagnosed early in the regime, governing incompetence not only comes easily and naturally to right-wingers but actually serves their basic premise about government incompetence.

The choice of "Heckuva Job Brownie" to head the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) had nothing to do with the natural incompetence of government. Emergency preparedness and disaster management can be done competently, as the Clinton-era FEMA demonstrated. The catastrophe that was the Bush regime FEMA was entirely manmade, starting with the staffing of the agency with useless cronies (and, in the case of the ultimate right-wing incompetent, FEMA director Michael Brown, cronies-of-cronies). Call it a coincidence if you like, but to right-wing plutocrats, it's unacceptable to allow the public to expect competence from their government even in the field of disaster management. We have gone beyond Queen Marie Antoinette's infamous "Let them eat cake" to Movement Conservatism's "Let them drown."


OUR COMMENTER STRIKES TO THE HEART
OF THE HEALTH CARE REFORM DEBATE

Which brings me to what set me off on this merry chase. In response to our tribute yesterday to the incoherent twittering of Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, as it happens on the subject of health care, a regrettably anonymous commenter left these elegant words of wisdom:

Let's keep private sector bureaucrats in charge of health care that's worked out well for us and even better for them and their congressional shills.

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