Your one stop pundit shop.
Steven Pearlstein's opening says it all:
As a columnist who regularly dishes out sharp criticism, I try not to question the motives of people with whom I don't agree. Today, I'm going to step over that line.
The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they've given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They've become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems.
Charles Krauthammer has the answer for health care reform:
Ronald Reagan ... Yet today's ruling Democrats ... this massive concoction ... This is all quite mad ...Tort reform ... There is no logical reason to get health insurance through your employer ... But that's a political problem of Obama's making ... the Democratic Party's indebtedness to the trial lawyers ...
Michael Gerson says that Obama's political honeymoon is over. Of course for Gerson, it ended on January 20, 2009.
Paul Krugman on the rise of the town hall mobs:
... where angry protesters — some of them, with no apparent sense of irony, shouting “This is America!” — have been drowning out, and in some cases threatening, members of Congress trying to talk about health reform.
Some commentators have tried to play down the mob aspect of these scenes, likening the campaign against health reform to the campaign against Social Security privatization back in 2005. But there’s no comparison. I’ve gone through many news reports from 2005, and while anti-privatization activists were sometimes raucous and rude, I can’t find any examples of congressmen shouted down, congressmen hanged in effigy, congressmen surrounded and followed by taunting crowds.
And I can’t find any counterpart to the death threats at least one congressman has received.
Peggy Noonan manages to ignore the story behind the town hall screamers because it's all the Democrats fault.
Douglas H. Paal states the obvious:
THE criticisms from some of my fellow Republicans of former President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s success in gaining the release of two American journalists from North Korea’s gulag are misplaced. The Clintons’ behavior demonstrated respect for the expertise of their advisers and restraint from political grandstanding. Any propaganda gain for the North Korean regime will be short-term and limited. It’s even possible that the episode will have a positive effect on our troubled nuclear negotiations.
The Wall Street Journal is still whining about Miguel Estrada.
Ellen Goodman on one of the more vile rightwing lies being pushed in the health care reform debate:
I am as happy as anyone at signs of an economic recovery. But I confess to having mixed feelings about the resurgence of the wing-nut industry.
We now have “The Birthers’’ manufacturing myths that President Obama was not born in the United States and therefore is serving illegally. They are following the business plan of those earlier entrepreneurs selling the idea that Obama had killed his grandma. Consider the scare-biz Internet scribe who penned the memorable line: “Obama flies to Hawaii to visit his grandmother and just a few days later she winds up dead. Coincidence?’’
But now the industry has ratcheted up from accusing Obama of killing his grandma to accusing him of trying to kill your grandma.
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