Something strange has happened in America in the nine months

[MikeWB]

The Zios are clearly behind the Obama birth certificate story but who's behind the medical scare? Who runs all these medical insurance companies? My guess is that Zios own a lot of them as well.

Johann Hari: Republicans, religion and the triumph of unreason

How do they train themselves to be so impervious to reality?

Wednesday, 19 August 2009


Sarah Palin really has claimed ? with a straight face ? that Barack Obama wants to kill her baby


Something strange has happened in America in the nine months since Barack Obama was elected. It has best been summarised by the comedian Bill Maher: "The Democrats have moved to the right, and the Republicans have moved to a mental hospital."

The election of Obama – a black man with an anti-conservative message – as a successor to George W. Bush has scrambled the core American right's view of their country. In their gut, they saw the US as a white-skinned, right-wing nation forever shaped like Sarah Palin.

When this image was repudiated by a majority of Americans in a massive landslide, it simply didn't compute. How could this have happened? How could the cry of "Drill, baby, drill" have been beaten by a supposedly big government black guy? So a streak that has always been there in the American right's world-view – to deny reality, and argue against a demonic phantasm of their own creation – has swollen. Now it is all they can see.

Since Obama's rise, the US right has been skipping frantically from one fantasy to another, like a person in the throes of a mental breakdown. It started when they claimed he was a secret Muslim, and – at the same time – that he was a member of a black nationalist church that hated white people. Then, once these arguments were rejected and Obama won, they began to argue that he was born in Kenya and secretly smuggled into the United States as a baby, and the Hawaiian authorities conspired to fake his US birth certificate. So he is ineligible to rule and the office of President should pass to... the Republican runner-up, John McCain.

These aren't fringe phenomena: a Research 200 poll found that a majority of Republicans and Southerners say Obama wasn't born in the US, or aren't sure. A steady steam of Republican congressmen have been jabbering that Obama has "questions to answer". No amount of hard evidence – here's his birth certificate, here's a picture of his mother heavily pregnant in Hawaii, here's the announcement of his birth in the local Hawaiian paper – can pierce this conviction.

This trend has reached its apotheosis this summer with the Republican Party now claiming en masse that Obama wants to set up "death panels" to euthanise the old and disabled. Yes: Sarah Palin really has claimed – with a straight face – that Barack Obama wants to kill her baby.

You have to admire the audacity of the right. Here's what's actually happening. The US is the only major industrialised country that does not provide regular healthcare to all its citizens. Instead, they are required to provide for themselves – and 50 million people can't afford the insurance. As a result, 18,000 US citizens die every year needlessly, because they can't access the care they require. That's equivalent to six 9/11s, every year, year on year. Yet the Republicans have accused the Democrats who are trying to stop all this death by extending healthcare of being "killers" – and they have successfully managed to put them on the defensive.

The Republicans want to defend the existing system, not least because they are given massive sums of money by the private medical firms who benefit from the deadly status quo. But they can't do so honestly: some 70 per cent of Americans say it is "immoral" to retain a medical system that doesn't cover all citizens. So they have to invent lies to make any life-saving extension of healthcare sound depraved.

A few months ago, a recent board member for several private health corporations called Betsy McCaughey reportedly noticed a clause in the proposed healthcare legislation that would pay for old people to see a doctor and write a living will. They could stipulate when (if at all) they would like care to be withdrawn. It's totally voluntary. Many people want it: I know I wouldn't want to be kept alive for a few extra months if I was only going to be in agony and unable to speak. But McCaughey started the rumour that this was a form of euthanasia, where old people would be forced to agree to death. This was then stretched to include the disabled, like Palin's youngest child, who she claimed would have to "justify" his existence. It was flatly untrue – but the right had their talking-point, Palin declared the non-existent proposals "downright evil", and they were off.

It's been amazingly successful. Now, every conversation about healthcare has to begin with a Democrat explaining at great length that, no, they are not in favour of killing the elderly – while Republicans get away with defending a status quo that kills 18,000 people a year. The hypocrisy was startling: when Sarah Palin was Governor of Alaska, she encouraged citizens there to take out living wills. Almost all the Republicans leading the charge against "death panels" have voted for living wills in the past. But the lie has done its work: a confetti of distractions has been thrown up, and support is leaking away from the plan that would save lives.

These increasingly frenzied claims have become so detached from reality that they often seem like black comedy. The right-wing magazine US Investors' Daily claimed that if Stephen Hawking had been British, he would have been allowed to die at birth by its "socialist" healthcare system. Hawking responded with a polite cough that he is British, and "I wouldn't be here without the NHS".

This tendency to simply deny inconvenient facts and invent a fantasy world isn't new; it's only becoming more heightened. It ran through the Bush years like a dash of bourbon in water. When it became clear that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, the US right simply claimed they had been shipped to Syria. When the scientific evidence for man-made global warming became unanswerable, they claimed – as one Republican congressman put it – that it was "the greatest hoax in human history", and that all the world's climatologists were "liars". The American media then presents itself as an umpire between "the rival sides", as if they both had evidence behind them.

It's a shame, because there are some areas in which a conservative philosophy – reminding us of the limits of grand human schemes, and advising caution – could be a useful corrective. But that's not what these so-called "conservatives" are providing: instead, they are pumping up a hysterical fantasy that serves as a thin skin covering some raw economic interests and base prejudices.

For many of the people at the top of the party, this is merely cynical manipulation. One of Bush's former advisers, David Kuo, has said the President and Karl Rove would mock evangelicals as "nuts" as soon as they left the Oval Office. But the ordinary Republican base believe this stuff. They are being tricked into opposing their own interests through false fears and invented demons. Last week, one of the Republicans sent to disrupt a healthcare town hall started a fight and was injured – and then complained he had no health insurance. I didn't laugh; I wanted to weep.

