It Must Be Exhausting to Be A Republican
November 4, 2013

 
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I could never do it. I mean, being a Republican nowadays means living in a CONSTANT state of utter OUTRAGE! It must be exhausting to be a Republican. And if you’re a Teabagger? OMG, forget it! I’d be too tired to pull the trigger on the gun in my mouth. Yesterday’s Sunday shows were a primer in cluelessness. I watch all three of the network Sunday shows (plus “Up” on MSNBC) back to back each week, and I don’t think they went more than 15 minutes in those four hours without some Republican expressing “OUTRAGE”… not just over something minor, but sometimes over things President Bush did as well (if not worse). I swear that these people can’t hear themselves speak or else they wouldn’t say things so demonstrably stupid (and frequently disproven by their own words on tape.) A few examples:

Starting with our first show, “Up” on MSNBC, they spoke of the fact that Republicans are OUTRAGED that President Obama dare try to fill THREE vacancies in the D.C. first circuit court, accusing the president of “court packing”… a term dating back to when FDR attempted to add six more justices to the Supreme Court, thus ensuring that more decisions would fall in his favor. But President Obama isn’t seeking to ADD judges to the court, just fill the existing vacancies. Those three vacancies on the Court didn’t open up overnight. If President Obama filled ONE vacancy, would that be “Court packing”? Of course not. But because Republicans REFUSED to fill those vacancies as they opened up, trying to fill them now is “court packing”. Once again, Republicans CREATED a problem by refusing to cooperate, and then when the inevitable happens, they accuse The President of mucking it up. Oh, and they’re OUTRAGED!

Outrage #1: Republicans create a problem by refusing to confirm nominees, and then when the president tries to fill those vacancies, it’s “an OUTRAGE!”

So now we switch over to Fox “news” Sunday where they live in a perpetual state of outrage. And for the second week in a row, Republicans are outraged that President Obama “clearly did not tell the truth when he said if you like your insurance, you can keep your insurance.” Unfortunately for then-Senator Obama, he didn’t insert the caveat: “as long as your insurance meets certain minimum requirements.” Clearly, he failed to account for the fact that lots of Republicans LIKE sub-standard policies that would hang them out to dry if they got hit by a bus, so long as it’s cheap (how many times have I written in these pages that Republicans lack any ability to consider the consequences of their actions). THE WHOLE POINT of the health care “mandate” if that everyone is covered by insurance rather than become a drain on society if they don’t have coverage. So yes, if your sucky policy doesn’t include “hospitalization”, then “NO, you CAN’T keep your policy.” Deal with it.

Outrage #2: President Obama failed to anticipate that some people (Republicans) would be “OUTRAGED” that they might be forced by their insurance company to give up their junk policy for one that actually provides real coverage, just because their crap policy was cheap. And offering them the opportunity to buy BETTER coverage wouldn’t make them happy. Then again, what does?

Oh, but Fox had an entire hour to fill with non-stop outrage, so for the second week in a row, they repeated the (intentionally?) deceptive claim that “Florida Blue”… Florida’s “Blue Shield” provider… “is canceling the policies of 300,000 customers because of ObamaCare.” Problem is, the CEO of “Florida Blue” already appeared on “Meet the Press” last week to deny the claim, stating that no ones policy had been “canceled”, but in fact their policies were being “transformed” into policies that meet the new basic minimum standards of The Affordable Care Act. Naturally, this will make the policies more expensive, but Obama’s promise was not violated: “If you like your policy, and your doctors, you can keep your policy and your doctors.” You might have to pay more to stay with that policy, but then, with more options opened up by the Exchanges, your insurance company might lower rates in order to compete (or as one Fox pundit put it yesterday: a sinister plan to “put the insurance companies out of business.” Hashtag #FreeMarketHypocrits). If you don’t want to pay more, and “cost” is more important to you than keeping your doctor, then YOU can choose to cancel your policy, but that is YOUR decision.

Of course, if you’re a selfish bastard of the “bootstraps” persuasion, it should come as no surprise that the folks at Fox are outraged that some people have to pay for things they won’t need, like men paying for “maternity care” or women paying for “prostate-cancer screenings”. Someone please explain to these people that THAT’S HOW INSURANCE WORKS. You may pay for things you don’t need, but others pay for things you may need that they don’t.

Outrage #3: “ObamaCare” is “canceling” junk insurance policies that don’t meet basic minimal standards. Only, they’re not. They’re not “canceling” anything. They are only bringing those policies into compliance. And yes, they may cost more, BUT YOU’RE GETTING MORE IN RETURN, and for less money than it would have before The ACA. Outrageous!

