Last night, in a brilliant ten minute segment, Rachel Maddow exposed the financial and political operators behind the health care town hall screamers. We all know that they're bringing the crazy in a very big way, but Maddow wants us to know who is responsible. Bush operatives. Republican hacks. Swift boaters. Even an oil industry billionaire. Exactly the kind of people you would expect, doing exactly what you would expect them to be doing. Just watch.
via videosift.com
Her closing summary:
To talk about these town hall events as some organic outpouring of average American folks who have concerns about health care is to be willfully blind as to what is really going on-which is professional P.R. operatives generating exploitive, manufactured, strategically deployed outrage in order to line their own pockets. These P.R. spinmeisters get paid a lot of money for doing it. The corporations they work for get to kill legislation that would hurt their profits.
And the real people who they launch into these town hall settings after they're told that health care reform is a secret commie plot to kill old people and to mandate sex changes-those real people get more and more and more angry, and more and more and more alienated. And ultimately, they get left, like the rest of us, with a health care system that is broken and doesn't work in the interests of the American people, but does work in the interests of the corporations that profit from the way the system is now.
This is professional, corporate-funded, Republican staffed P.R., and it should be reported as such.