Astroturfing--how a handful of paid operatives create false impressions of public opinion

On January 9, Washington Post columnist Harold Myerson posted a column titled "Despite what the critics are saying, Obamacare is working."

I just scored all 604 comments for this column, now that the commenting is pretty much wrapped up, and the results are telling:

Against the article & against the Affordable Care Act (ACA): 55%
For the article & for the ACA: 41%
Ambiguous: 4%

Of the anti-ACA comments, a majority were vitriolic rants laced with words like "socialist"
"Obummercare" and the like, accounting for a full third of all the comments.

Of the pro-ACA comments, a small minority were anti-right wing vitriolic rants--mostly in response to the hundreds of red-faced denunciations of all things Liberal/Democratic/Obama--accounting for 11% of all the comments.,

A very large percentage of the anti-ACA comments included expressions of contempt for the Washington Post.

It seems unlikely that this distribution of comments mirrors the demographics of the Washington Post's readership--especially since so many of the comments opposing Meyerson's column included statements that the Washington Post wasn't worth reading.

So--what accounts for this disparity? Where did all the antis come from, if they aren't WaPo readers? And what about the WaPo's paywall that limits nonsubscribers to commenting on only 10 articles a month?

The greatest likelihood is that they are the same kinds of operatives who the tobacco industry hired decades ago to pretend to be constitutents of Congressmen, inundating them with calls and letters and telegrams opposing tobacco regulation.

That is, paid Astroturfers.

Anyone can validate my numbers by devoting a few hours to totting up the comments on this thread. And anyone can see what the current state of the art is in right wing Astroturfing with a little research. It includes "persona management" software that can give one operative up to 100 different online identities, each with a unique IP address.

So much for the WaPo paywall, as this one comment thread proves. I hope the WaPo comes up with a way to control these trolls-for-hire. They're making reasoned discourse hard to do there. And on any other major newspaper's comment threads on issues where wealthy special forces want to game the system.

What Republicans hear when you say "Obamacare"

The Republican Party didn't rename the ACA "Obamacare" for nothing. The change sounds harmless enough to liberals and moderates--and even moderate, unbiased urban conservatives--because they have no idea how the change plays to the GOP's undereducated, aging, white, male-dominated, fundamentally Southern base.

What they hear when you say "Obamacare" is "Negrocare:"  a law enabling the Negro president of the Negro-loving government to steal money from whites and give it to Negroes by the same federal government that once started the "war of Northern aggression" against the Confederacy.

And yes, many older white Southerners still refer to the Civil War as the "War of Northern aggression." As the patriarch of America's most popular reality show articulated when he said blacks were perfectly happy under Southern white rule.

America's urbanites cannot grasp how much rural older white Americans hate Obama for being black, and hate him even more for being educated and, as presidents go, rather aloof. That makes him an Uppity Negro in their eyes, and that grinds their grits.

Also, "Obamacare" personalizes it. It lets such people reject the ACA because they reject the man, instead of forcing them to confront what they could possibly object to in provisions like not letting insurance companies dump you on any flimsy pretext if you get really sick and thus start to cut into their profits.

Or the fact that any kind of insurance only works if the pool is big enough. That's why every driver is required to have liability insurance. The mandatory requirement is, in fact, a Republican idea formulated by the conservative Heritage Foundation and embodied in "Romneycare."

Republicans only because opposed to this way of preventing freeloaders on the healthcare system when the Democrats agreed with them that it was the right thing to do.

Bottom line: don't call it "Obamacare" even if all the mainstream media does and even the left-leaning media does. They're being played by the GOP's Ministry of Propaganda when they do--and so are you.

