I truly appreciate the attempt to be rational and have substantive discourse in the interest of the common good. After all, that’s what we should be having in this country.
But the fact of the matter is, the radical right that is today’s Republican Party has absolutely no interest in that. Theirs is an ideology of win at any cost. They are not cowered by hypocrisy, they are not swayed by fact, and they are not interested in discourse.
They have no alternative plan. This is in fact THEIR plan. For the love of Christ, their last Presidential candidate IMPLEMENTED the fucking plan in Massachusetts, and had to run AGAINST it.
So while these questions are spot-on, they’ll be met with only ham-handed changing of the subject and lies. But you get an A for effort.
With Respect to Smokin’ and also to Dylan Scott, I believe these are actually unserious questions in the context of the likelihood of getting any answer of substance. Indeed one could argue that this is a “Strawman” article given the actual political conditions at the moment.
Dreaming up questions you wish the petitionee to answer is about as relevant as dreaming up what house you’re going to buy if you win the lottery. You’re not going to win, they’re not going to answer any of this, so it seems to me almost an exercise in column-inch filling, rather than a genuine attempt to elicit accountability or ideological leadership.
Whether there is some mechanism to avail the American public of the political truth rather than the ideological fiction wrapped in marketing hyperbole we currently witness, well I have yet to see anyone devise anything that cannot be shouted down in the “louder wars” environment presently 24/7 in the media, especially on the right. Still good luck getting those answers, I think the public should be told…
Or, they could answer that this individual was kicked out of his plan, and had to settle for a plan with $200 bigger deductible and a $25 copay per office visit. Were I a filthy Republican sympathizer like you, the story might end there.
But this individual is saving $4300 in premiums this year for an equivalent policy, same doctors. And this individual recovered the added deductible and copays in the first two months of premium payments.
And they could say that only a raging dumbass who has either not been affected at all by the law, or in fact is actually benefiting from the law, would be stupid enough to go out on a limb spewing Fox News talking points on a subject they know absolutely nothing about.
In case you didn’t get the memo, Republicans are now off Obamacare, having been proven to be the filthy liars that they are. If you want to remain a useful stooge to the Kochs, you’ll have to try to keep up in spite of your cognitive deficits. Now, it’s all Benghazi, all the time. Do pay attention, or your John Birch Society membership card will be revoked.
Your reply confirms all the comments that point out that trying to teach a pig to sing is futile: it wastes one’s time and annoys the pig.
Who cares? Are you so out of arguments that you’ve reduced yourself to poll numbers? How many polled actually want single-payer? How many polled have bought into right-wing propaganda or even know how the ACA functions and what it provides?
Most importantly. What will you say when those numbers flip and a majority end up supporting it in the next few months or years?
With the tsunami of lies only now being proven so, it’s no wonder poll numbers are where they are. The Kochs and the lobbyists have spent a fortune on a misinformation campaign. They have an entire “news” channel dedicated to it.
As Twain is said to have offered, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
When those numbers flip (they will), I can guarantee it’ll either be complete silence, or they’ll go with the usual plan of attack and just make stuff up completely…errr…I mean “unskew” the numbers.
They have nothing of value to offer. The Obama administration and the Democrats took their idea and made it law. Of course good old Mitch can spend the rest of the campaign trying to convince the voters of Kentucky that their health care insurance exchanges were create from whole cloth and had nothing to do with ObamaCare. Maybe it work on the truly gifted among them.
If you look at the history of their party, where they’re at now was almost a certain end product. Beginning with the Southern Strategy, it’s been about rounding up the lowest common denominator for a few cheap votes at the expense of honesty and thoughtful policy. It’s now a whole party running on the fumes of manufactured scandals, hatred of homosexuals, and long-since debunked trickle-down bullshit. It’s sad.
Yes, that is the issue here, opportunity missed, not a series of questions that will result in sideways answer - or whatever. If the GOP presented an alternative plan, instead of just saying “no”, they could have, considering their history in successfully negotiating with the president, made this work for themselves as well, forcing the president, who wanted a bipartisan consensus, to accept some of their HC legislation “ideas”. They refused, thinking their new found power in the Tea Party would prevail. The ACA sat out on thin ice for three years and the opposition couldn’t find a way, even with the disastrous roll out, to cripple the legislation. It might still implode as corporate greed prepares their excuses for 2015 premium hikes. But all in all it was a major fail for the GOP. The questions don’t matter at this point.
The GOP has a business model: What they do in office–and the ONLY thing they do in office–is sell custom-made legislation, assets belonging to the American people and access to our Treasury and credit lines (generally in the form of contracts, for which competitive bidding and performance specs may be limited or non-existent) to their clients in exchange for donations and other considerations.
This goes hand-in-hand with their avowed dogmas that the free market will fix every freaking thing, and that privatizing government functions is more “efficient”–neither of them more than rationales for making government into a conduit between America’s assets and Republican clients.
The decisions of the last administration, no matter how outwardly incompetent, ill-advised or downright evil, all make perfect sense in light of an overriding mission to enrich RNC clients at the expense of the American people.
Defense (as you imply) is the best way to implement this policy, as the inherent destructiveness, secrecy and (often) physical remoteness of defense contractors’ products give excellent cover to cheating the taxpayers.
Conversely, domestic infrastructure programs (for example) are relatively accessible to the public, who can see how their money is being spent, and are likely to take an interest in local projects; this explains why Republicans abdicated their responsibility to maintain infrastructure during the last administration.
The Republican business model also explains why no Republican project ever benefits average Americans: the worth, in dollars and cents, of every bit of good returned to Americans from their taxes reflects profit diverted from Republican clients.
In fact, the Republicans have attempted to normalize the expectation that Americans should pay and pay for their clients while receiving nothing in return, by continually complaining when we get anything–say, health insurance (like citizens of every other developed country), or when the extremely poor get food.
This model is also reflected in the Rs’ perennial campaign problem: a tendency to change their marketing but never their widely rejected product.
Well, they can’t change their product, because it’s dictated by their clients rather than the voters. All they can do is attempt to put some lipstick on it and hope the voters will think it’s something new.
The hell they don’t. After the years-long chant of “Repeat and replace”, we’ve heard nothing from the GOTP but the same tired, corporate-friendly “solutions” they’ve been offering up since Obama started this process. Of all the hypocrisies that need to be brought up in this election year, this is the biggie.
Besides, it’s so much fun to watch them squirm when they’re asked questions like this.
I mean no offense by this, Dylan, but your questions reek of wonk, and however meaningful, those kinds of meandering questions give them the opening for their meandering answers…
Ask them a complex question and you get word salad. Ask them for a number, or a yes or a no, and when they weasel around instead of giving the straight answer, they will look like the wafflers they really are.
They say that, but how they do get uppity when one begins eliminating highways, bridges, their favorite military boondoggle, rational utilities, even crazed subsidies for rich oil companies
Yeah, they could just answer that way, but it would all be the residue of the bullshit they’ve been throwing at the wall in hopes it will stick. You can’t stop this, you know it, and it makes you sick.
And the wingnut crowd isn’t interested in the information part, only the disinformation part, so proving any lies to be lies doesn’t matter much. See: global warming and evolution.