Of course, it wouldn’t be Fox if they didn’t bring up their favorite outrage of the year: Ben-gha-zi!!!. If you haven’t heard, on September 11th, terrorists attacked a place where Americans were known to reside. The Administration was caught off guard, and a number of Americans starting with the numeral “4” were killed. In 2012, that number was “4”. Period. In 2001, that “4” was followed by three zeros. So which one do you think Fox viewers believe is more deserving of 14 straight months of “outrage” and calls for the president’s resignation? If you guessed “2012”, go to the head of the class.

Of course, if it’s Sunday, you’re going to see either John McCain or Lindsey Graham on your TV (Joe Lieberman was the third Stooge before he retired.) And since the topic was Benghazi, naturally Fox brought on Graham to opine on the latest calls for “an investigation into just what happened.” These are the same people that said calls to investigate 9/11/2001 were “unpatriotic”. So Graham is “outraged” that Obama is refusing to allow members of his own Administration to testify before a GOP kangaroo court because there’s an investigation already underway. Graham indignantly tells host Chris Wallace, “Can you imagine if President Bush had said, you can’t talk to these people because there’s an ongoing investigation?” BUSH DID SAY THAT! On numerous occasions! He said that during the “9/11 Commission” and he said it during the “Valery Plame” investigation. How many members of his Administration refused to testify in the Plame Affair? Heck, Alberto Gonzales and Harriet Meyers both flat-out defied a court order to testify. And “Scooter” Libby was convicted of perjury. So PLEASE Lady Graham, don’t start getting all indignant because the Obama White House is refusing to perform in the Center Ring of your circus.

Outrage #4: Terrorists attacked and killed a number of Americans on September 11th. The White House seemed to ignore all the warnings leading up to the attack and then “allowed” it to happen anyway. There’s even rumors that they watched it unfold on TV! The Administration rejected calls for a public investigation, and when that failed, they simply refused to cooperate, citing “an ongoing investigation”. Which 9/11 am I referring to?

The botched roll out of the Healthcare.gov website is on the short list of Republican “outrages” this week. Why? At the same time they are cheering the “obvious failure of ObamaCare” (because they equate a website with an entire healthcare reform law), they are also “outraged” that people can’t “enroll in ObamaCare”. None-the-less, it’s grounds for yet another “hearing” in which Republicans get to question the Administration over just how it could have botched something they assured us for months would be a slam-dunk work just fine. Which one do you think was more deserving of an intense Congressional investigation? The invasion of another country on false pretenses that costs Billions of dollars, left 4,000 American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead sparking a civil war that continues to this day, or the utter failure of a government contractor (that’s NOT named “Halliburton”) to deliver as promised? That’s a rhetorical question, of course.

Over on “Meet the Press”, OUTRAGE over the “ObamaCare” website (notice how the “Liberal Media” never uses the true name, “Affordable Care Act”?) continued, with The Gregory bringing on twice-failed presidential candidate Mitt Romney to critique the implementation of his own health care program that he repeatedly touted as “a model for the nation”. An “outraged” Romney jumped on the “Obama Lied” bandwagon and said that the president HAD to know he was lying when he said everyone could keep their plan because when he (Romney) passed “RomneyCare” in Massachusetts, that’s exactly what happened. Some people had to give up their plan (and the world didn’t come to an end). So clearly, RomneyCare was a disastrous failure, right folks at Fox? (Hope you’re not waiting on me to answer that one.)

Outrage #5: They want ObamaCare to fail. They shutdown the government demanding that it not be allowed to go into effect. They actively sabotaged the program so it would fail, so when the website failed and the consequences are that millions of people might have to wait a couple of extra months to save hundreds of dollars on their health insurance, it’s an “OUTRAGE!”

So what’s the lesson in all this? It’s that, if you’re a Democrat, no matter what you do, it’s grounds for OUTRAGE! And in EVERY case that I’ve described, the source of the “OUTRAGE” is a direct result of Republican action/inaction to ensure it came out that way. Meanwhile, ACTUAL things deserving of genuine OUTRAGE that in some cases cost thousands of lives and billions of dollars, were not only NOT sources of outrage, but they actually held those who WERE outraged in contempt.

I could never be a Republican. Too exhausting living in a state of perpetual OUTRAGE, lurching from one manufactured crisis to the next.
 

Postscript: While I thank so many of you for dropping by to read about my Mother’s ongoing crisis (we hit some record numbers for non-referral traffic last week), few of you actually spread the word to help get her story into the Media. Apathy is indeed a stubborn enemy. – Mugsy


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November 4, 2013 · Admin Mugsy · No Comments - Add
Posted in: fake scandals, Healthcare, myth busting, Partisanship, Politics, Right-Wing Insanity

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