The Whopper of the Year wasn't the President's lie about ACA coverage--it's the Republicans lie that their alternative is better

Every hour of every day, across the airwaves and the blogosphere, Republican partisans blast “Obamacare” with the usual heavy-handed sarcasm that passes for humor in conservative circles.
    Oddly, though, no Republican has even one word to say about Republicare–their alternative to the Affordable Care Act.
    Republicare is what we’ll get if the Republicans succeed in destroying the Affordable Care Act, through a combination of winning the Presidency and their lavishly funded national campaign of sabotaging the ACA. Then we’ll revert to the American healthcare system as of 2008, with no changes whatsoever. The proof of this is simple: the Republican-dominated House has passed 46 healthcare bills since 2010. And every one of them did nothing but repeal the ACA. Period. Individual Republican lawmakers suggest this or that reform, but the GOP's "Repeal and Replace" campaign, so far, is all repeal, no replace.
    So the real whopper of the year is the claim that the American healthcare system as of 2008, with no changes at all, beats the ACA, warts and all.
    The Republicans know better than to say this out loud. They’re just hoping Americans won’t realize it’s what they’re actually saying. They’re hoping we won’t remember what it was like to have insurance company clerks making life and death decisions about you–decisions that were nearly impossible to appeal; to have your insurance dropped as soon as you got really sick; to have insurance refused if you had a “pre-existing condition;” to get sold junk insurance policies in which “the large print giveth–the small print taketh away” (apologies to Tom Waits); a healthcare system that was the most expensive on earth per capita, with the worst results among rich countries.
    There are Americans who will spend more for healthcare under the ACA than before. However, what most of this small minority don't realize is that the healthcare insurance they'd had before was, for most, junk policies that would have done nothing for them if something bad actually happened to them. Investigative journalists have researched the angry "ACA losers" featured on FOX News daily and found that most of the cases were bogus--people who hadn't bothered to find out what their alternatives were under the ACA, or who didn't realize that their old policies were so bad they were really uninsured.
    For at least 90% of all Americans, they're better off with the ACA.
    Want proof? Look at what the Republicans say. They refuse to talk about what they have to offer in lieu of "Obamacare." What's the use of criticizing anything if you don't talk about the alternative?

     I dare any Republican to actually compare “Obamacare” to Republicare.

The Lie of the Year isn't President Obama's whopper about the Affordable Care Act

Politifact.com has "awarded" its Lie of the Year dubious honor to President Obama for saying you keep your healthcare if you like it.

The Right Wing Media has picked this up and made a whole lotta hay with it.

But this time they're wrong.

The President's lie was a lie, all right, and even though it only directly affects a very small percentage of Americans it also affects his credibility with everyone else.

However, the Lie of the Year is vastly more pernicious, even though no one ever says it explicity.

It's the Republicans' lie that Republicare is better than Obamacare for any but 1% of Americans.

Republicare is what we get if the Republicans repeal Obamacare. Forty-six times in that last several years the Republicans have voted to repeal Obamacare in its entirety (in the House of Representatives), and 46 times the Republcans' health bill contained exactly nothing to replace Obamacare with if it succeeded.

So Republicare is simply America's high profitable healthcare system as it was before the Affordable Care Act became law.

And Republicare was a disaster that killed many people and drove many others into bankruptcy. The Affordable Care Act, warts and all, is infinitely better than a Republicare, in which you might pay into your healthcare insurance provider for 40 years only to get dumped as soon as you get really sick and start reducing that insurer's profits.

Republicare is the most billionaire-friendly healthcare system on Earth. But for us non-billionaires, the idea that it's preferable to the ACA would only make sense to someone completely blinded by right wing ideology.

And that's why Republicans NEVER talk about what we'll get if they get what they want. They want us to look at the ACA without regard to the only alternative they've given us: nothing.

And Nothing is what Republicare is.

Why is it called "ObamaCare" ?

When you're engineering propaganda campaigns in a democracy with laws you pretty much have to obey such laws as exist (political statements can be more slanderous and just plain false than slander of private citizens, businesses and institutions).

But for most statements you need plausible deniability while you're communicating with people in dogwhistle language.

"ObamaCare" is a perfect example. Who could complain? It is, after all, the signature legislation of the President's presidency.

But that's the thing about dogwhistles. You don't hear what the dogs hear.

