Hypocritical GOP Senators Go On An Orgy Of Healthcare Fear-Mongering

Republicans hardly waited for the Sunday morning bobblehead shows to go into the greatest display of political hypocrisy anyone has ever heard. One after another, they came up to the podium all day Saturday, and railed against the healthcare reform bill they have been trying to sabotage from the moment Democrats announced they would try to pass it-- in the 1940s. Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse captured their unctuous mummery and bad faith sanctimoniousness better than anyone. He reminded us of GOP perfidy-- highway robbery... in broad daylight-- in running up billions of dollars in deficits on behalf of their cronies in the pharmaceutical industry when they controlled the House, Senate and White House and decided to toss senior citizens into a donut hole so squeeze out even greater profits for Big PhRMA. In 2006 that industry alone showered over $14,000,000 in barely veiled bribes on incumbent members of Congress-- more than $10,000,000 of it to Republicans, the 3 current sitting senators who received the most being anti-reform fanatics Orrin Hatch (R-UT-$369,781), Joe Lieberman (I-CT-$295,090) and Jon Kyl (R-AZ-$167,250). Since 1990 Pharma has "donated" around $100,000,000 (not counting close to 2 billion dollars for "lobbying" these same worthies), the bulk of it going to Republicans and the biggest current members on the receiving end being Orrin Hatch (R-UT-$1,368,909), Arlen Specter (R/D-PA-$1,111,016), John McCain (R-AZ-$852,915). Did you think it was a coincidence that Orrin Hatch lead the right-wing onslaught against reform yesterday or that when he was tired Dick Burr (R-NC-$773,416) took over? It was considered rude of Whitehouse to bring up the GOP connection, even subtly, to Big PhRMA. And he didn't stop there:

"Now, when at least we take on the Insurance Industry, suddenly they discover a concern about deficits. Well, I would urge that based on that trajectory these remarks have a lot less to do about the deficit than they do about protecting the Insurance Industry... It is very hard to find any daylight between the position of the insurance industry and the position of our Republican friends."

Of course not; whatever daylight there may have once been, has been long blotted out with cascading greenbacks-- $324,658,744 since 1990 (62% to Republicans) plus another $1.3 billion in lobbying. And the biggest recipients spoke with the loudest voices yesterday. We haven't heard McCain ($2,919,753)-- the biggest Insurance Industry bribe taker in the history of the U.S. Congress-- get so worked up about anything since he decided to prove Baghdad was safe for a casual stroll. The bipartisan circle of steel protecting Big Insurance-- Ben Nelson ($1,258,299), Joe Lieberman ($1,037,652), Chuck Grassley ($983,674) and Miss McConnell ($953,557)-- are all determined to eviscerate healthcare reform on behalf of their benefactors.

I'm not a big viewer of the Sunday talk shows. Normally I just watch bits of them at Crooks and Liars but today I wanted to see the way the Republicans would extend their fear mongering from yesterday. I wasn't disappointed. One after the other, the Republicans went on the shows-- with Lieberman in an all too familiar role-- to predict the end of the world if healthcare reform passes. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) must have felt he was on a roll as he took his minstrel show over to Fox News Sunday to drill into the heads of worried white seniors that they will be "dumped into a ghetto," the same program that encouraged Kit Bond to reprise his line from yesterday about how healthcare was "something Bernie Madoff would really envy."

The defenders of the status quo, which in the end is all any conservative party ever is, fears change-- and wants to share the fear with anyone who will listen. Had Americans listened to hysterical conservative fears at the great moments in our country's history we would never have promulgated the Declaration of Independence. Nor would we have fought the Revolutionary War against the British monarchy they remained loyal to, many of them leaving for England, Canada and the Bahamas after Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown in 1781, followed by the British evacuations of Savannah, Charleston and New York City in 1782-3. And we certainly would never have had a Bill of Rights-- which conservatives fought with as much vitriol as they are using against healthcare reform. In his brilliant book, The Progressive Revolution: How The Best In America Came To Be, Mike Lux take us through a whole litany of conservative cause célèbres that progressives beat back in the name of moving the nation forward. I tweeted them all during the debate yesterday, reminding people that the #1 weapon in the conservative tool box is fear. They used it to try to stop universal suffrage and claimed doom would descend on us all if anyone but wealthy white property owners was allowed to vote. They used the same language to oppose free public education, the emancipation of women, the emancipation of slaves, a minimum wage, an 8-hour work week, the right of working people to use collective bargaining, the end of child labor laws, regulations protecting consumers from poisonous meat and crooked banksters and every civil rights bill that ever came up for a vote. And then there was Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, all of which Republicans claimed would lead to the end of the world and the rise of socialism.

After Democrats began ignoring their hysteria and passing legislation to ameliorate the Great Depression caused by the Republican economic and fiscal policies of the 1920s, the media began creating an atmosphere of conventional wisdom that would see the Republicans swept back into power in 1934, just as they are busy doing today as they warn weak sisters like Blanche Lincoln, John Barrow, Glenn Nye and Larry Kissell that their political careers will end if they support Obama's program of reforms.

It didn't quite work out the way they predicted it would in 1934 or 1936. Instead the Republicans lost 10 more seats in the Senate in 1934, bringing them down to a paltry 25, followed two years later-- after more virulent obstructionism-- with 8 more losses for a grand total of 17 Senate seats. The same thing happened in the House. Just when the GOP, believing its own hype, was preparing to take back the House leadership, 1934 saw them shrink to 103 seats (of 425), followed two years later by another electoral massacre that left them with 88 impotent screaming obstructionists that even the media stopped paying attention to. Yesterday's Raleigh News & Observer, North Carolina's second largest newspaper, noted that the self-inflicted shrinkage of their pup tent may purity may cost the GOP very dearly. In North Carolina the Republican Party is likely to follow California in prohibiting independents from voting in their primaries, "in theory screening out some moderate voters." There's nothing theoretical about it; it's an intraparty suicide pact.

In this age of polarization, it is politically incorrect to be a moderate.

The Republican Party likes to bill itself as the conservative voice of North Carolina and that is true enough, although the Libertarian Party might take exception.

But the state Republican Party has historically been far broader than the Helmsian party, with strong ties to the more moderate GOP brand of the mountains, the foothills, the board rooms and the suburbs.

Sometimes the Republican Party forgets that.

And not just in North Carolina. "As conservative British Prime Minister HaroldMcMillan (1957-63) once noted: 'A successful party of the right must continue to recruit from the center and even from the left center. Once it begins to shrink into itself like a snail, it will be doomed.'"