Political Irony

© Ted Rall

I love this comic. Subtle, but deadly accurate.

Whether or not you think he’d make a good president (and I personally don’t think he would), I’m really glad Ron Paul is running for president, since it gives him a platform to point out truths (which is the job that our corporate-owned mainstream media is too scared or too dishonest to do).

For example, that the Bush administration wanted to invade Iraq before 9/11, and simply used the 9/11 attacks as an excuse. Thursday night, Paul repeated the charge. “Think of what happened after 9/11, the minute before there was any assessment, there was glee in the administration because now we can invade Iraq, and so the war drums beat. … Extremists have taken over, and they’re the ones who run the foreign policy and have convinced us to go along with all these wars. … That’s exactly what they’re doing now with Iran.”

Rather than dispute the charge, a former Bush press secretary responded to the “glee” charge by attacking Paul, tweeting “The man is nuts.”

The 9/11 attacks were also used as an excuse to pass the PATRIOT act. Paul says that the act was written 20 years before 9/11 (during the Reagan administration), and was just waiting for an event like 9/11 when they could pull it out.

Paul also attacked the “war on drugs”, pointing out that “A lot more people died from the consequences of the war on drugs than the drugs themselves.”

The Republicans have managed to frame public opinion about Obama with the constant media noise about how he hasn’t accomplished anything. It doesn’t matter that the Republicans have filibustered just about everything Obama does, but that hasn’t stopped the media from convincing former Obama supporters to feel betrayed by him.

For example, the LA Times has a story on a middle-class woman who campaigned for Obama, but after the election felt let down by him. She changed her registration from Democrat to Independent, and even blacked out the top of the “h” on her Obama bumper sticker so it would read “got nope” instead of “got hope”.

The good news is that she has changed her mind and issued a public apology to Obama. The bad news is why she changed her mind — she was recently diagnosed with stage three breast cancer. Two years ago, after her husband was laid off from his job they faced a difficult choice — they only had enough money to either pay their mortgage or pay for their health insurance (the latter bill being larger than the former!), so they took a desperate but necessary gamble and lost.

Without insurance or enough money to cover the expensive treatments, this could have been a death sentence for this mother of two children, but she found a lifesaver (perhaps literally) in a part of Obama’s healthcare reform that has already kicked in — the “Pre-existing Condition Insurance Plan”. In her words “The application was short, the premiums are affordable, and I have found the people who work in the administration office to be quite compassionate (nothing like the people I have dealt with over the years at other insurance companies.)”

A Harvard study says that more people die from lack of adequate health insurance each year than died in the 9/11 attacks. The next time someone complains about Obama not accomplishing anything, point out that Obama was able to pass health care reform, something that had eluded every prior president who tried. And now the Republicans are campaigning that they will repeal it (or find a way to gut it) and go back to the dark ages.

Hopefully, it won’t take a life threatening disaster to change your mind about Obama. Try to ignore the noise machine and look at the facts. As our mother with breast cancer puts it:

So this is my public apology. I’m sorry I didn’t do enough of my own research to find out what promises the president has made good on. I’m sorry I didn’t realize that he really has stood up for me and my family, and for so many others like us. I’m getting a new bumper sticker to cover the one that says “Got nope.” It will say “ObamaCares.”

Another blogger has picked up this story, and the best part are the comments on it.

© Tom Tomorrow

Given the situation, why was the media so surprised by the Occupy Wall Street protests? Oh that’s right, the media is owned by the one percent!

Speaking at a Christian college in Iowa, presidential candidate Rick Santorum was asked an interesting question by a student. Citing a study from Harvard University, the student asked if “God appreciates the fact that we have 50 to 100 thousand uninsured Americans dying due to a lack of healthcare every year.”

“Dying?” he countered. “I reject that number completely, that people die in America because of lack of health insurance.”

If Santorum doesn’t like the facts, he just denies them. He then added insult to injury with the standard talking point of blaming the victims:

“People die in America because people die in America. And people make poor decisions with respect to their health and their healthcare. And they don’t go to the emergency room or they don’t go to the doctor when they need to. And it’s not the fault of the government for not providing some sort of universal benefit.”

Santorum displays an amazing lack of Christian morals, as well as a willingness to ignore established facts. This is a sure sign that conservatives are going to ramp up their disinformation campaign against health care reform in the run-up to the 2012 election.