"ObamaCare" serves several masters. Personalizing the huge omnibus bill that represents the first reform in America's healthcare system in over a century lets the Republicans avoid the issues involved. Making it about hating the person sidesteps all the benefits for ordinary Americans in the ACA and focuses voters' minds on just hating the person of the President.

Enormously wealthy special interests and demagogues have spend hundreds of millions of dollars since 2007 stoking personal hatred for the President--to a degree that's striking even in America's highly adversarial political system.

So calling the Affordable Care Act "ObamaCare" piggybacks on all the propaganda of aggrievance and scapegoating put out by the special interests that have profited so enormously from the old healthcare system.

How to discuss ObamaCare with your Tea Party friends & relatives

My fellow Democrats--here's how to talk about ObamaCare with your Tea Party relatives, workmates, and acquaintances:

Don't. Make them talk about RepubliCare. That's the Republican Party's alternative to ObamaCare.
I realize it's a challenge, since they never, ever talk about it, and have never offered a single piece of legislation that would implement it.

But just as you can make a drawing from "negative space"--shading in everything but your subject--you can describe RepubliCare and its consequences precisely:

It's what we'd have if ObamaCare were repealed and nothing introduced to replace it.

It would be the status quo for American healthcare, the most expensive on the planet on a per capita basis, with some of the poorest health outcomes (if you aren't a millionaire) of any advanced nation. It's the system every sane economist says is completely unsustainable. And of course RepubliCare strips you of any protection from your health insurers, letting them cancel your insurance the moment you really need it--as has been SOP for decades.

Force your Republican friends & family to tell you first, exactly what RepubliCare is, and second, exactly how its provisions compare with those of ObamaCare.

Don't let them bring up any other theoretical health plan. The GOP has offered NOTHING but repealing ObamaCare, so nothing but the old status quo is exactly what they must defend.
They keep trying to get us on our back foot to defend our law. Don't fall for it. Make them defend theirs.

ObamaCare vs. RepublicCare

Given how America's political system works, the only alternative to ObamaCare is RepubliCare.

But while the GOP and its friends have spent over $400 million telling you how awful ObamaCare is, they haven't spent a cent telling you what their alternative is.

I can tell you what it is, though:

1. Repeal ObamaCare in toto.
2. There is no "2."

So RepubliCare is for-profit medicine by the medical-industrial complex, for the medical-industrial complex, by the medical-industrial complex.

RepubliCare is overcrowded emergency care facilities being used by the poor as their primary care. RepubliCare is your health insurance that you paid into for forty years getting canceled as soon as you really need it.
RepubliCare is private health insurance for those whose employers don't provide health insurance plus freelancers plus retirees, which provides excellent care for millionaires, while the rest find it's either too expensive to buy or whose deductibles are so high it's useless.
RepubliCare is the most expensive per-capital healthcare system on Earth, with the worst outcomes for most people compared to those of other developed nations--the healthcare system growing in costs so rapidly that it's consuming the American economy--the healthcare system every responsible economist said is unsustainable and running us over a cliff in short order.

ObamaCare has plenty of shortcomings--mostly due to compromises made at the behest of those who are now trying to kill it. But it's a dream compared to the nightmare of RepubliCare.

So--the next time your Republican friends, family and acquaintances want to talk to you about how awful ObamaCare is, make them do so not against some imaginary ideal but against the reality of RepubliCare.

Republicans want death clerks getting between you and your doctor

Seems like every month or so the House GOP majority passes another bill repealing the Affordable Care Act--dozens of times at this point.

The fig leaf of replacing it with anything but the pre-Affordable Care Act status quo was dropped long ago. Now the GOP is all about going back to the Good Old Days.

Well, the Good Old Days featured your health insurance provider being able to cancel your health insurance whenever you turn out to really need it, as decided by some anonymous clerk. The healthcare providers have whole departments who job is to find an excuse to cancel your healthcare insurance the moment it becomes unprofitable for them.

