We Are So Screwed, Tea Party Debate Edition
Applause lines:
- The uninsured should be left to die.
- Said uninsured parents should have daughters who die unnecessarily of cervical cancer.
- A Fed Chairman who tries to fulfill his mandate by reducing unemployment is guilty of treason.
Boo lines:
- Muslims are not collectively responsible for 9/11.
- The children of illegal immigrants should not be denied the chance to go to college.
- We should not pass an extraordinarily regressive tax cut.
In summary, the candidates were involved in escalating wingnuttery contest it would be hard to imagine even ten years ago, and were considerably to the left of the audience even so.
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Not to mention the anti-Obama lines, a President so horrible that he lowered their taxes and empowered the INS to go on a deportation binge.
BUT I WANT MY COUNTRY BACK!
Whatever could they mean?
It’s just one of life’s mysterious.
The GOP is a party of sociopaths.
I think that may be unfair to sociopaths.
It’s fair if the sociopaths are inebriated retarded masochists on an acid trip.
Republicans are sociopaths who are willing to screw themselves over just to see others suffer but are too dumb, delusional, and drunken on their own sense of superiority to understand that that’s what they are.
That’s a horrible thing to say about acid.
“Sociopath” gets bandied about a fair bit these days. I do it myself. In this case, I would go with a phrase I came across in the Guardian Weekly; savage indifference.
I would think that the bloodlust we have witnessed the past two debates, the level of savage indifference that has been expressed is sociopathic.
Sociopathy is an excuse. Genuine sociopaths are simply incapable of feeling empathy the way the rest of us do. Blaming sociopaths for indifference to suffering is like blaming a color blind person for poor wardrobe choices.
The vast majority of people in that audience are perfectly capable of feeling empathy and do so in their daily lives with friends and family members. Unlike sociopaths, they are morally blameworthy for their savage indifference.
Indeed. These are people who commit to a political ideology for the purpose of overriding their empathy.
I think what we have here is another manifestation of the kind of extreme “othering” which dehumanizes your opponents and enables genocide. It is sadly a normal part of the human behavioral repertoire and not restricted to actual sociopaths.
Look on the bright side. Presumably somebody uttered the ‘boo’ lines? How ever shall they explain that?
If Rick Perry was the tough-talkin’ Texan everyone said he was, he probably would’ve responded to Bachmann accusing him of sexually assaulting middle school girls for money with more than apologetic stammering. Ron Jaworski sounded better fake apologizing for dropping a blatant S-bomb during the Pats-Dolphins game.
I heard it, but i could have sworn it was Gruden.
I thought so too, but Jaws was the one who apologized.
One other observation: Blitzer asked at the end what each of them would bring to the White House if elected, in terms of tangible personal touches. Santorum was awkward but said a bedroom for his seven kids, and Huntsman said his motorcycle. Ron Paul and Bachmann copped out with lame “a bowl-a-common sense!”/”teh Constitution!” answers. Mitt Romney had an epic fail by haltingly attempting a joke followed by pandering with conviction by saying “a bust of Winston Churchill” to tepid applause, which I enjoyed.
Just in case anyone didn’t get the Churchill bust reference.
The Republican Party cannot decide whether it is an ongoing criminal enterprise or a Satanic Doomsday Cult.
why not both…
The Republican Party makes much more sense when you view it as a Cthulhu cult run by Cobra Commander, doesn’t it?
Haha, now I hear Rick Perry speaking in that Cobra Commander voice from the old cartoon.
I think you are on to something.
The diary of a COBRA trainee was one of the funniest things I ever read on the internet.
C O B R A !
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/journal-of-a-new-cobra-recruit
That audience is not made up of voters who are applauding policy positions; they are fans at a live taping of their favorite reality show.
That’s all any partisan ever is. If Obama has proven anything, he’s proven that actual policy results don’t matter to liberals, either.
The constant back and forth between “Obama betrayed us!” and “Leave our president alone!” on the internet, along with the criticisms from the congressional black caucus and labor leaders, show that what you’re claiming isn’t true. The actual policies and their consequences are what liberals talk about. Conservatives avoid such things.
James, the point is that both sides do it. With this bold, fresh analysis, Soullite is hoping for an op-ed spot at the Washington Post.
