I met a man today who thought that President Obama needs to be recalled and that "we won’t get our country back" until we do. WTF?
This was in stark contrast to the engaging minds I encountered mid-week at the Roseburg Town Hall, willing to listen, willing to talk, willing to argue and entertain an opposing point ov view.
So this guy wants to impeach Obama?
I guess when your baseline for impeaching a President is a guy lying about getting a blowjob in the White House, your bar is pretty low, but if it’s that low, how come these assholes sat by for 8 years while Bush was President, getting us into a phony war that’s killed over 4300 of our young men and women (by lying to the people I might add), destroyed the infrastructure of two countries (one of which had absolutely nothing to do with the terrorists that attacked us on 9/11) and expected the citizens of this great nation to pay to rebuild them? How come they're happy to have that government abuse laws like FISA, illegally wiretap its citizens and indefinitely detain people who were kidnapped off city streets and flown to black prisons where they were tortured, all while we turned our backs?
And now this President, MY President, and his too wants to reduce health insurance costs from a staggering average of $12,000 - $15,000 per year, to around a fifth of that, and you’ll get better care to boot. No more of your insurance company cancelling your policy because it deems you a bad risk, no more of your insurance company telling you that it deems your problem a ‘prior’ or ‘pre-existing’ condition and therefore you aren’t covered. No more going without insurance because you simply can’t pay for both that and feed your family.
And this asshole thinks our President needs to be impeached?
Did I mention that this guy was also over 65 and on Medicare? It’s OK to have single payer medicine for the elderly and socialized medicine for the VA, but for everyone else, no, we’re just one slippery slope away from the grip of communism and everyone in FEMA gulags. They’re still living in the grip of the Cold War their beloved Ronny was supposed to have ended. Someone forgot to tell them I guess.
I really can understand a difference of opinion, but what’s on the table isn’t rocket science. Either we want more affordable and better quality healthcare for all or we don’t. Why are we even discussing this, it’s a no-brainer.
This was so different from my experience the other night at the Roseburg Town Hall held by Peter DeFazio that I just felt I had to let this out there. What amazed me was that I had never previously met this guy and he injected himself into our conversation after hearing our accents and realizing that I was Australian, and he was secure enough in himself to almost immediately rail against the medical systems of Australia and the UK and tell us that "we knew what was coming then" if Obama’s healthcare plan was passed. He'd visited New Zealand for a monthat some point in the last few years, which I think is what gave him the amazing insight into their way of life and the way in which such a medical system was 'destroying' those countries. I didn't get the impression that he thought New Zealand or Australia were gripped tightly in the iron fist of Communism, but yes, we apparently knew waht was coming.
My wife and I both said "Yes, and the sooner it arrives the better". He was taken aback, literally, because it had never occurred to him that anyone would actually disagree with him. He’d skimmed the media for the talking points – health care crisis as girl can't get kidney transplant in Canada, person refused care in the UK, etc. "That doesn’t happen in the USA" he declared proudly, "our system works". My wife had to point out the fact we don’t get that degree of media coverage in the US because it actually happens so often that its no longer actual news. Lots of blustering ensued. You could tell he was fighting the urge to call us America haters.
I feel sorry for these people because they have never had a day of medical security in their lives. They have lived under constant threat of having their healthcare cancelled from under them, their life-saving operation refused funding, or a massive bill landing in their mailbox, forcing them into bankruptcy and the loss of their ‘prized’ insurance. Those that survived this gauntlet and made it to the finish line of 65 are the lucky ones, like this guy was. Had he been forced to sell his house ten years ago to pay for a wife’s kidney transplant, mastectomy or chemotherapy, maybe he’d have a different point of view.
You can’t educate the blissfully ignorant unfortunately, because to them this whole fiasco is bigger than healthcare, bigger than TARP or the Recovery Act, its about that dirty little word – Socialism, and the Communists like Chavez and Castro that we’re all going to become, that’s if we don’t all become burkha wearing Muslims first.
I am fortunate, for if anything major were to happen to me I would be on a plane back to Australia in a second and make use of the medical system I have paid into for most of my working life. I can’t imagine not living under that security net, where the government values its people enough to provide them with affordable healthcare as a right.
So as this man finished his bloviating and slinked back into the crowd I realized that although these people are woefully misinformed, countering their arguments with facts completely disarms them. Obviously their talking points don’t come with rebuttal points.