Plasma Pool

We shouldn’t be terribly surprised by any new round of viscous, disingenuous, irrelevant propaganda coming from the GOP, particularly in the area of health care, where standards of integrity and empiricism have long since given way in favor of who can scream lies the loudest. But the immediate reaction by the Republican National Committee to the passage of the historic healthcare bill Sunday night, ostensibly penned by Chairman and Chief Bling Officer Michael Steele and intended for the party faithful, is a gracefully deranged gem of ad hominem missives:

Dear Fellow Patriot,

In defiance of the will of the American people, Nancy Pelosi and her Democrat cronies have authorized a government takeover of your health care.  She even considered an unconstitutional backdoor process that involved passing the bill without a vote on it before she realized that she could simply cajole, bully, and even buy off members of Congress in order to get enough “yeas” to ram President Obama’s socialist scheme down our throats.

Nancy Pelosi has gone too far. She is no longer serving the American people and the Constitution of the United States. She is beholden to left-wing special interests, and does not represent the will of the people. It is time to fire Nancy Pelosi.

In order to fund our efforts to oust Speaker Pelosi, the Republican National Committee is launching a Money Bomb to raise the resources we need to gain 40 House seats. If we gain just 40 House seats, we will fire Nancy Pelosi. Please donate, and then tell your friends to donate, so that we can end the tyrannical reign of the most aggressively left-wing Speaker in American history. Donate, so that we can fire Nancy Pelosi!

Sincerely,

Michael Steele
Chairman, Republican National Committee

We needn’t begin to address, for the umpteenth time, the network of carefully orchestrated falsehoods (concerning Pelosi, reconciliation and other congressional procedures, healthcare generally, and so on) on which this pathetic call rests. We needn’t address that this is but the latest of many opportunities the GOP has taken to turn the discussion away from legitimate points of policy contention to assassinating the character of those who’d rather seriously discuss them. Steele was of course not alone in spouting this nonsense; presidential hopefuls Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney took their own stellar, fearmongering cheap shots, as did many other GOP underlings. But Steele is truly shameless.

None of this should surprise us. With respect to both the policy and politics of this debate, the GOP’s rhetoric has rarely struck a note that wasn’t radically dishonest, self-congratulatorily petulant, or both. Republicans never seriously entered the debate to begin with. The closest they’ve come to a serious, comprehensive case against the manufactured specter of “socialized medicine” was made long ago by Ronald Reagan, the man who decades later made defending its unquestionable benefits a hallmark of his presidential campaign and presidency. Many future articulations have expanded on Reagan’s argument’s levels of complexity and heft (others haven’t), but the basic right-wing argument against universal health care remains as morally and intellectually bankrupt as it was when babyfaced Reagan made it.

Today those who claim Reagan’s mantle as their swaddling clothes have made defending Medicare—the program that young Reagan insisted would put a blunt and nonnegotiable end to American freedom—from Democrats’ supposed vigor to starve it one of many mendacious talking points, the relevance of which seem to be solely that they all work well to distract and mislead the public. And they do. This childish, proudly ignorant approach is as sophisticated an approach as today’s GOP can muster to the real-world public policy question of how to keep people we claim as our fellow citizens from sickness and death.

Why would we be surprised, now that the Republican propaganda campaign to “kill the bill” has proven unsuccessful, that the GOP’s sole substantive response is a fundraising gimmick centered on convincing Americans that the Speaker of the House is one colossal B?