James, the point is that both sides do it. With this bold, fresh analysis, Soullite is hoping for an op-ed spot at
the Washington Postunder Andrew Breitbart.FTFY
the tea party is simply a very vocal, idiot minority of the republican party, that’s taken it over. they assume, wrongly, that given enough time and exposure, everyone else of voting age will also become old, white and stupid. you can’t explain this.
i do keep waiting for mitt romney’s head to finally explode, when his brain reaches its saturation point of stupid, and (reasonably, i think) rebels.
as well, i expect an “exorcist” moment, when michelle bachmann’s head does a complete 360, when her contradictory statements finally reach a tipping point. if we’re really lucky, this could also include projectile vomiting, always a crowd pleaser.
rick perry will eventually twirl off into the atmosphere, as his body, twisted like a spring, finally hits maximum tension, and releases all that pent up energy, created by the exertions of having to constantly amp up the crazy (and then backtrack off stage). i wonder how many audience members will be caught up in his gravitational pull, and sucked skyward with him?
for poly sci majors, this election will be a godsend, providing material for 1,000′s of master’s thesis and phd dissertations. i am almost envious.
I’m not so worried about this bunch; I’m worried about what comes after. Goldwater set the stage for Reagan by shifting the Overton Window for Republicans to the right. (Nixon was a bit of an anomaly, I think, a cold warrior who was plenty right-wing, but mostly uninterested in domestic affairs.) What happens when the Republicans come up with a Presidential candidate who isn’t a frothing-at-the-mouth nutbar? It’s coming, and it’ll be here sooner than we think. (Actually, maybe that’s was Bush was, and what that means is that we’ll have more of the financial apocalypse, and more war. It’ll look like Mad Max.
I don’t know. The Republican Party is a Darwinian environment that selects for batshit insanity, callous cruelty, false consciousness and pigheaded stupidity, in varying degrees depending on the individual candidate.
I don’t see the Republican primaries yielding a candidate who isn’t all of those things in some obvious way. The real problem is that the Dem platform as actually practiced in today’s corporate-owned politics is “we’re just a half-step behind the Republicans” and there are only two viable choices. Voter anger can only be expressed by picking whoever isn’t in power.
So the Republicans take power and fuck up the joint, the Dems sort-of half-ass clean it up, handicapped by their fecklessness and Republican perfidy, but it’s not good enough, so the Republicans take power again and fuck up the joint some more.
What a bunch of sick fucks.
I didn’t watch it so I thought you were probably indulging in a little bit of hyperbole, but you really weren’t. That is -exactly- what happened.
Jesus, it is like they revel in being awful people.
There’s no “it is like” to it. They do revel in being awful people. They are willing and eager to screw themselves over so long as someone else suffers in the process. A Republican who loses 90% of his quatloos is thrilled so long as his neighbor is left with none.
A Cold War joke:
A sociologist interviews various nationalities on their wishes for an ideal life.
The Italian: “I want the world’s best cook to be my personal chef.”
The Frenchman: “I want the world’s most beautiful woman to be my mistress.”
The Briton: “I want the restoration of the Empire.”
The American: “I want to corner the market in electrostatic widgets”
The Soviet: “I want my neighbor’s pig to die.”
wins
Just watched the “uninsured” clip (couldn’t stomach watching the whole thing). Just to note, Wolf’s question clearly implied a person who could afford to buy health insurance but chose not to because he was young and healthy. So maybe not quite as awful as Scott’s quick summary suggests (the free rider problem in health insurance is a difficult one after all), Still, the cheering for letting someone die in that situation was rather creepy.
Can I get a link?
http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/09/tea-party-debate-audience-cheers-idea-of-letting-sick-man-without-insurance-die-video.php?ref=fpb
I’m not seeing the difference. It’s the equivalent of cheering because someone dies without life insurance.
Being happy when one of the wrong people dies is barbaric and evil. And they’re cheering in no small part because they like doing things that upset or anger liberals.
The problem with Blitzer’s question is what Glenn mentioned. The premise that he could have bought insurance but didn’t gives people a veneer of schadenfreude to hide behind. It’s not pretty, but we all harbor some twinge of satisfaction at some shirker getting his just desserts.
Now that being said, a twinge of satisfaction doesn’t justify cheering at someone’s death, and Blitzer probably should’ve phrased it as someone who couldn’t afford insurance. The recent story about the guy who died from an infected tooth because he had to choose between paying for pain meds and antibiotics would’ve been a better choice.
Yes, somebody makes a narrowly rational decision within a broken system that turns out to have been a bad risk — let them die! That’ll show ‘em!
But they die FREEEEE, no doubt comforted by the knowledge that no taxpayer dollars were wasted in trying to save a life.
What I want to know is, what if the uninsured person is pregnant? I assume the answer is to let her die, but transplant the fetus into a woman with a better job.
FTFY
Yep, you did. Good work.
A good Christian woman would already be pregnant.
Good Christian women can carry litters if necessary, though.
Exactly. “Could not afford” and “chose not to” are the same thing in practical reality. Their cheers are an enthymeme that contains an unspoken chain of reasoning something like this:
a) personal responsibility is everything
b) anyone who lacks any necessary thing is to blame
c) let the uninsured die
“a” does not apply to big contributors such as banks and defense contractors
Blitzer probably should’ve phrased it as someone who couldn’t afford insurance.
