skews13
Diamond Member
- Mar 18, 2017
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Tom Price, liar.
It's Sunday, that blessed day reserved for national political figures to appear on morning television shows and lie outright to America. For some reason we put up with this; I'm going to presume it's because very few families own their own pitchforks anymore or even knows where to procure one. Whatever the case, for some reason America seems hell-bent on (1) electing blatantly crooked people to office, (2) listening intently while those crooked people insist that Reality Is What You Make Of It, So Shut Up, and (3) getting extraordinarily twitchy whenever any other serious member of journalism or politics implies that maybe we ought not treat crooked people who lie to us as if they are Right Proper Gentlemen who simply have a different opinion than you or I about what color the sky is or whether dogs generally have four legs or six.
This is how we get spectacles like this morning's shows, which featured two of the biggest crooks in American politics, both of whom trotted out huge, massive, consequential lies and effectively dared "serious" America to call them to account for it. First up was the inexplicably not-indicted-yet Tom Price, taking a break from stock profiteering in Congress to serve as Donald Trump's head of Health and Human Services. He made the rounds of several shows to, among other things, deny that cutting $880 billion from Medicaid counted as cutting Medicaid. And it was at this point that any truly modern, civilized society would have insisted that someone in the studio walk up to Tom Price and smack him with the business end of a boat oar.
HOST: ... that that's actually not going to result in millions of Americans not getting Medicaid?
CROOK: Absolutely not. And we believe strongly that the Medicaid population will be cared for in a better way under our program because it will be more responsive to them. These decisions will be made closer to them.
With nearly a trillion less dollars. The premise here is that you can get equivalent health care after cutting nearly a trillion dollars out of the program and spending it on tax cuts for the wealthy—things were just that inefficient and will be made that much better with nearly a trillion less dollars. It's not a cut, it's just being responsive to American’s current problem of having too much health care coverage.
Lest we blame the sociopathic liar Trump for this new coarsening of our discourse, aka rank dishonesty, let us remember that the Tom Prices of the nation have been peddling overt falsehoods to nearby television cameras for decades, now. Trump did not cause this. Trump was the result. Trump is what happens when the collective journalists of the nation decide that no matter how dishonest a pubic official might be, making a big deal over that dishonesty would be the real tragedy because then dishonest people would be super, super mad and say things that were even worse.
On the other end of the liar's spectrum; America's dumbest wonk, Rep. Paul Ryan. Now here is a man who has failed upward. We are to assume from the omnipresent (if, perhaps, self-promoting) wonk label that this is the top end of how erudite you're allowed to be in politics before your knowledge renders you an unsavory, out-of-touch elite; as it turns out, the upper boundary is approximately three PowerPoint slides, twenty words per slide. Paul Ryan's angle today was to brazenly tell every American with preexisting conditions that it's not his fault if insurance just became unattainable for twenty or so million of them; it's your fault for not being so fabulously rich that you can pay Literally Any Price for whatever insurance is offered. So let's just sit ourselves down in our most comfortable chair and bask in the chutzpah of this gigantic lying ass.
CROOK: Under this bill, no matter what, you cannot be denied coverage if you have a pre-existing condition.
HOST: But you can charge people more.
CROOK: Let me finish my point. You can't charge people more, if they keep continuous coverage. [...]
HOST: But as you know, Mr. Speaker, sometimes people lose coverage through no fault of their own. [...]
CROOK: So let me finish my point. That's right, so I was getting there until you just cut me off. The point of this bill, in those states that get a waiver to do what they need to do to make it work better in their particular states, has support exactly for that very person. [...]
By which he means the $8 billion slush fund tacked in to "support" a problem estimated at $200 billion, meaning $192 billion's worth of the needed "support" is explicitly not in the bill, and leaving the rest to the states to be cobbled together in the form of "high-risk pools" that do not, if we are relying on the strict history of such things, work. The previous incarnation of the bill resulted in more than twenty million people losing coverage as a result of not being able to afford any such insurance, high-risk pool or otherwise; the new bill is widely expected to, if anything, make those numbers worse. Incidentally, the way you can tell when a Host is really getting under Crook’s skin is when Crook insists that you stop interrupting his bullshit session to point out the obvious flaws with it. How very uncouth, Host. Who’s the real monster here?
Crook also pressed the point that the bill does too have a score from the Congressional Budget Office, because he says so, and that you're the dishonest one if you happen to know that the score he's talking about is for a previous bill and doesn't count here. He says it's still close enough, which therefore means he's also accepting the estimate of 20+ million new uninsured as still valid while still insisting to you, on camera, that 20 million equals zero million.
And no, it doesn't appear any of the major studios still keep oars behind the cameras. That is a shame.
Alright, so today we learned that crooked politicians can get away with saying anything they like, because we've still got it in our heads, here in America, that brazenly lying about actions which will result in the actual deaths of actual Americans is within the bounds of discourse. This is why our elections are now riddled with conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists. This is why the crudest liars in the nation can continue to rise to the top—they can gain the electoral advantage of their lies, and suffer none of the electoral blowback for being pinned as a liar. This is how nations like North Korea operate, after they've dispensed with the pretense of an adversarial press entirely and just have the political elites themselves issue the news.
And it's not going to get better until we institute some punishment for lying more substantive than thank you for joining us today, I hope to see you next weekend as well.
Tom Price and Paul Ryan go on the Sunday shows to brazenly lie to Americans about healthcare
