Fiting Assholery. On last nite's episode of MSNBC's Countdown, both Keith Olbermann and Eugene Robinson said that the Obama Administration made a key mistake in linking universal healthcare insurance to cost-cutting because it supposedly opened up the healthcare discussion to lunatic and dishonest assertions that the Government is proposing "death panels" to save money. That is very much akin to saying to someone whose house was broken into, "Well, you did leave your door unlocked" or "You may have locked your doors and windows, but you didn't have window gates or a burglar alarm or an electric fence — or minefields or machinegun emplacements — on all sides of your house"!
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There is no obligation to cast about for ways to try to avoid assaults from liars and con artists. Liars will lie, con artists will con — that's what they do! — no matter how many preventive measures you may throw up to dissuade them.
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And when the Radical Right invents crazy frauds to fool stupid people, intelligent and honest people at the Center and on the Left have an absolute obligation to explode the myths and expose the liars as the liars they are, and the morons who believe them as the morons they are. In short, we need to fite assholery to the death, not give up on ever getting the truth out because 20% of the people are uneducated fools who cannot and will not believe the truth. If at the end of a campaign of crystal-clear exposition of the truth, some assholes still believe crazy nonsense, that can't be helped. It nonetheless remains the obligation of responsible public officials to ram thru blameless legislation to fix the problems the Nation wants fixed.
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Howard Dean also appeared on that episode of Countdown and was not taking excuses. He told Olbermann that end-of-life counseling will be in the final bill, and Democrats will (just have to) ram the bill thru without Republican votes if they must. They have the votes, because the electorate gave Dems the votes to legislate without any Republican input whatsoever, and over objections from every single Republican in Congress, if need be. Again, Howard Dean comes out as principled and courageous. It's a pity that the media contrived to oust him from consideration for President in 2004. He made one silly move, that odd yahoo "scream", that was magnified into the worst mistake anyone ever made but was actually preposterous trivia. Had I made such a mistake, I'd have made it my tagline and ended every speech with it, found a way to spell it and then emblazoned it on teeshirts (perhaps over a slogan like "Enthusiasm counts"), and urged my supporters to defy the media and other critics and shout it themselves, at rallies, at demonstrations, in the convention, whatever. But Dean did not have THAT much courage, when he needed it, so perhaps he is a better adviser than he would have been President. Let him advise Democrats now as I advise:

Damn the assholes! Full speed ahead!
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4.331 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:19 PM