The Democrat's Health Care Scare

There have been numerous contrasting articles about the health care debate in the papers in the past couple weeks. The first type, virtually all from Media Types sympathetic to Nationalized Health Care, portrays those in opposition to government run health care as cynical tools of conservative lobbyists. The other type - and increasingly more common - presents in more measured and factual terms those same protesters as righteously angry free agents.

The latter is interesting in that they rebut the cheerleaders of Obamacare in rather stark terms. They also offer a much more realistic assessment of who is actually being rude in this debate: the politicians promoting Obamacare. Events of the past few weeks have revealed numerous examples of true "rudeness", and it's not the protesters:

- President Obama and congressional Democrats attempting to ram health care reform through Congress before the August recess without any opportunity for lawmakers and citizens to read the bill, much less allow time for public debate. They did the same thing with the Stimulus Package and Cap & Trade.

- Prominent Democrats - including President Obama - vilifying protesters for using the very organizational tactics that have been used for decades by Democrat interest groups, and particularly the President himself as a Community Organizer.

- Time and time again misportraying health care protestors at town hall meetings as "outsiders" intent on squashing reasoned debate. Numerous Democrats have gone so far as to proclaim that they would only allow residents from their districts to attend town halls in the future, without offering a scrap of evidence that their accusations about outsiders are true.

- Cynically concocting an eleventh hour attempt to take the heat off of themselves by casting the insurance companies as the villains. Astonishingly, a mere two week's ago the Obama Administration was portraying the insurance companies as partners in the reform process.

- Accusing their opponents of using scare tactics, when fear has been their sole justification for attempting to rush Obamacare through without debate in the first place.

- Democrat politicians stage-managing "Townhall" meetings, doing them over the telephone, providing little public notice before live events, and giving admission mostly to people that are sympathetic to their cause, as the President did with his appearance in New Hampshire, with dozens of other Democrats following suit.

- Decrying the lack of "civility" and "reasoned debate", as if they had no part in creating the firestorm of controversy in the first place.

The list goes on and on.

How much more arrogant and disrespectful can you be than to do all of these things? None of these actions, however, is an accident. These politicians tried to use disinformation and intimidation to rig the process and got called on it by the American people. The fact that their response to this widespread disapproval was to try to further rig the process with more disinformation and intimidation almost certainly dooms their efforts to nationalize health care, the outcome they most richly deserve.