So Eric Cantor is freaking out that a mentally-ill man, Norman Leboon, posted a YouTube video threatening him and his family.  But Leboon is really not at the same level as the the Christian Militia terrorists, or even Joseph Stack, the anti-tax nut.  His insanity was not focused.

See, Norman Leboon is megalomaniac and probably schizophrenic.  In other words, he’s insane.  Batshit insane, in the classic Apocalypse Now sense.  It’s unfathomable that all of this occurred and yet the man was not committed to a hospital:

Leboon’s brother, Peter, said yesterday that his brother’s behavior had become so erratic in recent months that he also had notified the FBI after Norman Leboon posted one antigovernment YouTube rant.

“They dismissed it as no big deal,” Peter Leboon said.

Peter Leboon said he tried several times to have his brother committed to a mental institution, most recently before Christmas. [...]

Peter Leboon was concerned because his brother, who he said began showing signs of mental instability three years ago, had a permit to carry a concealed weapon.

“The last time I tried to get him help, we searched the whole house, six or seven of us, we couldn’t find the gun,” Peter Leboon said. “I found the permit, though, and destroyed it. Whatever happened to that gun, who knows?”

Christina Wilson, 28, a neighbor, said FBI agents took Leboon away in shackles on Saturday.

That morning, Leboon was outside his house screaming at his neighbors.

“He was ranting and raving: He was going to blow everybody up on the block,” said Wilson, who lives two doors from Leboon.

“For the past two years, he’s been off his rocker,” Wilson said. “I’ve called the cops plenty of times.”

The police would take Leboon away, but never for more than a few hours, said James Hopkins, 39, brother of Leboon’s live-in partner, John Hopkins III.

“I’ve called the police for two years, and the City of Philadelphia has done nothing,” said James Hopkins, who lives across the street. [...]

According to Philadelphia court records, Leboon was arrested by police June 14 after he threatened to kill John Hopkins and slammed his face into a wall.

But at a July 28 hearing in Municipal Court, neither Leboon nor John Hopkins appeared, and Municipal Court Judge Frank T. Brady issued a warrant for Leboon’s arrest – a warrant that remains outstanding. [...]

“He’s made threats to Obama,” he said. “There’s threats to the pope. He threatens to stone him.”

The videos were made in Leboon’s kitchen on a desktop computer with a Web cam attached to the monitor, Hopkins said.

Wilson, who has three children, said parents would have to run out and grab their children when Leboon would come outside and start preaching that he was God.

Incredible!  The real story, given all of the above, is how the Reagan era policies that led to the closure of federal mental health hospitals, and thus no place to put the mentally ill, have been a complete failure (they knew it back then, too).

The failure is still with us.  Look at how many times Leboon, unstable and possibly carrying a gun, came into contact with authorities.  Now what is likely to happen to him?  He’ll be locked up in prison, which is the new mental health hospital.  He clearly needs treatment, not prison, but that’s not the way we roll in the U.S.A.

Wonkette is right to make light of the way this poor, troubled soul expressed himself on YouTube because it shows how much Cantor overreacted in an effort to discredit real threats made against Democratic lawmakers.

The larger issue remains that our country has no functional way to deal with our mentally ill.  It wasn’t just Eric Cantor that Leboon’s insanity focused on from his home in the Philadelphia suburb of Mayfair.  As Wonkette sardonically wrote, “He threatened George W. Bush and Barack Obama and David Duke and Harry Reid and the talking pig-god Babe, and we did nothing.”

Here’s his threat to President Obama from November 2009:

So to all the Republican folks who jumped on this poor schizophrenic’s ramblings as damning evidence that violent extremism is on both sides of the political spectrum (read this gloating post at Gather.com), you might want to hold your pens.  This guy is no more a liberal activist than he is the God of Enoch (which he claims he is).

The American media is suffering from financial pressure, but more worrisome is that its quality has gone downhill.  The major news organizations are failing in their coverage of the big stories.  More people turn to sources like Wikipedia and blogs.

I’m not the only one who says so.  Ryan Chittum, writing on the Columbia Journalism Review‘s blog, pointed out that thin coverage and the back-paging of front page-worthy stories is a real problem for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal:

The Journal, which scored recently by bringing David Reilly back into the fold after a stint at Bloomberg, posts a Reilly news article looking at the culpability of Lehman auditor Ernst & Young. The paper dumps it on C7. The NYT has on the same angle—a very good one to examine closely—and slides it inside on B2.