How do they train themselves to be so impervious to reality? It begins, I suspect, with religion. They are taught from a young age that it is good to have "faith" – which is, by definition, a belief without any evidence to back it up. You don't have "faith" that Australia exists, or that fire burns: you have evidence. You only need "faith" to believe the untrue or unprovable. Indeed, they are taught that faith is the highest aspiration and most noble cause. Is it any surprise this then percolates into their political views? Faith-based thinking spreads and contaminates the rational.

Up to now, Obama has not responded well to this onslaught of unreason. He has had a two-pronged strategy: conciliate the elite economic interests, and joke about the fanatical fringe they are stirring up. He has (shamefully) assured the pharmaceutical companies that an expanded healthcare system will not use the power of government as a purchaser to bargain down drug prices, while wryly saying in public that he "doesn't want to kill Grandma". Rather than challenging these hard interests and bizarre fantasies aggressively, he has tried to flatter and soothe them.

This kind of mania can't be co-opted: it can only be overruled. Sometimes in politics you will have enemies, and they must be democratically defeated. The political system cannot be gummed up by a need to reach out to the maddest people or the greediest constituencies. There is no way to expand healthcare without angering Big Pharma and the Republicaloons. So be it. As Arianna Huffington put it, "It is as though, at the height of the civil rights movement, you thought you had to bring together Martin Luther King and George Wallace and make them agree. It's not how change happens."

However strange it seems, the Republican Party really is spinning off into a bizarre cult who believe Barack Obama is a baby-killer plotting to build death panels for the grannies of America. Their new slogan could be – shrill, baby, shrill.

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

If Obama wasn't a Jewish Mouth Puppet, I might have hope...

[MikeWB]

If Obama wasn't a Jewish Mouth Puppet, I might have hope...

He's not as big of a puppet as some make him look like. If he were a total tool of theirs, we would have been in Iran by now.

[thirdeyewise]

He looks pretty big to me:

In 2000 when Abner Mikva campaigned on Obama's behalf throughout Chicago. Obama failed to make it into Congress and Mikva said that one reason was that Obama didn't know how to speak to black audiences on the South Side. "He got clobbered in the black areas since he came across as a Harvard Law professor," he recalled.

Mikva became Obama's political advisor and suggested he learn more effective public speaking from observing preachers. Mikva said of Obama: "He listened to patterns of speech, how to take people up the ladders. It's almost a Baptist tradition to make someone faint, and, by God, he's doing it now."

by Obama's senate bid four years later, the state senator had come a long way as an orator. "When he spoke to black audiences in 2004 he had the rhythm and knew how to speak. He could have taught a thing or two to Dr. [Martin Luther] King."

"I think when this is all over, people are going to say that Barack Obama is the first Jewish president"- Abner Mikva

"Barack will be the first Jewish president in the US, he has a yiddeshe nishama (Jewish soul),."  -- Abner Mikva


Presidential historians and convention observers believe this year's Democratic convention will be the first time that a rabbi gives an invocation before the presidential nominee's acceptance speech since the advent of modern American political conventions nearly a century ago.        
 - The Jewish Daily Forward August 21, 2008 "


The Chicago Jewish News, a nationally prominent Israel-First propaganda organ, published a lengthy article on 'Obama and the Jews' by Pauline Dubkin (October 24, 2008), which quotes approvingly a 'long-time Jewish observer of the political scene', who declared that, "Jews made him (Obama). Wherever you look there is a Jewish presence."


One of Obama's longest supporters, Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf, provides a clue to Obama's affinity for Zionist appointments. According to Rabbi Wolf, "Obama is embedded in the Jewish world."


Barack Obama: America's First Jewish President! – huffington post November 14, 2008

Obama became the first president ever to host the Jewish passover ritual known as seder at the White House


Obama declared May 'Jewish American Heritage Month'



anything contrary is probably just for show, or they know the climate in the country will not permit their next move.

[MikeWB]

John McCain promised to be in Iran by the year's end. Why aren't we there yet? Why is Netanyahu working behind the scenes to undermine him?

To me it's clear that he's not doing as much as they want. Sure, he's propping up banks and protecting banksters but Israel is still a thorn. Things are never black and white.

[thirdeyewise]

what ever the reason, we just don't know. but i can guarantee the Jews here and the Jews in Israel are on the same page, we just don't know which one that is.

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Iran's internal politics is probably screwing up plans big time as well as Russian Arms shipments. ?  I think the American Israeli controllers are actually a lot more sophisticated under String Boy Obama than under the Dumb Mouth Puppet Bush.

[kolnidre]

I couldn't get through that stupid article much beyond the assinine quote from Maher that the Democrats have moved toward the right under Obama. And then all it does is mock the so-called "right" (labels and allegiances are so stupid!) for the statements of some cut-outs who are useful idiots for just such occasions.

Want to talk about blind faith? Damn, go to some site that attracts "socially responsible" types and observe their corporate-fed Gaia worship and love for invasive gubmint.

We're always being fed false debates to get entrapped in. Like this healthcare melee. Both sides are compelled to argue about something that doesn't work, puts people on drugs, slices and dices them, and steals their money just at the end of their productive lives as useless eaters. The whole process only focuses people's desire for more or cheaper such "health care," i.e. management of symptoms, and not good health and prevention. They don't tell you that 92% of oncologists refuse chemotherapy for their families and themselves. Yet somehow they live inside a moral paradigm that allows them to act so lovingly to dispense that rat poison to non-family members.

Not one word about what's in the food, the water, the air, the drugs. Rather, it's all about the reaction to the problem that the same groups cause in the first place.

Sorry for the rant. It's my orthorexia nervosa acting up again.