I live in a fairly conservative state, so not surprisingly our airways are contaminated with right-wing talking heads, spreading out right lies, contradictions, and more or less non-factual arguments. One show I was listening to the other day, made me laugh in how in factual loss it was. The radio show on a local country station, unfortantly the name of the radio station and the name of the show has for some reason left my thought process at this point, but the arguments he used were so idiotic that I will never forgot them. There are in order in how he presented on the show, and I will try my best to debunk them, one by one. His arguments:
The price of long distance, land line based, phone calls have decreased over the years, because the government stopped regulating those computers, and allowed for the free market to take over.
President Obama had indoctrination on his mind, with his question of "How can you help President Obama reach his goals in 2012?".
The health care bill is not supported by a majority of Americans.
The 9/12 protests represents the majority of Americans.
The health care bill does want to insure illegal immigrants.
Basic right-wing propaganda, and no real surprise there, but I have to point the hypocrisy and out lies being spewed, not only by major right-wing talking heads, but even you're local idiots with a mic.
The first claim:
I saw an article the other day, that pointed out the amazing force the free market can play, if the government will allow it. It was an article that talked about how the price of a long distance phone call has dropped dramatically since 1984. It goes like this "If you grew up in the pre-cell phone era, you know about the long distance charges, and how the prices would change from morning to sunset" (And then the radio talk show host goes on about how his parents, still believe in this principle and won't call until after 7 p.m.)"Well the price for a phone call from Chicago to Minnesota would cost in those days upto 84 cents a minute. But it all changed once the government allowed monopoly of At&t and their Bell systems, was broken up and the free market took over and allowed for competition to take over, now that same call is around 7 cents a minutes." See folks, if the government would figure out that they cause more problems than they fix, we would be better off. I mean look at this, once the free market took over, and people had a choice, the price dropped. They should understand this in health care, but look what they are trying to do, they are trying to put more government into the system, which will just cause more and more problems.
Now before you fall out of your chair laughing, he is partially correct. The At&t bell systems had a government regulated and endorsed monopoly of the system. But we have to look back at the history of the telecommunications system. The main reason for there being only one network of communications, was that it was perceived that it would better for one network to control the system, because the technology was not there for an expansive of the network, and so it would only cause headache and problems for citizens if we had more than one network (Imagine the modern GSM network versus the CDMA network, in the cellphone world, and now have it where those networks could no longer connect to one another, because the CDMA network runs on a different frequency, and so the transmission of GSM network voice transfers would not be able to travel on CDMA wires). Well the late 60's and 70's the development of the internet and of routers, allowed for networks to interchange, and allow for the possibility of more than one network. So in 1984 the Justice Department filed an anti-trust suit against At&t and part of the agreement of the suit was that At&t was to broken up. So in place of At&t came up several different regional "Bell systems" all lead by different companies, and helped create some competition, so although the government started the monopoly, the government stopped it, and allowed for competition, which it will do, when it sees an unfair control of the market, and unfair pricing. The regional Bells all transformed into different companies, with the south region, which covered my state, turning into BellSouth, which then in turn, with the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was broken up even further, and lead to the expansion of smaller Bell systems to spawn up, and help drop costs. With the expansion of long distance calling to all companies, companies like Sprint and Verizon (Known as Bell Atlantic at the time) to expand and gain more coverage. But even with all that, the main factor for the drop in price is simply, innovation. Cellphones, computers, networking, switches, routers, all these things were heavily important in the price drop of long distance calling prices. And who were most of those innovations, if not all, funded by and intended for? Why it would your United States government. So although the free market and choice do bring down prices, you sometimes need government to help implement choice and competition, kind of like having a Public Option in health care to help bring Choice and Competition in the health care market. That will be my longest rebuttal, as working in the telecommunications field, and having a step-father, who was working doing in that field during the entire event, makes me very basis to what actually happened and who did what.
Next claim:
A local man wrote in the Daily Independent basically mocking our rightful claims about our fear of what President Obama was really try to do with his speech to school children. It was setup as a political satire, that was slanted towards us, as though we are the bad guys in this situation. I can't believe a local person would write such garage, but he probably got his barking orders from the extreme left media, which have apparently have gotten to this person to the point, where they would blind-fully deny that President Obama is forcing kids to write him about how they could help him achieve his goals in 2012, I just hope that this local person realizes how lost they really are
Well of course, the Obamna White House said the question was badly worded, and redid it, to keep lunatic fringe talking heads like this quiet, what a great job that did. But that's all besides the point, I don't see anything that is out of the ordinary in that question. What can you do to help the President achieve his goals, which in the context of Obama's speech, which was centered around staying in school and taking responsibility for their actions, to anyone student would sound like how can I help the President keep kids in school, and do their homework, etc. And most would have answered that way. So that whole argument is basically saying that school children will not be able to put that question into context with the speech? Which is absurd, and the children, lower level children, probably wouldn't understand what his goals is anyways, so this isn't indoctrination, it's just a simple question.
Next Claim:
Why won't Congress listen to the people? We don't want their government run health care, and we showed it on 9/12. If you were ask every American, a majority of them would not want anything like President Obama wants. They don't want the government coming in their waiting rooms, and doctors offices and putting a bureaucrat in between you and your doctor.
His ramblings go on for a while, but you get the point. This actually covers two of his points, a majority of Americans don't like the health care proposal and a majority of Americans supported the 9/12 tea baggers. Well unless he lives in a different American than you and I live in, every single poll points to a very high majority of Americans, support President Obama's plan and most of them don't support the antics of the right-wing smear that is the 9/12 protest, so he is simply and utterly wrong on this subject.
Last Claim:
The proposals in Congress right now, are basically guaranteeing coverage for illegal immigrants
Basically the Joe "You Lie" Wilson's approach to defeating health care reform. Belief it or not, there is some small tidbit of truth to this. The plans proposed do say that no government money will go to fund health care or health insurance for illegal immigrants, and so by law the insurance exchange and the Public Option will not be allowed to people who are here illegal. The claim the right is making is that there is no infrastructure in place to stop illegal immigrants from gaining access, in this bill. That is true, the proposals out right now have infrastructure or proposals to help implement the law set in place, but at the same time, no government supplied systems have these infrastructures in place, but they still are able to stop (For the most part) abuse to the system by illegal immigrants, by taking common sense actions, while not invading on people's privacy. What the right is basically advocating with this argument is that we need a "Real ID" for all citizens, which would impose even more government control than anything we have seen, and be a complete destruction of our privacy. So once again the right wants to dispatch our privacy to make sure that certain people are targeted instead of just using the systems in place to help control as best we can a problem, which is uncontrollable.
On a side note, these block quotes are not transcribes from the show, and are more or less paraphrases from my memory, the gist of what he was trying to say gets across, and there are several direct quotes which I can remember very distinctively. I know that it may seem weird that I can remember huge chunks of a radio show, but yet can't remember the name of the talk show host or the station, but if you knew me you would understand why. I can remember faces, conversations, pictures, etc. for extended periods of time, but names and information like that, I get lost. Also, I know I didn't get into how the Public Option is not a government take over, and several other points, but this entry is already long enough, and I didn't feel it extremely important to expand it any further on the basis of covering every single point.