Better yet, once they find that excuse, they also go back and sue you for any benefits you've gotten in the past.

I call those clerks "Death Clerks."

Try calling them that next time you get into it with your hard-right Uncle Harry or your Libertarian co-worker.

The irony is that one reason for Americans paying vastly more for their healthcare with poorer results than any other rich country is around 3/4 trillion dollars each year spent on unnecessary procedurs. The Affordable Care Act provides for looking into this source of waste and fraud--and the Republicans are dead set against it.

The Republicans LOVE waste and fraud, as long as it benefits rich people. They only want to throw the book at middle class and poor people who waste taxpayer money. It's the middle class and below who get these useless procedures--many of which have their own dangers, in fact--but it's the rich who profit from them.

Those are the "death panels" the GOP thundered against. Meanwhile they love the actual Death Clerks who routinely sentenced people to death in the name of healthcare insurance provider profits.

The one question the Prez must ask the Guv in the next debate

"Governor Romney: is there ANY bill a Republican Congress could send you that you would veto? Because your own policy positions can only become law if Congress passes the bills you say you want. If a Republican Congress chooses to ignore your positions and sends you pure Tea Party bills, isn't it true that you will sign them?

"For example, a bill that repeals Obamacare in its entirety, killing its restrictions of healthcare insurers dumping people who actually get sick? You said you wanted to preserve some aspects of Obamacare. But what if Congress ignores you and gives you the "Repeal" without any of the "Replace" ? You'd sign that in a New York second, wouldn't you? If you wouldn't, say so now. Otherwise your silence is assent.

"How about laws mirroring the most restrictive state laws on abortion? Laws handing the military multibillion-dollar weapons systems it hasn't even asked for because they send money to key Congressmen's districts? Laws handing huge tax cuts for the rich that stick ordinary taxpayers with the bill? Laws on drugs that help the "war on drugs" establishment continue its as-fruitless-as-Prohibition-was efforts to keep billions of dollars flowing into the "drug war" enforcement complex? Laws that destroy FDR's New Deal--Medicare and Social Security, privatizing both with cheapskate vouchers that will leave many oldsters having to choose between medicine and food? Laws restoring the ban on homosexuals in the military?

"Because the moderate positions you now say you want--as opposed to the "severely conservative" things you said to get the Republican/Tea Party nomination--are meaningless unless you are willing to state now, unequivocally, that you will veto measures more extremist than those of Romney 2.0."

Why Congress will remain in GOP control in 2013

Even in the face of the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent by a handful of angry white aging billionaires in this campaign, the President has a chance of reelection because he commands national attention even without funding. He can make the news almost daily from now to November.

Not so with Joe Blow Congressman from Some Small State, running for reelection. For the billionaires to swamp President Obama's voice with their well-financed bullhorn is nearly impossible. But it's a snap for the Angry Billionaires' Club to bury congressmen--even including many state senators--out of their petty cash fund. And since it's legal to lie in political ads, and also legal to keep your involvement secret (so major corporations can conceal their meddling in politics), the ABC can and will target vulnerable congressmen across the country with libelous campaigns--including dirty tricks like chain emails and telephone "push polls" like they used to bury John McCain in 2000--and do it in last-minute banzai charges that give Democrats and moderate Republicans guilty of ever cooperating with Democrats very little change of surviving.

So even if President Obama is re-elected he will face an intransigent Republican House majority and either Senate majority or submajority (i.e. enough Republican senators to block nearly all confirmations and legislation through preventing majority votes).

Meaning you should vote for Romney if you think there's nothing worse than gridlock in our Capitol--or for Obama if you think efficient achievement of Republican aims is even worse than gridlock.