With this audience, I think that would have just made it worse. Someone who chooses not to have health insurance is exercising their freedom of choice. Someone who can’t afford health insurance is a parasite.
I am so happy to living and working in Ghana now. Although we do have a Muslim minority of 20%, I am hoping that they are way down on the list of wing nut targets. After all there are far more Muslims in Indonesia, India, and Bangladesh that they have to get to first.
Ben Bernake hasn’t done shit to improve unemployment. He has been interested in propping up the stock market and keeping wages low, and that’s pretty much it.
And you know what, that little shit is a treasonous bastard and the Democrats won’t get anywhere defending him.
You and Rick Perry are kindred spirits, then.
Rick Perry seems to have a better understanding of Bernanke’s record.
Nah, Perry insists that core inflation is out of control. Perry has managed to be more wrong than soullite.
I would like to hereby nominate soullite as Republican candidate for President in 2012. He’ll fit in fine with them on abortion and gay rights, and he is moderately less crazy than Perry.
Could give Romney a run for his money for the “moderate Republican” vote (both of them), without that magic underwear problem.
the candidates were involved in escalating wingnuttery contest it would be hard to imagine even ten years ago
I was recalling how Republicans got offended when Alan Grayson described their health care plan as “don’t get sick, but if you do get sick, die quickly.” That was less than two years ago.
Yeah, mine was supposed to be a response to Mal as well.
Wazz up wid dat?
I’d comment but it would take up too many column inches and force people to scroll.
So I’ll link to my response, instead.
Ron Paul shot a man in Reno, just to watch him go bankrupt.
I was thinking, “I cheered a man in Reno. As I watched him die”.
Why is that I feel that the person who’ll get the Republican nomination is the first one who in a debate will get up and say:
‘I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die…’
In reply to c u n d gulag:
Anybody can say it. The nomination will go to the first candidate to just shoot a man (preferably an undocumented immigrant or public union member) on camera, just to watch him die. And then law enforcement will look forward, not back, because you don’t want Republicans to go all obstructionist on you, nor to criminalize simple policy differences over when someone passes the threshold beyond which they can’t be punished for murder except by Gawd.
Look, the reality is that although Alan Grayson is a fun punching bag for team-jersey Democrats, he was right in pretty much every particular concerning todays Bircherite Movement Conservative Republican Party. In this particular:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/6253092/Democrat-Alan-Grayson-claims-Republican-health-care-plan-is-dont-get-sick.html
The comment system is acting whacky on this thread.
It doesn’t ‘reply,’ it seems to make every oen of my replies into a new comment.
Maybe it’s just me…
At least one article explaining how it would actually (not) work to have churches pick up the social services baton:
http://www.ethicsdaily.com/news.php?viewStory=17948
Mal,
begging to differ, but….
40 – Fundamentals of Health Insurance: Part A, Health Insurance Association of America, 1997, ISBN 1-879143-36-4.
41 – Thomas P. O’Hare, “Individual Medical Expense Insurance,” The American College, 2000, p. 7, ISBN 1-57996-025-1.
42 – Managed Care: Integrating the Delivery and Financing of Health Care – Part A, Health Insurance Association of America, 1995, p. 9 ISBN 1-879143-26-1.
To actor, as Cthulhu only knows where the reply will end up:
Yes, but insurance as part of employment arose as part of wage controls in WW2. The literature here is pretty consistent.
And, in hindsight, it was my original comment that was unclear. My apologies. I was referring to the practice where insurance is part of your employment, not insurance itself.
Ah, so we both covered the same point, just from different directions.
Serious question: Is there any evidence about this, one way or the other? Strikes me that there’s scope here for international comparisons.
[...] didn’t see the Tea Party debate, but I’ve been informed that criticism of Rick Perry for establishing an anti-HPV vaccination program got applause. [...]
Wolf Blitzer asked Ron Paul who would pay for a 30 yo man with a good job and income who didn’t purchase health insurance but got sick. Paul danced around the question with talk about freedom and responsibility, which got the crowd fired up.
Blitzer reworded it more directly, along the lines of “Should he be left to die”, a couple of people in the crowd shouted yep and people cheered.
Ron Paul had the good sense not to answer the question.