Somehow the Times thought more people would care about Sorkin’s scoop on a $3 billion deal for Tommy Hilfiger or that it was more important than an auditor approving accounting fraud. They don’t and it’s not.

Look, I know that Lehman collapsed a year and a half ago, but this is a major story—one that finally gets awfully close to putting the crimes in the crisis. I’ll go ahead and say it: If you’ve wanted to know about the Valukas report and its implications, you’ve been better served by reading Zero Hedge and Naked Capitalism than you have The Wall Street Journal or New York Times. This on the biggest financial news story of the week—and one of the biggest of the year. These papers have hundreds of journalists at their disposal. The blogs have one non-professional writer and a handful of sometime non-pro-journalist contributors.

Chittum, from his perch at the CJR, points to several Lehman stories that blogs broke that should have been broken by the big outlets if they had just…read the Lehman report.

I’m not crowing about this: it’s terrible.  Blogs can never replace a professional journalism class; much of Wikipedia would never be written without top-shelf news organizations like the Times or the Journal.  Don’t forget the low standards at Huffington Post.

More evidence of the news organizations failing  jumped out at me in this Washington Post story about a persuasive healthcare speech President Obama gave today in Ohio.  Reportedly, some Republicans voters were swayed enough by the President to give it a try:

Still, not everyone has a firm opinion, and many admit they have a limited understanding of the details. Voters often say they are not sure whom to believe, offering a version of a comment by Patrick O’Toole, Mary Jo’s husband: “You hear this from one side and that from the other side, and you don’t know what’s right.”

Overlooking Obama’s shortcoming for not not hammering out these speeches much earlier and more often, Patrick O’Toole points to a media failure.  Too many media outlets are following the Fox News approach, which is to have no standards for who they put before your eyes.  There is weak critical analysis of what is said, so the news story is ultimately the talking point barked, when the story should be the talking point supported or debunked.  The consequence is an electorate exemplified by Mr. O’Toole.

Standards have eroded across the board; two months after Betsy “Death Panel” McCaughey was shown on Jon Stewart to have no basis for what was dubbed Lie of the Year, she wrote another column about the healthcare bill for the Wall Street Journal.  It was not accompanied by an editors note cautioning, “This woman can’t find her facts in the bill she is writing about, she just believes they exist.”

Image:  Travis Ruse.

George Will must be turning over in his grave.  Buckley, too.  Once a hallowed voice of conservative thought, the Wall Street Journal has been Fox Newsified as everyone feared would happen when News Corp. bought it in 2007.  Exhibit A:

A special committee was established to oversee The Journal’s editorial integrity. But after the managing editor, Marcus Brauchli resigned on April 22, 2008, the committee said that he resigned under pressure, and that News Corporation had violated its agreement by not notifying the committee earlier.  Brauchli said that he thought it was reasonable that new owners would appoint their own editor.

However, a June 5 Journal news story quoted charges that Murdoch had made and broken similar promises in the past. One large shareholder commented that Murdoch has long “expressed his personal, political and business biases through his newspapers and television stations.” Journalist Fred Emery, formerly of the British newspaper The Times, recounted an incident when Murdoch was reminded of his own earlier promises not to fire The Times’ editors without independent directors’ approval and allegedly responded, “God, you don’t take all that seriously, do you?”

Exhibit B:  Of all discredited people to opine about what the health care reform bill says, they chose Betsy “Death Panel” McCaughey (photo, above right).  She’s hardly Grade A conservative thought about one of our country’s most pressing issues; more former prom queen than Dow policy analyst.  What, were all the fellows at the American Enterprise Institute tied up?

McCaughey – a laughing stock after she continually couldn’t find her facts in the bill on The Daily Show — is now a regular Wall Street Journal columnist about health care reform.  She seems like a sweet lady, but this spectacle must make her children blush (video below):

McCaughey’s turn to be questioned was embarrassing as she kept flipping through the bill, unable to find the facts she was basing her arguments upon.  Women everywhere cringed.

She is the one who started the death panel rumor, the topic in the clip above that she couldn’t support.  McCaughey (pronounced “McCoy”) is a follower of faith-based facts; she is of a new class that discuss facts that can’t be evidenced.  It only takes a belief that the fact is there, even when it’s not.  Just like when someone believes the Earth is only 2,000 years old.  On the WSJ editorial page, they now feature the flat earthers of our national discourse.  Bravo, Journal.