Those aims start with repealing ObamaCare in its entirely. Governor Romney is making the rounds saying he'd keep various parts of it. He won't, because that's not up to him. A Republican Congress with a 51 vote Senate majority will use an arcane process called reconciliation to send him a blanket repeal of ObamaCare in toto. Do you seriously think he'd veto that? He would sign it, fulfilling his tacit promise to the Republican base to do as Grover Norquist said--sit in the White House and stay out of Norquist's way, signing all Republican legislation sent him without making a peep. All a President Romney would need to have is a functioning right arm and enough neurons to guide it through a signature.

It is unlikely for the ABC to manufacture enough votes to give the Senate a veto-proof majority. Which means a Democratic president would be able to force Congress to compromise--just as Clinton forced the intransigent Newt Gingrich Congress to play ball, even though Clinton had to call the GOP's bluff and bring most federal functions to a halt for a period of time.

So if it goes one way, control of America will pass to Congress, but actually to the ABC; if it goes the other way, we'll get four years of pitched battles between a Congress that believes compromise is immoral and a President who has nothing to lose by blocking them. At the very least it would be entertaining to watch this kind of unstoppable force-immovable object Kabuki dance play out...

Guess what it costs to vote to repeal ObamaCare?

I heard a plausible estimate today that it has cost about $2 million each of the 33 times the Republican Congress has voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act (which they invariable call ObamaCare because most of their voters aren't heavy on complicated thinking), knowing full well that the Senate would never pass it and the President would always veto it even if it did.

So that's $66 million in yours and my taxes devoted to building a legislative bridge to nowhere. I can think of better uses for $66 million of our money. Can't you, regardless of whether you're liberal, centrist, conservative, or a fringer?

The biggest point this makes is that the Republican Party's alternative to the Affordable Care Act is nothing. They haven't been passing an alternative healthcare reform bill designed to supersede the ACA. So now they've made their legislative healthcare agenda clear: their alternative to the ACA is nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch-o.

Then their patrons, the health insurance (until you need it) industry, get to return to:
a. denying coverage to children with pre-existing conditions.
b. forcing seniors to pay the highest prices any citizen of any country on Earth pays for prescription drugs.
c. forcing college-age offspring off their parents' healthcare plans.
d. enabling employers to deny covering preventive health services for women.
e. enabling health insurance providers to continue their death panels in the form of setting lifetime caps for medical care.
f. enabling employers to continue the lucrative practice of finding and using any excuse to not just deny continuing coverage for anyone who gets really sick, but to sue people they dump for what the insurance company paid out for healthcare up to that point. It has been proven that the healthcare insurance industry employs substantial staffs of doctors and researchers to do just this, as they should if profit is their only goal (and the GOP says profit should be the only goal of any private company, since they're devout social Darwinists).
g. enabling freeloaders who'd never paid for healthcare insurance to avail themselves of doctor and hospital care when they're indigent, with the costs passed on to the rest of us (which Governor Romney said was contrary to the free market six years ago).

What wrong with the status quo? It's unsustainable. Anyone who has studied the current system, regardless of their political flavor, knows this. Yet this is the GOP plan: the status quo.

Governor Romney claims he has a detailed plan. I doubt it, but say he does. So? He's not running for King and he's not running for Congress. Only Congress can create and pass legislation. They could model a healthcare bill after Romney's supposed plans, but they choose not to. They choose to simply repeal the only healthcare reform bill passed in a century of trying by everyone back to Teddy Roosevelt, and replacing it with nothing.

So when they reiterate the mantra "Repeal and replace" they're being honest about the former and lying about the latter. It's Repeal, pure and simple.

Yet another example of how radicalized the GOP has become--and, in its efforts to root out every single scrap of Democratic legislation since the New Deal, it has become nihilistic--a legislative lynch mob, full of torches and pitchforks and ropes to throw over the nearest tree branch...

John Roberts is the only true conservative on the Supreme Court

Today right-wing America is aghast at Justice Roberts' treason. (And they hardly notice the fact that three of the Court's "liberals" voted with the conservatives to kill the Medicare mandate). 

But in fact Justice Roberts proved yesterday that he's the only true conservative on the Court.

That is, IF you define "conservative" as a political philosophy, and not as a set of political positions.

