nhboy
Ubi bene ibi patria
" If being a pig farmer was enough to make Joni Ernst a United States senator, if that one ad about castrating hogs was enough to make her one of 100 people with enormous influence over every aspect of U.S. policy making, then it ought to be enough to make Chris Peterson a genuine Man of the People and the face of the anti-anti-Obamacare movement erupting across the land.
It was Peterson, a pig farmer from the Hawkeye State, who told Republican Senator Charles Grassley the other night that he was on Obamacare and that he wouldn’t be able to afford insurance without it, and who said to the senator: “And with all due respect, sir, you’re the man that talked about the death panels. We’re going to create one great big death panel in this country [because of the fact] that people can’t afford to get insurance.”
You remember Grassley and his infamous tweets from 2009 about pulling the plug on grandma and all that. It was insanely demagogic. The actual proposal in question was some language in the House version of the Affordable Care Act that would have required Medicare to cover voluntary consultations between individuals and their doctors about end-of-life care. It was one of the worst examples (not the worst—there’s always Sarah Palin for that) of plainly false fear-mongering that helped make the law so unpopular.
Well, it’s not so unpopular now, and all this ought to be making Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell very nervous indeed, because what we’re seeing here is almost without precedent in American history.
What’s important about this week’s protests is that these are middle Americans protesting for government. Stop and ask yourself when that has happened lately. We can probably count on one hand the number of times it has happened ever. Such uprisings are almost always anti-government, from Shay’s Rebellion in the 1780s right on up to the Tea Party. They’re almost never pro-government.
The other kinds of protests we’re accustomed to are those by particular groups making demands of the government—African Americans demanding the right to vote, women demanding equality. These two categories are each other’s opposite to the extent that the former want government to limit its reach and the latter want government to expand it.
But what’s going on at these town halls isn’t like either of those. This is people saying: government, you’ve actually done this good thing that helped me and my family; don’t take it away. "
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/02/24/the-unprecedented-people-s-revolt-to-protect-obamacare-from-their-representatives.html
It was Peterson, a pig farmer from the Hawkeye State, who told Republican Senator Charles Grassley the other night that he was on Obamacare and that he wouldn’t be able to afford insurance without it, and who said to the senator: “And with all due respect, sir, you’re the man that talked about the death panels. We’re going to create one great big death panel in this country [because of the fact] that people can’t afford to get insurance.”
You remember Grassley and his infamous tweets from 2009 about pulling the plug on grandma and all that. It was insanely demagogic. The actual proposal in question was some language in the House version of the Affordable Care Act that would have required Medicare to cover voluntary consultations between individuals and their doctors about end-of-life care. It was one of the worst examples (not the worst—there’s always Sarah Palin for that) of plainly false fear-mongering that helped make the law so unpopular.
Well, it’s not so unpopular now, and all this ought to be making Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell very nervous indeed, because what we’re seeing here is almost without precedent in American history.
What’s important about this week’s protests is that these are middle Americans protesting for government. Stop and ask yourself when that has happened lately. We can probably count on one hand the number of times it has happened ever. Such uprisings are almost always anti-government, from Shay’s Rebellion in the 1780s right on up to the Tea Party. They’re almost never pro-government.
The other kinds of protests we’re accustomed to are those by particular groups making demands of the government—African Americans demanding the right to vote, women demanding equality. These two categories are each other’s opposite to the extent that the former want government to limit its reach and the latter want government to expand it.
But what’s going on at these town halls isn’t like either of those. This is people saying: government, you’ve actually done this good thing that helped me and my family; don’t take it away. "
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/02/24/the-unprecedented-people-s-revolt-to-protect-obamacare-from-their-representatives.html