A former insitution is officially Fox Newsified.

I feel bad for Bob Herbert at the New York Times. His column yesterday has the same tone many of my posts on this blog have had: what in the hell is going on in the United States?

(post continued below)

"Am I now ready to go to the healthcare town hall debate with the President, Dad?"

Right before the election I had dinner with a gay friend of mine who is a nuclear physicist.  He told me that he was voting for McCain.

“Why?!” I asked, not hiding contempt in my tone.  He smiled as if he had been confronted with this exact response dozens of times.  “Well, I vote with my checkbook,” was what he managed through his toothy grin.

Republican politics tend to be one of the ways gay men who don’t feel comfortable with who they are escape themselves.  Some people join the military; others join the priesthood; and others become Republicans.  They think it’s the “Daddy Party”, so they join it to separate themselves from the nancyboy Democrats.

As they grow up a little and realize they are voting against their interests, gay Republicans usually have to come around with the “vote for the checkbook” argument.  I had a response:

“Leaving aside the arguments that you are choosing your checkbook over your civil rights; what, exactly, about the last eight years made your checkbook stronger or was in any way exemplary of fiscal restraint and prudence?” I asked.

He had  no answer, but instead looked embarrassed.  As a former Teenage Republican, from a conservative standpoint the George W. Bush years lost the fiscal issue for the Republicans.  Anyone who still says they vote for them for fiscal reasons is apparently still living in 1988.

Herbert is one of my favorite columnists, and the tone of his writings are imbued with a sense of dumbfoundedness.  Back in January he saw the beginnings of the Republican mode of attack against Obama:

The G.O.P.’s latest campaign is aimed at undermining President Obama’s effort to cope with the national economic emergency by attacking the spending in his stimulus package and repeating ad nauseam the Republican mantra for ever more tax cuts.

[....]

Maybe the Republicans don’t think there is an emergency. After all, it was Phil Gramm, John McCain’s economic guru, who told us last summer that the pain was all in our heads, that this was a “mental recession.”

The truth, of course, is that the country is hemorrhaging jobs and Americans are heading to the poorhouse by the millions. The stock markets and the value of the family home have collapsed, and there is virtual across-the-board agreement that the country is caught up in the worst economic disaster since at least World War II.

The Republican answer to this turmoil?  Tax cuts. [....]

The question that I would like answered is why anyone listens to this crowd anymore. G.O.P. policies have been an absolute backbreaker for the middle class. (Forget the poor. Nobody talks about them anymore, not even the Democrats.) The G.O.P. has successfully engineered a wholesale redistribution of wealth to those already at the top of the income ladder and then, in a remarkable display of chutzpah, dared anyone to talk about class warfare.

Yesterday, Herbert’s column almost nine months later sounds even more exasperated:

The political debate has been poisoned by birthers, deathers and wackos who smile proudly while carrying signs comparing the president to the Nazis. People who don’t even know that Medicare is a government program have been trying to instruct us on the best ways to reform health care. [....]

The wackiness is increasing, not diminishing, and it has a great potential for destruction. There is a real need for people who know better to speak out in a concerted effort to curb the appeal of the apostles of the absurd. [....]

But there is another type of disturbing behavior, coming from our political leaders and the public at large, that is also symptomatic of a society at loose ends. We seem unable to face up to many of the hard truths confronting the U.S. as we approach the end of the first decade of the 21st century.

There is no end to the craziness. The entire Republican Party has decided that it is in favor of absolutely nothing. The president’s stimulus package? No way. Health care reform? Forget about it.

We’ve also been unable or unwilling to face the hard truths about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the terrible toll they are taking on our young fighting men and women. Most of us don’t want to know. Moreover, we’ve put the costs of these wars on a credit card, without so much as a second thought about what that does to our long-term budget deficits or how it undermines much-needed initiatives here at home. [....]

There are many other issues that we remain in deep denial about. It’s not just the bad economy that has thrown state and local budgets into turmoil from coast to coast. It’s our refusal to provide the tax revenues needed to pay for essential public services. Exhibit A is California, which is now a basket case.

The serious wackos, the obsessive-compulsive absurdists, may be beyond therapy. But the rest of us could use some serious adult counseling. We’ve forgotten many of the fundamentals: how to live within our means, the benefits of shared sacrifice, the responsibilities that go with citizenship, the importance of a well-rounded education and tolerance.