That's the mistake most self-styled conservatives and liberals make. 

The essence of conservatism is respect for established institutions, for the rule of law, for tradition, for doing one's job with a measure of humility.

The job of Supreme Court Justice--and most especially Chief Justice--was described by Justice Roberts during his confirmation hearings. He said it was not to usurp the roles of the Executive branch or Congress. It was to favor narrowly-defined decisions supported by most or all the Justices over sweeping, precedent-overturning decisions by 5-4. It was to subordinate one's own political preferences  to the Court's role of simply determining whether a law passes Constitutional muster or not.

And--here's the kicker--to actively seek reasons to uphold laws passed by elected representatives of the People, even if they weren't the reasons set forth by the law.

You don't look for reasons to overturn laws that run contrary to your own political philosophy. You don't ignore precedent in considering laws that run contrary to your own political philosophy. 

And you don't do things that suit the specific positions of your political philosophy but which would also damage one or more of the core institutions of the country.

There's no reason to believe that Justice Roberts' opinion of ObamaCare differs from that of Scalia, Alito, Thomas, and Kennedy. But unlike them, Roberts doesn't believe in legislating from the bench. Roberts--at least in the clinch--doesn't believe in being an activist judge. 

He knows that the SCOTUS decision that inflicted Bush II's mix of mediocre ability and vaulting ambition on this country damaged the reputation of SCOTUS seriously. And SCOTUS has neither an army nor an elected legislature. It depends entirely on the "consent of the ruled-on" so to speak. 

No student of SCOTUS can forget President Andrew Jackson getting a ruling that didn't suit his genocidal approach to Indian relations and telling the Court to go enforce it themselves.

No one can know whether Roberts thought that he might kill two birds with one stone in this decision: help to restore the Court's legitimacy in the aftermath of Citizens United (which 80% of Americans believe was wrongly decided, according to a 2010 ABC News-Washington Post poll), while at the same time helping to rally conservative voters to defeat President Obama, upon which a President Romney and a Tea Party-dominate Congress would gut the bill by defunding it and giving all the states waivers. Certainly no one thinks Roberts is President Obama's BFF after the latter hectored the former to his face in Obama's state of the union address following the decision.

It's also conceivable that Roberts is looking to his place in the history books. No doubt he'd love to see the Roberts Court revered...and, perhaps, remembered as the Roberts Court and not the Kennedy Court (since Kennedy's swing vote has determined so many decisions.)

Whatever Roberts' motivations, with this decision he showed what true conservatism looks like, which is at its essence an antecedent morality--making decisions that hew to the promises you made to get the job, and working as the SCOTUS chief justice to rule on a law's constitutionalty--period.

That said, the SCOTUS conservative majority just reinforced its belief that money is protected speech in smacking down the Montana case, and Citizens United is a far bigger decision than this one.

Still, it's a good sign. And it does establish Justice Roberts as the closest thing to a true conservative that President Eisenhower would recognize. Conversely, it also establishes Justice Alito as the most doctrinaire justice--not Scalia or Thomas--because Alito is the only one of the five conservative justices who has never delivered a swing vote, going along with the more liberal justices. That surprised me to find out, because he doesn't wear his politics on his sleeve like Thomas and Scalia do. 

As you talk with conservatives, try this tack with them. Encourage them to think more about conservative principles, and less about conservative positions. Oh, and while you're at it, ask them what they think about the quarter-billion dollars the healthcare insurance (until you actually need it) industry has spent on manufacturing public opposition to healthcare reform. Do they really think that kind of political leverage (against miniscule money toward the other side) bodes well for our republic?

Take note of everyone who said ObamaCare is unconstitutional

There are lots of laws I'd like to see repealed, whether they're constitutional or not. So right wingers are entitled to hate ObamaCare. But they're not entitled to say it's unconstitutional. 

