In this weekly feature, we follow — with increasing consternation — the national healthcare debate. Last week, we were pretty fazed by the mobilization of the Bitterz. We had no idea.
In case you hadn’t heard, the creation of a government health insurance provider will lead to the creation of “Death Panels” which will inevitably decide that Trig Palin is an unworthy recipient taxpayer money and should be euthanized, immediately.
(This would be instead of the American Way, in which the rich can afford to prolong their lives indefinitely, while poor people have to pull the plug, as god intended.)
This is, of course, a grotesque straw-man vision of government-run health insurance (which would be, of course, totally different from profit-motived private insurance), designed to frighten many bitter white people who believe that America is run by a secret Kenyan Muslim black nationalist.
Or, you know, this is maybe a grotesque straw-man etc, I honestly have no idea. I can’t even begin to fathom this level of rage at the development of a healthcare plan which asserts nothing more controversial than the idea that the government (that is, the American people) ought to provide for people who can’t provide for themselves.
In any case this has led, naturally, to Real Americans — many of whom receive Medicare, a government health insurance program — showing up to harass their elected officials, screaming and screaming about how government health insurance for poor people who can’t afford good medical care will invariably lead to the gub’ment deciding who out of all old people get to live and who will have to die; they have also begun to plot violence against the president, and to wave signs portraying him as Hitler.
The White House has had to clarify, actually clarify, that they don’t want to kill your grandmother.
The lesson here, as always, is that no talking point is too cynical in its estimation of the idiocy and gullibility of the American public.