The problem is our national discourse, and that the Republicans appear to have crafted Obama and Liberals as enemies, as opposed to reasoned opposition.  It’s a dangerous step, for either side.  Winning political skirmishes to advance your ideology is fulfilling; turning a society against itself in the process is dangerous.

The current political climate is at best creating a country that is unable–and unwilling–to solve its most serious problems.  At worst, it is turning the country against itself, which can have far more violent and disastrous repercussions than the right is willing to admit as they carry guns to public debates.  The moment something big goes wrong with the emotions they are stoking, the current state of Republican politics is going to come back to bury them.

Bob Herbert, you’re not the only one exasperated, confused and concerned.

There are very, very few senators I would call a nutcase, but Tom Coburn of Oklahoma is one.  A few days ago he wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that started out ridiculous [emphasis added]:

I spoke with thousands of voters at town-hall meetings this summer. What I gathered from them is that it’s not just the proposed overhaul of health care that has them upset. Many also expressed a sense of betrayal. In spite of their hope for change, it still appears that the government in Washington is run for its own benefit and the benefit of special interests—not for the benefit of the American people. The folks I met with also don’t trust politicians in Washington to address mounting long-term challenges to our economy. It’s not just the attendees of town-halls meetings in Oklahoma.

“In spite of their hope for change” they now feel betrayed?  It’s as if Oklahomans were on the Obama Express last year, and now they have been let down like a bunch of liberals.  That’s an amazingly disingenuous way to start an opinion piece.  Oklahoma is what you could call a wing-nut state, and they have a wing-nut as a Senator.  From Wikipedia:

Oklahoma, one of the reddest states in the nation, was far from a swing state in 2008. A strongly conservative state located in the Bible Belt where evangelical Christianity plays a large role, Oklahoma has swung and trended more to the Republicans in recent years than any other state. Having voted for the Republican presidential nominee in every election since 1968, Oklahoma once again showcased its status as a Republican stronghold in 2008 with Republican John McCain capturing 65.65% of the vote while Democrat Barack Obama took in the remaining 34.35%.

Look at Coburn in relation to public idiot William Kostric, who brought a loaded gun to a healthcare debate.  If you watch Kostric on Chris Matthews, he can barely answer any question cogently.  He doesn’t know what he’s talking about, he’s unable to back up his beliefs, but he’s armed with opinions and loaded weapons:

Kostric, who carried a sign that read “It is time to water the tree of liberty”, said he “wanted to be heard” because Americans are losing a lot of rights in this country.

When asked by Matthews to name those rights, Kostric can only reply “a litany” yet can’t name a single one before expressing surprise that Obama is a Constitutional scholar.  Kostric hasn’t demonstrated he understands anything about the Constitution and our civil liberties at all, except that he gets to carry a gun like a Big Man.

"Because I can do it," he said when asked why he was armed outside a hall where Obama spoke about healthcare.

He just “believes” we’re losing rights, and on the right-wing that’s all it takes:  belief.  It’s one thing to hang on to belief when there are few facts; but when you hang on to beliefs that contradict all facts, it only makes you a fool.

Kostric’s sign paraphrased Thomas Jefferson: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”  Timothy McVeigh, who murdered 168 people in Coburn’s home state because of his right-wing paranoia, had the Jefferson quote on his T-shirt.  Surely Oklahoma Senator  Coburn would express concern when right-wingers are arming themselves and showing up at public discussions:

The Phoenix Police originally said three persons were spotted with guns in downtown Phoenix near Obama’s appearance and later upped that count to 12.

Actually, Coburn defends them.  From Frank Rich:

[L]ast Sunday, when asked by David Gregory on “Meet the Press” if he was troubled by current threats of “violence against the government,” Coburn blamed not the nuts but the government.

“Well, I’m troubled any time when we stop having confidence in our government,” the senator said, “but we’ve earned it.”

Coburn is nothing if not consistent. In the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, he was part of a House contingent that helped delay and soften an antiterrorism bill. This cohort even tried to strip out a provision blocking domestic fund-raising by foreign terrorist organizations like Hamas. Why? The far right, in league with the National Rifle Association, was angry at the federal government for aggressively policing America’s self-appointed militias. In a 1996 floor speech, Coburn conceded that “terrorism obviously poses a serious threat,” but then went on to explain that the nation had worse threats to worry about: “There is a far greater fear that is present in this country, and that is fear of our own government.” As his remarks on “Meet the Press” last week demonstrated, the subsequent intervention of 9/11 has not changed his worldview.

