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Wednesday, May 04, 2011

Marco Rubio Sells Us Some Truth

Steve Benen:
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) made his "Meet the Press" debut the other day, and was asked about his support for the Republican plan to end Medicare. Given the number of retirees in Florida, Rubio's position is of particular interest. He responded that the GOP proposal "doesn't cut Medicare," adding, "The only people in this town that have voted to cut Medicare spending are the people who voted in favor of Obamacare. That's a fact."

The Ryan budget ends Medicare as we know it. Seniors will be forced to assume the costs of endlessly rising healthcare costs, and the ones who cannot will die on the streets exactly as they did before the program came into existence.

These programs were hated by Republicans much more than the spectacle of poor seniors dying in the streets before they were implemented and throughout the entire existence of these programs Republican leaders hated them as well, with perfect consistency. Republicans hate the very idea of any government that equitably administers to shared human needs.

How many times do Republicans have to say this over and over and over before it occurs to people who will suffer and die pointlessly if Republicans get to do what they want that they really want to do what they keep saying they want to do? One idly wonders.

So, you're an evil lying greedhead Republican asshole like Rubio and you get called on supporting the end of Medicare in a state thronged with vulnerable older Americans whose interests who pretend to represent? Just lie. Lie about it. You know, brazen it out, show conviction, flat out deny the truth, and then repeat the denial in an easy to remember sloganeering kind of way your victims will take up themselves as you lead them to slaughter and pick their pockets.

Rubio's supplemental accusation that it is healthcare reform itself -- you know, blackmanistan islamofascist "Obamacare" -- that really ends Medicare. What the fraught passage of healthcare reform begins to do is lower healthcare costs and eliminate egregiously evil abuses of coverage that freight our inexplicably stupid for-profit insurance and healthcare system, in defiance of the supremely superior systems elsewhere in the world, an address of costs and crimes which happen, among other things, to be the only actually possible way to preserve Medicare and other indispensable and cherished entitlement programs once we move beyond frankly idiotic market fundamentalist slogans, not to mention address the budget deficit Republicans pretend to care about as they lard super-rich parasites they actually work for with more and more treasure and power ballooning deficits ever ruinously higher and higher.

Rubio's glib lie that Obamacare ends Medicare is, of course, just the repetition of another lie, already repeated so often it has assumed the pseudo-substance of "truthiness" (this is what Rubio means by "a fact") for those who don't understand or care to understand the actual issues involved even the slightest bit.

Just so you know, Rubio is very smart to say all this, smart the way smarmy scum bags are smart, not, you know, smart in the sense of sensible or anything, because Rubio is very likely to succeed in his gambit -- media pundits are in the main too vapid to call him on anything, his constituents are in the main too ignorant to call him on anything, his likely opponents are likely to be too timid or compromised to call him on anything and even were they to do so they would likely retreat to utterly ineffective wonk speak untranslatable into making a case on a campaign trail or in the scrum of actual governance.

The real story of Rubio's debut on Meet the Press is that he exposed himself as a profoundly evil man bent on the destruction of countless citizens whose interests he would claim to represent and who is more than happy to lie with a skull-head smile right to your innocent face as he signs your death warrant and pockets your cash. Word in the Village is that he's a rising star who made a very impressive showing.

2 comments:

jollyspaniard said...

I had thought that America would get to the point where it would either a) discontinue it's massive forward deployed military status or b) pull the plug on seniors. It looks like that point is coming up sooner than I thought.

This is political suicide for Republicans. Since seniors are a big part of their base they face an impossible task, convince people you're killing off to continue voting for you while you do it. I suspect it won't work.

Dale Carrico said...

It's easy to see why they might think they can get away with it, though -- after all, they've spent well over a generation punching working class people in the face and getting them to vote for them all the while by telling them how much they like getting punched in the face. Of course, it was only white racist patriarchy that really made that pitch seem to sing, and the demographics no longer support that particular line, but nobody ever said Republicans were exactly quick on the uptake.