I don't normally watch the Sunday Morning TV talkies. I prefer NPR's Weekend Edition, with the Will Shortz puzzle and fairly decent news coverage. But this week I turned it on for a while. And it was pretty much what I expected, having been reading the summaries here. But boy, is it infuriating.
Paragraphs are your friend. They make it easier to read a long text. I use them when I write. They're a natural break. Even in spoken text, a natural break in the flow helps make it intelligible. A good speaker, like a good writer, paces the flow.
Sunday Morning talkers, like jornos, usually do get this; they keep the paragraphs short; they don't ramble on. But the Rethuglicans still lie with impunity, and most of the TV hosts let them get away with it. It is very infuriating.
So this Sunday I heard the usual garbage about how the American People have Rejected Health Care Reform and Want Only Small Incremental Changes. I heard about how the voters of Massachusetts dethroned Obama and prove that the tea partiers are the dominant political force. I heard about how the Rethuglicans were oh-so-helpful in trying to forge bipartisan solutions with Obama but that socialist bolshie wouldn't listen to them. So my blood heated up and I didn't want to think in paragraphs any more.
I just wished I could be sitting there, on screen next to them, and could have one long paragraph to reply. Or say it without letting them hear me take a breath:
WHAT DO YOU MEAN the American people don't want reform? If you check the details in the polls you find that the American people really do want the bulk of what's in the reform packages. They want to get rid of the insurance companies' right to refuse coverage based on pre-existing conditions! They want to get rid of the right of the insurance companies to rescind coverage once a sucker, er, policyholder has the temerity to actually make a claim! They want insurance to be made more affordable, including subsidies if necessary for moderate-income families. They don't want to lose insurance when they change jobs. They want cost controls, not that the Obama plan does enough but certainly the Republicans didn't do anything about cost control when they were in charge and it was a stupid move on Obama's part to make a deal with PharMA to leave high drug prices in place but that's leaving a Republican policy unchanged, not some kind of socialist move. The bulk of the reform program is still popular. Sure, people don't like the mandate, but that's the deal that the insurance industry insisted on, an old Republican policy again fercryinoutloud, and the Yugo tax sucks but Obama's Reconciliation plan raises it to the Camry level and makes it that less likely to impact so many people, so it's the Republican aspects of the bill that make it unpopular, not the stuff Democrats wanted. And really, this is such a friggin' compromise in the first place, Obama and Reid and Pelosi blew it, and instead of doing what the Republicans do and figure out what the majority party itself wants and then enforcing discipline to get that through even if a few members of the party are not happy about it all, instead they started with a program that was meant to attract Republicans, but deMint made his "Waterloo" call and if the Democrats in Congress were politically competent they would have realized that no bipartisanship was possible since the Republicans do have discipline, so do what the party wants and forget about the other side of the aisle; do was done to us when Bush was in charge! And when you look for the middle of the Democratic members' position, it ain't what you see there now. What you see now is the very right edge of the Democratic consensus. No, the middle position would probably be a form of SINGLE PAYER, like in that scary dictatorship Red Canada, with basic coverage for everybody from birth to death covered via Medicare, paid for by an increase in the Medicare tax, so rich people pay more than poor people, and everybody would get covered, and the deductible would be based on your ability to pay, and you know what? Even that's not the left side of the party. A lot of us really DO want socialized medicine, which works so well in that Bolshevik dictatorship called the United Kingdom, where the "dirty commie" NHS is so popular that Conservative Party leaders are struggling to show themselves as bigger fans of it than supposedly-leftist Labour! And over there, if you don't like the NHS, and you can afford it, you can still buy private insurance and see private clinics and some rich people do, but it's not necessary, and it's not even that expensive, 'cause the private insurance industry knows that if the patient is really sick, they can always foist them off on the NHS! So if we had an NHS here, or a single-payer plan like Medicare For All, people could still buy Medigap to cover their deductibles and provide access to additional providers, and there could still be concierge doctors for the rich, so the insurance companies could continue to exist, but they wouldn't be killing people like they do now. But no, we're Democrats, so we didn't figure out the middle of our own road, and instead we tried to build a plan that was more like Dick Nixon's and Mitt Romney's plans, but instead the Republicans act like it's Fidel Castro's plan, and funny how even Cuba has better medical care than the US by now, even as the rest of that sorry state has failed, so don't go tarring us with lies about the Obama plan. It's a friggin' compromise already, with far too many "Republican Ideas" already in it, and we're holding our noses to vote for it because it's much better than the status quo but not what we really want so SHUT YOUR PIE HOLE.
And then I'd take a breath.