[....]

Coburn’s implicit rationalization for far-right fanatics bearing arms at presidential events — the government makes them do it! — cannot stand. He’s not a radio or Fox News bloviator paid a fortune to be outrageous; he’s a card-carrying member of the United States Senate.

It’s hard to fathom how to make sense of how the right wing thinks any more.  We are only 8 months into a new Presidency that is trying to fix the mess of the previous administration, and now Republicans are speaking as if they aren’t the ones who got us where we are today.

I used to understand their point-of-view, but now the mainstream of the Republican party is so divorced from reason, education and history that it’s difficult to formulate responses to their views.  Maybe that’s the point.  While that might work well as a sugar rush to tongue-tie reasoned opposition with stupidity, it certainly isn’t a good strategy to get back into power.

“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.” — Abraham Lincoln

“[M]y baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’“- Sarah Palin, 8/7/09

Republican Death Panels: How many falsehoods can a party spread before it is no longer viable to the electorate?

As if the Republicans’ Teabaggers, Birthers and Screamers weren’t problem enough for its image, now they have the Deathers.  The Republican Party is now the embodiment of American fringe politics.

Ever since August 7th when Sarah Palin twittered that her disabled baby would die before the eyes of Obama’s death panels, the Republicans credibility with voters has taken a nose dive (again).  At what point does a political party obscure the reality of issues to voters so often, that it can no longer run in elections because it has destroyed all faith and trust in itself?

The Republicans used to rely upon Frank Luntz and Newt Gingrich to help them obfuscate in crafty, disingenuous ways.  Now, they flat out lie.

The party’s stars in politics and in their information machine Fox News have hearkened the pending Death Panels who will kill the elderly and Sarah Palin’s baby.  Problem:  there is no such thing.

In fact, pro-life Republican Johnny Isakson of Georgia is the one who wrote the provision into the healthcare bill.  Facing South’s Sue Sturgis unearthed that fact:

Many in the media quickly pointed out that Palin’s claims weren’t true. But Sturgis was the first to report that one of the biggest advocates of counseling for end-of-life care — the provision that actually was in the Congressional legislation — was none other than a pro-life Republican: Sen. Johnny Isakson of Georgia.

Although one of their own was the architect of the “Death Panels”, Republicans have been going into over drive to tell people that they exist, when they don’t.  Isakson is exasperated by his own party:

“I just had a phone call where someone said Sarah Palin’s web site had talked about the House bill having death panels on it where people would be euthanized. How someone could take an end of life directive or a living will as that is nuts. You’re putting the authority in the individual rather than the government. I don’t know how that got so mixed up.”

Are voters wisening-up to Republican tricks to harm the veracity of the national debate over issues, and if so, how long can a party function with no credibility once people realize this is their game plan?

Death Panels and Republican Credibility – a timeline

“By poisoning the political well, they’ve given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They’ve become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems.” – Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post, 8/7/09

The ‘Death Panel’ provision of Section 1233 of America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009, as written by pro-life Republican of Georgia Johnny Isakson:

According to an analysis of the bill produced by the three relevant House committees, the section “[p]rovides coverage for consultation between enrollees and practitioners to discuss orders for life-sustaining treatment. Instructs CMS to modify ‘Medicare & You’ handbook to incorporate information on end-of-life planning resources and to incorporate measures on advance care planning into the physician’s quality reporting initiative.”

June 25, 2009 - Peter Johnson Jr. claimed on Fox & Friends that health care reform is “the government deciding who will live, who will die.” He later went on to ask: “Is that what this plan is about? To save money by killing old people? That’s frightening. That’s absolutely frightening.”

June 26, 2009 -  NewsBusters article titled “Obama Says We Shouldn’t Treat Old Folks to Save Money And the Media Goes Deaf,” Warner Todd Huston wrote, “[I]t sure seemed to me as if the most caring, most civil, most intelligent president evah just said that healthcare could be cheaper if we don’t give old folks and the infirm the full measure of care they now get. It appeared that Obama said we should just let them die or suffer because they aren’t worth the effort.”

