Obama’s Miserable Failure: Fourteen Years And Not A Death Panel In Sight

The Right Has Never Been Right

Sarah Palin Was A Pioneer Of Dumb And Wrong

We are fourteen years into the implementation of Obamacare and somehow, we aren’t facing a nationwide shortage of burial space to store all the bodies from the death panel’s reign of terror.

You remember the death panels, don’t you? Most famously failed vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s “lie of the year,” the death panels were spoken about by Republicans from 2009-2012ish nearly as often as the Bush-era Republicans invoked “9/11.”

Here’s a reminder of Palin’s purple prose:

“The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's ‘death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”

What we have, instead, is another broken promise from the Obama era. Instead of death panels we have a record number of people in the United States with health insurance. Instead of government bureaucrats sentencing Grandma to the great beyond, we’ve got an Obama-Biden orgy of health and longer life with access to doctors and hospitals and new, lower prescription costs.

Thanks, Obama.

As part of my work at The American Independent and Media Matters before that, I have to wade knee deep in a lot of right-wing nonsense. One of the most common characteristics of the right’s propaganda – this includes official party officials as well as the party’s quasi-official public relations agent, Fox News – is hyperbole to the point of absurdity.

Conservatives can’t just make the argument that a Democratic idea is bad or that it costs too much. No, everything Democrats do (according to conservatives) is part of a byzantine plot to turn America into a socialist/communist/feminist super state where Sharia and abortions are available on every street corner. The right-wing fearmongering doesn’t just go to ten, it goes all the way to ten thousand, every time.

This is not new and not just some Trump-era thing. Because while Trump did push the notion that windmills wouldn’t just provide clean energy but also lead to the mass slaughter of birds, Ronald Reagan once argued that Medicare was the advance guard of socialism.

Here are Reagan’s exact words from 1961:

From here it's a short step to all the rest of socialism, to determining his pay and pretty soon your son won’t decide when he’s in school where he will go or what he will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell him where he will go to work and what he will do.

…

If you don’t, this program I promise you, will pass just as surely as the sun will come up tomorrow and behind it will come other federal   programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country until one day as Normal Thomas said we will wake to find that we have socialism, and if you don’t do this and I don’t do this, one of these days we are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.

It’s been fifty-three years since the Gipper’s warning and Americans merely got a prescription drug program, not full socialism. What a rip-off!

A rational person looks at this ludicrous hyperbole and wonders when the average conservative voter is going to figure out this is all a scam and he or she is the big sucker for the party leaders and demagogues. The answer is unfortunately never.

They will never wake up and instead of understanding that the doomsday scenario never comes to pass, they just move on to the next great fear factor. It could be Al Qaeda, MS-13, diversity training, sexy M&Ms, or Taylor Swift.

At the same time, don’t expect that the mainstream media will ever pick up on this dysfunction and regard the next round of Republican fear promotion as a shaky premise built on quicksand. Instead, they will soberly reference the absurd rhetoric with a mere “Republicans say the Green New Deal will cause human genitalia to spontaneously fall off and fly to China if the bill passes.” The press allows itself to be led about by the nose with these Republican claims and they aren’t stopping anytime soon.

What we can do is remind people that when it comes to the right, these are the people who just absolutely never get it right. In 1993, Bill Clinton’s budget plan led to a boom, not a downturn. In 2009, Obama’s recovery act saved the economy and health care expanded instead of contracting. And under Biden, legislation like the Rescue Plan, Inflation Reduction Act, CHIPS and Science Act and the infrastructure bill is powering America like a rocket out of the Trump-COVID slump.

Democrats should not just accept it as a given that we collectively move on past the purple fear-prose of Reagan, Palin, Trump and the rest. Instead, they should be made to have their faces rhetorically shoved into their own excrement again and again, not because they will ever learn to stop, but because they deserve the shame and humiliation that comes with aligning with obvious nonsense.

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— Oliver

Follow me, Oliver Willis, on Threads @owillis1977

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