And they weren't entitled to say it's unconstitutional before today's ruling, as if they not only sat on the Supreme Court themselves but could read the minds of at least four other justices, and read them before they were made up--so a bit of time travel to boot. Even constitutional lawyers who have argued many cases before the Supreme Court don't do that. They know better.

Of course anyone was entitled to say they thought this law was unconstitutional. Just not to declare something constitutional or unconstitutional as a plain fact. 

That's arrogance.

It is extremely telling that the swing vote in today's 5-4 majority was Justice Roberts, one of the very conservative justices. Unless someone can prove that Justice Roberts is a socialist mole, his presence in the majority means not that he is even a liberal--he most assuredly is not--but that he understands the Constitution...possibly better than Rush Limbaugh, astonishing as that might seem. Understands it well enough to vote against his "side" and possibly his personal inclinations.

So you should take note of everyone--from personal acquaintance to Congressman to commentator--who said ObamaCare was unconstitutional before today. Such people proved by saying so that they didn't respect their own limits--and that they didn't respect the intelligence, authority and experience of others. This is the hallmark of the partisan ideologue--utter contempt for anyone and any idea that doesn't match their own.

Today Romney's response was that on his first day of office "I will act to repeal ObamaCare." 

What action might that be? We don't have a monarchy; he isn't running to be King Romney. Even with a Republican majority in Congress, all the Democrats have to do is employ the tactics the Republicans in the Senate have been using every single day since President Obama took office, and they will probably be able to block anything coming up from the House. He can't simply declare ObamaCare invalid on his say-so. 

So what he said is very close to being a lie. This has nothing to do with political persuasions. It has to do with character. And Romney's character is marked by his total comfort with lying--at least in the political sphere--effortlessly and constantly.

The American public, by a large majority, hates ObamaCare and wants it repealed. Um, except for its provisions, most of which they love, when asked about them one by one.

That, my friends, is the power of propaganda, fueled by a vast war chest. Be sure to ask your conservative friends and acquaintances about this when they cite majority opposition to ObamaCare. Even the name they've given the ACA (Affordable Care Act)--ObamaCare--is propaganda, because it personalizes a large, complex act that was crafted by a large committee and enacted after passing a gauntlet of special interests who stuffed it with compromises that President Obama certainly didn't want. Calling it ObamaCare makes it all about one person (a BLACK person, which they'll never say but they'll constantly show you), and lets you forget about its provisions and just focus on hating the person who headed the effort to pass it. 

Propaganda hates complexity, hates ideas really--loves pushing everything down to personal animosities. That's what branding it ObamaCare means and does.

That Obama guy...

Let's see if I understand the Sins of Obama correctly.

* He's a far left radical European Socialist.

Only the team he assembled to deal with the Republican Recession comprised Wall Street insiders, and his solutions all preserve the current system, albeit with some regulation--like all other rich countries have (notice how Canada's banking system didn't collapse? They didn't let the banks turn themselves into gambling casinos for billionaires).

* Obamacare is a socialist horror.

Except for it being Romneycare writ national. Now you can claim it's terrible. You can claim that healthcare should be done at the state level. And you can claim it won't work, and that Romneycare also won't work in the long run.

But you can't claim that it's a left wing radical solution unless you say pretty much the same thing about Romney. Though it is great fun to listen to Romney talk about Rom- I mean, Obamacare.

Besides which, the left wing of the Democratic Party denounced Obamacare because it was so conservative, lacking even single payer administration.

You'd think something so far left would be loved by the far left. But what do I know?

* Obama is a typical Democrat--unable to defend our country.

Have you seen what he's been doing in Iraq and Afghanistan? Here again, the left wing of the Democrats are wringing their hands at what a hawk he's proven to be. And Al Qaeda's honchos can't walk out of their hideyholes without wetting themselves for fear of ObamaDrones turning them into bugsplat.

Some peacenik.

* Obama's a foreigner.

Not unless his midwestern mom's a foreigner. If she's American, he's American. Period. Read the Constitution if you don't get it. It doesn't make the slighted bit of difference where he was born--just as it doesn't matter that John McCain was born in Panama.

