The Washington Post‘s business columnist Steven Pearlstein has added a subtle new rhetorical wrinkle to the campaign of clever, disarming understatement and reasoned discourse that has so far characterized the pro-Obamacare campaign. According to Pearlstein, if you claim that any of the various versions of Obamacare threaten a government takeover of health care, or that the higher cost estimates for the Democratic plans are more realistic than the lower ones, you’re a “political terrorist” (a designation that may helpfully distinguish you from those of us who favor terrorism just for the fun of it).
To emphasize the sheer out of this universe total and complete lunacy of longtime political co-conspirators Barney Frank and Rush Limbaugh, who both believe that the endpoint of health care “reform” is some version of a single payer system, Pearlstein tries to bring things down to Earth:
Under any plan likely to emerge from Congress, the vast majority of Americans who are not old or poor will continue to buy health insurance from private companies, continue to get their health care from doctors in private practice and continue to be treated at privately owned hospitals.
“Under any plan likely…”: Now, all of the plans that were originally being seriously considered by the Democrats, including our Truly Great Leader (TGL), offered robust “public option” rainbows leading right to the Frankian pot of single payer gold. Much of the discussion of the last month or two has been about pushing the public option back or watering it down. So, one translation of Pearlstein’s argument might be “Terrorism works!”
Keep this in mind: If you’re not with Pearlstein and the TGL, then you are the moral equivalent of Osama bin Laden – or maybe Ulrike Meinhof for you distaff extremists. That might make Pearlstein a Special Forces warrior, a veritable GI Joe of Health Care – either that or just another remote control attack drone.
Comments 21
and it’s not only terrorism that works, a mere month past hordes of urchins slunk through the neighborhood proclaiming the same for fire.
August 7th, 2009 at 2:58 pm
Hasn’t Pearlstein got the memo yet? There is no longer such a thing as terrorism.
Trust the Democrats to disguise the real thing as something else – I forget what this week – and to call something else terrorism.
August 7th, 2009 at 3:04 pm
Domestic Contingency Operation?
August 7th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
I now recognize myself as a “culinary terrorist.” For deviled eggs, I mix the yolk with cream cheese, a dash of Mayo, and a dash of sour cream. Then I add capers, cover with a slice of Nova salmon, and garnish with smoked Spanish paprika.
I used to think I was merely creative. Wow! I’m a type of terrorist! If only my mom could see me now. Sniff.
August 7th, 2009 at 3:59 pm
Steven, I’m sorry—we are not allowed to say “deviled” eggs on this site.
BTW, next time you make a batch o’ them mmdnndjd eggs, could you send a few here to ZC’s New York offices? They sound absolutely amazing! (And, if I may be so bold as to suggest, fancying myself quite the culinary terrrorist, a drop of hot sauce?)
August 7th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
BTW, Czar, appropos of today’s ZC executive board meeting (aka, buncha emails), I would like to commend you on the acronym TGL. It has what the French would call, if they spoke English, a certain I-don’t-know-what.
August 7th, 2009 at 4:49 pm
Steven – send sum a dem terror-eggs (T-eggs?) over to the West Coast, too. We’re stahving.
August 7th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
Before we go bigtime, Howard, I can do a massive search-and-replace on “Obama” (not to mention Oslash etc.) and replace the name with Truly Great Leader.
Obviously, Truly Great Leader himself will appear immediately in the minds of virtually all of the world’s 2 billion (?) English language readers who see the phrase, forever, but we can’t expect them all to process “TGL” immediately. For now, I suggest that when using the acronym, you link to Barbara’s post or to the Lanny Davis article, or maybe to a new post on the subject put up for just this purpose.
August 7th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
Hmmmm, new post, you say? I just posted something on the new jobs nos. and included the TGL acronym in the title without proper attribution. I don’t want to cheat Barbara (or Lanny) out of their royalties. Can you have ZC’s legal department look into this? I’m pretty sure they haven’t all left for the weekend. When I took the elevator down before, it stopped at 21, and I noticed there were still lights on.
August 7th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
Barbara signed the same release (in her sleep) that you did giving us all rights to everything she or anyone she knows ever does except as taxable by the State of California, so that’s not my main worry. I was more concerned with intelligibility, which I think is fine in your new post. The other concern is that those (a tiny few, probably) who might be skeptical about the justice of the designation might benefit from Lanny’s brilliant and irrefutable exposition.
We might refer to Hillary, if she ever comes up again for some reason (opening a women’s dental clinic in Botswana, for instance), as OTGL (Other Truly Great Leader) and Bill (even more doubtful) as OOTGL (Other Other Truly Great Leader), though in his case OOGL has a certain appeal…
August 7th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
… and anyone who disagrees is an SVP (small, vicious person).
