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August 15, 2009
If the antics we've seen over climate change and the CPRS is as loony as Australian politics gets, we should count ourselves lucky. Nothing we produce here can hold a candle to the American right. Nothing that wouldn't count as certifiable, anyway. They make Steve Fielding and Wilson Tuckey look like finishing school graduates.
Obama's proposed health care reforms have them in a frenzy, dragging the British NHS system into their personal debacle. It's been claimed that if Stephen Hawking had presented to the British system he would have been written off as a hopeless case and left to die. Never mind that it turned out Hawking is British and owes his life to the NHS, the scare is out.
There's talk of something they call 'death panels', whereby the elderly will be deemed expendable and given a nudge into the grave by government. Well, according to Sarah Palin, they will anyway. Sarah didn't make 'death panels' up all by herself. It's a leftover of the conservative arsenal against Clinton's health care reforms.
Another Republican meme doing the rounds escaped from a more friendly owner to end up plastered all over the American landscape in modified form.
Obama's not having much luck dealing with the lunacy. When town hall meetings organised to explain the scheme were hijacked by screaming loonies, the solution was to have Obama do a few, the idea being more or less 'look me in the eye and say that'. But when he tried, they didn't turn up.
Paul Krugman :
The truth is that the factors that made politics so ugly in the Clinton years — the paranoia of a significant minority of Americans and the cynical willingness of leading Republicans to cater to that paranoia — are as strong as ever. In fact, the situation may be even worse than it was in the 1990s because the collapse of the Bush administration has left the G.O.P. with no real leaders other than Rush Limbaugh.
He thinks there's no point carrying on the diplomatic approach with such people. Obama needs to simplify the message and drive it home. His commenters beg to differ. They say it's time to start pointing out what lunatics these birthers and tea party people really are.
In comments over at Club Troppo, Ken Lovell says:
Our Great and Powerful Friend, our ally and protector, has become a fractured and dysfunctional society that increasingly tries to promote and protect its self-identified global interests by the use of crude force. On any objective analysis it is a deeply disturbing situation that can only get worse. Yet hardly anybody wants to talk about it or even admit there is a problem.
Luckily our great and powerful friend can't inflict its fractured and dysfunctional health system on the rest of us, although its interests do attempt to burden us with its insane politics. This kind of stuff is bad for American society, and invariably works to the disadvantage of the crowds who tend to support it. But what's bad for them can be good for us. Watching both the antics and the state of the American health system, we can be grateful that Wilson Tuckey is as bad as it gets here, that at least Barnaby Joyce is funny, and that we know the benefits of Medicare.
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I agree, it looks dangerously nutty over there. That is why I wish you people would stop trying to import the same nuttiness here. You did this during the "Howard Years" by banging on about "Culture Wars" the "Religious Right" and so on. So invoking the likes of Culture Warrior Paul Krugman as an authority on anything does not help.
Please, can't we have our own little unique Australian polity?