June 25, 2009 -  American Spectator article titled “Obama Wants to Let Those Pesky Geezers Die,” Capital Research Center senior editor Matthew Vadum paraphrased an excerpt from a Los Angeles Times article as stating: “So, old people: screw you”

June 27, 2009 – Forbes on Fox, Forbes publisher Rich Karlgaard misrepresented Obama’s remarks at the health care forum, stating: “[W]hat he’s indicating is that government health care involves rationing. It’s kind of funny that he let it slip out. It was kind of funny he signaled it by wearing a black tie, the color of funerals. There’s going to be more funerals for old people going ahead.”

July 16, 2009 - former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey falsely claimed on Fred Thompson’s show that the House health care reform bill would “absolutely require” end-of-life counseling for seniors “that will tell them how to end their life sooner.”

July 17, 2009 – Betsy McCaughey writes an op-ed for the New York Post repeating false claims, writing “[o]ne troubling provision” of the bill “compels seniors to submit to a counseling session every five years … about alternatives for end-of-life care,” adding that the “mandate invites abuse, and seniors could easily be pushed to refuse care.”

Fox News stars begin spreading the rumor

Sean Hannity:  “[I]t sounds to me like they’re actually encouraging seniors in the end, ‘Well, you may just want to consider packing it all in here, this is — ‘ what other way is there to describe this?” He continued, “So that they don’t become a financial burden on the Obamacare system? I mean that’s how they intend to cut cost, by cutting down on the health care we can give and get at the end of our lives and dramatically cutting it down for senior citizens? You know, welcome to the brave new world of Obamacare. We’re going to encourage, you know, inconvenient people to consider ‘alternatives to living.’ ”

Laura Ingraham:  “[S]ome will call them death camps, but this is the way Obamacare is gonna go for America.”

August 9, 2009 – Newt Gingrich on This Week -“You’re asking us to decide that the government is to be trusted … You are asking us to trust turning power over to the government, when there are clearly people in American who believe in establishing euthanasia, including selective standards.”

August 9, 2009 – Michelle Malkin – “Death panels? What death panels? Oh, yeah, those death panels.”

August 10, 2009 – Fox & Friends, co-host Brian Kilmeade said, “[E]veryone’s talking about seniors, and they’re talking about the middle class and affordable health care. If the upper class is paying for the next two classes, and are seniors going to be in front of the death panel? And then just as you think, OK, that’s ridiculous, then you realize there’s provisions in there that seniors in the last lap of their life will be sitting there going to a panel possibly discussing what the best thing for them is.”

August 10, 2009 -Glenn Beck on death panels: “I believe it to be true.”

Thanks to Paul Krugman for writing about what is The Soundbite of the healthcare reform debate, first reported in the Washington Post:

At a recent town-hall meeting in suburban Simpsonville, a man stood up and told Rep. Robert Inglis (R-S.C.) to “keep your government hands off my Medicare.”

“I had to politely explain that, ‘Actually, sir, your health care is being provided by the government,’ ” Inglis recalled. “But he wasn’t having any of it.”

Nearly one-third of Americans are already on a government-provided healthcare plan.  Just don’t tell them.  That way, we can keep reading opinion polls like this 7/29 Gallup:

Less than half of Americans (44%) say that a new healthcare reform law would improve medical care in the United States, 14% say it would not change it, and 34% say it would worsen it.

The ‘government hands’ quote might be funny, but only until you realize that such ignorance is what prevents the country from improving the lot of its citizens.

Slate, complaining that this “joke” has started to wear thin, had an astute observation by Michael Kinsley it repeated:

The big lie that Medicare isn’t, nor ever should be, financed and regulated by the government, is a nice illustration of Slate founder Michael Kinsley’s hypothesis, articulated in his 1995 book Big Babies, that infantile denial lies at the heart of much contemporary political disaffection. The American people, Kinsley wrote, “make flagrantly incompatible demands—cut my taxes, preserve my benefits, balance the budget—then explode in self-righteous outrage when the politicians fail to deliver.” Although Kinsley conceded that big babyism had been enabled by both conservative and liberal politics, he wrote: “It is conservatives, more than liberals, who stoke the fires of resentment and encourage vast swaths of the electorate to indulge in fantasies of victimization by others.” This is perhaps 1,000 times more true today than it was 14 years ago.

SEE ALSO:  Are ‘Death Panels’ hurting Republican credibility with voters?