August 7th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
all those in agreement, say ahhh
http://petzotics.com/Lizards%20Images/med_BlueTongueSkink.jpg
August 7th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
That skink is SO you, fuster. Whatever happened to your avatar efforts?
August 7th, 2009 at 5:48 pm
@CK MacLeod – Igor showed up on JED’s blog, much to my chagrin as he was carrying a name that I made up after Gravatar refused to accept any form of fuster.
Is deleting the account and starting anew advisable?
August 7th, 2009 at 5:54 pm
yeah, deleting the account and starting over MIGHT be advisable – but it doesn’t or shouldn’t really mater what name your account is under – the avatars at gravatar are designed to travel with e-mail addresses not account names.
I also have the power, which I’ve been holding in reserve, to assign ZC-only avatars to authors and, by a different method, to commenters.
August 7th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
I’ll take another whack at it before begging the Tsar’s boon. Thanks, CK
August 7th, 2009 at 6:12 pm
What do you want to bet the Leftards wouldn’t turn a hair if these
disgruntled citizens‘political terrorists’ were bunged up in Guantanamo?August 7th, 2009 at 6:28 pm
Keep up, Pearlstein. It’s “jihad,” LOSER, and it means, like, really rigorous self-improvement. Kind of like a weekend at Ojai with the mud and hot rocks, and no iPhone at all.
Where’s your head at, man? What do you know about the struggle of the Obamacare-Nots? What a… fascist.
August 7th, 2009 at 7:18 pm
Accusing people of what you do yourself is a time honored leftist tactic, and a tactic of all authoritarians.
Like the town hall stuff with SEIU, and then accusing the people hit of being the problem.
The current POTUS hung out with Ayres and Dohrn, two bona fide terrorists, yet his Administration calls people who oppose him terrorists.
I don’t recall George W. Bush’s Administration ever calling Code Pink or even the rioters in Portland or Philadelphia terrorists when they protested his policies. Yet the Dems who cried for retreat in Iraq for years and who have ended the “War on Terror” language at the White House have now called Americans who simply voice disagreement with them terrorists, apparently finding them more annoying than people who blew up buildings and jets.
This is beyond sophistry, it is ignorance and blind grasping for power. America has elected a government of the immature, the greedy and the arrogant. It is not so much a problem that they may be incompetent, we may be a lot worse off if they are competent at pushing their agenda which does not bode well for the future.
August 10th, 2009 at 4:14 am
Here’s what I sent Mr. Pearlstein this morning:
Dear Mr. Pearlstein:
I read your article about healthcare reform with interest. I would like to point out one fact, however, which is that you have grossly abused the term “terrorist” in applying it to political dissent within our country. I urge you to cautiously consider your word choices during what is quite obviously a turbulent and important time in our nation’s political history.
I find it interesting that you accuse these protestors of attempting to stop political discussion. Just so I’m clear, how is it that you distinguish yourself from that very crime when you tar them with the “terrorist” label?
Our nation has always allowed for political dissent, but apparently under the current administration, that’s no longer trendy or cool, so it must be silenced.
Wow, I didn’t realize I lived in a country where free speech would now be squelched, where the president would urge me to snitch on anyone who disagreed with his reforms, and where journalists equated free speech with terrorism.
Deidre Knight
August 10th, 2009 at 7:24 pm
Thanks, Deidre.
Interesting how quickly the “political terrorist” line was taken up, including by at least one Dem representative, and how prevalent the urge – beginning with the Prez but hardly restricted to him – to squelch discussion. I don’t think that these people are really totalitarians, but they have all of the urges and reflexes of totalitarians. You see it – or in the universities experience it – all of the time in “speech codes.”
August 10th, 2009 at 8:03 pm
Trackbacks & Pingbacks 3
[...] cross-posted at Zombie Contentions [...]
[...] Apparently, the forthright expression of this perspective strikes the advocates of Obamacare as the fishy, heartless, ignorant, and indecent equivalent of Nazism, McCarthyism, racism, and terrorism. If so, I hope when Congress returns to business in September, it’s with new proposals on mental health care, which obviously is not what it could be in our nation today. As for self-inflicted political injuries of unhinged Obamaists: I say, let them suffer, and suffer, and suffer. It’s the American way. [...]
[...] Apparently, the forthright expression of this perspective strikes the advocates of Obamacare as the fishy, heartless, ignorant, and indecent equivalent of Nazism, McCarthyism, racism, and terrorism. If so, I hope when Congress returns to business in September, it’s with new proposals on mental health care, which obviously is not what it could be in our nation today. As for the self-inflicted political injuries by over-the-top Obamaists: I say, let them suffer, and suffer, and suffer. It’s the American way. [...]