* Obama's pro-abortion.

I'm pro-abortion, not him. He does favor women getting the last word, yet he signed that order forbidding using federal funds for abortion. This doesn't make him ready to join some misnamed "right to life" organization. But he's obviously a pragmatist, not a zealot.

* Obama's pro-homosexual.

I'm pro-homosexual. He's opposed to homosexual marriage. He will end military discrimination against homosexuals, but he's doing it carefully, enlisting like-minded officers and conservatives along the way. Here again if he were a zealot as the ranters say, he would have done this by decree. Instead he's proceeding carefully, building consensus.

* Obama only seems smart because he can read a teleprompter.

Anyone who watched the presidential debates or town halls where he fielded questions would know better of this law professor / Harvard grad / editor of the Harvard Law Review. And he may be the only prez who wrote his autobiography himself without a ghost writer.

Given these facts--which no amount of muttering about affirmative action can account for--there's only one possible reason why some people would persist in calling him unintelligent.

* Obama is a snob.

My daddy was from so far south in Georgia he thought of Atlantans as Yankees. His daddy once told me he raised "hawgs..'cuz they don't take no plowin'. And in their eyes, wasn't nuthin' worse'n an uppity...well, you know.

Obama does think he's smart. Well he is. But he also comes from modest circumstances, and only got ahead through outstanding academic performance. To have people raised with privileges he never had as a kid then go and call him a snob can, again, only come from one source. He uppity.

* Obama is a man of bad character.

This belief underlies a lot of the ranting you read in threads like this. The ranters believe he acts from unpatriotic, personally ambitious motives. They give him zero credit for having any sort of character.

Of course Republicans say this of every Democratic candidate for president--that he lacks character.

This is interesting since there has never been the slightest hint of scandal in his family life. He married his first love. He's always been true to her. They're obviously close, as their daughters are obviously close to both parents.

He did try drugs. But instead of lying or equivocating, he just said what did--and why he stopped--in his autobiography. Cards on the table.

Whenever there was a whiff of scandal about a Democratic presidential candidate, Republicans said the election was all about character.

This key campaign position went underground when Obama became the candidate--especially given McCain's adulterous crippled wife-deserting, playboy past.

And Obama's never been to a bondage strip club, unlike those fine Republican National Committee folks.

I have several beefs with Obama. I wish he hadn't gutted the space program. I'm dead set against any form of amnesty for illegal aliens, and he obviously favors it. I'd have nationalized the broke banks, then streamlined & reprivatize them.

But overall--Republicans don't know how lucky they are to have him.

ObamaCare vs. RepubliCare

This isn't a States Rights issue--it's a Republican Tribe issue. The GOP has zero respect for states rights, except for specific circumstances in which the state having a right advances the cause of the Republican Tribe. Otherwise they've shown total contempt for states' rights.

Nor is it a Conservative/Liberal issue. The world's leading conservative/capitalist/free market publication, The Economist, reluctantly endorsed ObamaCare in its latest issue.

Every other wealthy nation's conservatives wouldn't dream of giving up their heavily regulated healthcare systems for RepubliCare--the system that reached its zenith under the last Republican administration. They think American conservatives are nuts. But that's because other countries' conservatives belong to political parties. Ours belong to a tribe. A tribe isn't about competing principles or worldviews. It's about Us vs. Them.

Witness the fact that about a quarter of Americans believe that President Obama is the literal, biblical Antichrist.

That's not something you can reason with.

But for what it's worth, whatever the Republican leadership says, RepubliCare is exactly the existing system with no changes--because that's what the Republican Congress (1994-2006) gave us. I trust what people do when they're in power--not what they say they'll do when they aren't.

And every economist worth his salt has said that Republicare was becoming so much more expensive--even without considering the inequities--that the economy would not be able to support it within a decade or so.

So remember, the alternative to ObamaCare is RepubliCare--and in the latter case, the "Care" part is a sick joke. So to speak.