He certainly did answer the question: “that’s what freedom is about, taking your own risks.” And the crowd loved it. That’s because the 30-year-old who chooses not to buy health insurance is just living Patrick Henry’s immortal line, “give me liberty and give me death.” Tea Party FTW.
why is that “good sense”? If RP wasn’t prepared for a tele-journalist stuffed shirt to follow tea party/glibertarian thinking to its logical conclusion, he had no business being on that stage. If RP doesn’t actually believe in a frontier justice-style health care system, then more fool him because now he’s reaping what he’s sown. If he DOES actually believe in a frontier justice-style health care system, then f***ing man up and admit it straightforwardly; keeping silent and letting the crowd take the lead doesn’t make you look like a leader.
Ron Paul had
the good sense not tolacked the courage of his concivtions and didn’t answer the question.Oh, but he did answer, as I point out at my blog, and even his answer (“No, but…”) was wildly out of touch with history and reality.
Actually, Paul said no.
But Blitzer did not word it that way. He asked whether society (*) should let him die, not whether the guy should be left to die.
(*) By which he meant “government.”
I’m sure it was a gotcha question anyway, and hence unfair to ask.
If you watch it again, when asked directly if the man should be left to die, he responds “No” very clearly.
He wisely avoided going into the morality surrounding the “No” or what mechanism would rectify the two opinions.
He wisely avoided going into the morality surrounding the “No” or what mechanism would rectify the two opinions.
Why is it “wise” to not discuss what the result of your policy will be?
Actually, that question answers itself…
The Digby link someone left in this thread or the other cuts off Paul’s answer. He starts to say something about Medicaid but the video ends. Does the TPM one show his answer? I’m interested to know what he said but TPM always crashes my computer.
What is unfair about expecting people to own up to the logical conclusion of their beliefs?
Here it is. Paul says that before Medicaid the church would take care of it.
Paul says that before Medicaid the church would take care of it.
There is a Slactivist post my google-fu cannot find, where he does some basic math, and realizes that each congregation (average size: 150 members) would need to be responsible for 75 poor people’s needs.
He does say friends and neighbors before mentioning the church.
That ratio will improve if we relentlesssly persecute people who are not in congregations.
They haven’t exactly ‘thunk’ this thing through.
Without SS, Medicare, and Medicaid, each Galtian solo artist who DID want to help the sick and old would have to save money not just for themselves and their families, but for their neighbors, friends, and fellow church members.
That’s a Hell of a lot more money than any one individual has ever contributed to the safety net programs.
So, just remind them, they’ll also need to save for others.
Or not, which is what the selfishness is about:
You want to help your neightbor, you go right ahead! What’m mine is mine. And get off my lawn before I go all 2nd Amendment on your MFin’ ass!!!
Fred Clark (Slacktivist) has been promoting the notion of subsidiarity for a while now. The idea is that responsibility for solving life’s problems is nested.
- Try to solve your own problems
- Very often you will want your family there to support you
- Lots of problems are too big to solve at the family level. If your spouse dies, you need the sweet old lady from the front pew at the Church to come over with soup. If you’re taking flack from your boss, your shop steward should be there to lean on.
- Government action is the ultimate weapon against suffering and injustice (ultimate=most powerful and ultimate=last resort)
This is traditional Christian (Catholic) theology. The low-tax faction is trying to frame all social legislation as an attack on the Church, successfully, it would seem.
It’s weird that local church and government responsibility for helping the poor could ever have been construed as mutually exclusive.
D’oh! Supposed to be in response to Malaclypse
a frontier justice-style health care system
“Mister, you just shot an uninsured man.”
“Well, he shoulda insured himself.”
This.
I’m not entirely sure you thunk it through.
Why on earth would every individual need to save enough for himself and all others?
What is unfair about expecting people to own up to the logical conclusion of their beliefs?
Nothing.
Except that, for the first 150 years of this nation’s existence, we tried this and we didn’t succeed. We had the poor and elderly dying in the streets of major cities.
We had actual famine…famine…in Appalachia.
I sure don’t want to see the United States slip back that way, do you?
He does say friends and neighbors before mentioning the church.
No he doesn’t. Starting at 0:59 of the NRO video, the crowd quiets after cheering for hypothetical man’s death and Paul says:
And we’ve given up on this whole concept that we might take care of ourselves, assume resposibility for ourselves, our neighbors, our friends, our churches would do it.
You know, I actually have seen churches run spaghetti dinner fundraisers for sick people. That is not how a sane society pays bills.
Want proof that it is a bad way to pay bills? Ask the Air Force to do a fighter-jet fundraiser.
I practiced medicine, um, before we had Medicaid, in the early 1960s when I got out of medical school. I practiced at Santa Rosa Hospital at San Antonio and the churches took care of ‘em. We never turned anybody away from the hospital.
I wonder if Rep. Paul has ever thought about how much health care costs have gone up since the early ’60s, and what impact that might have on the ability of people (and their churches) to pay for them..
I wonder if Rep. Paul has ever thought about how much health care costs have gone up since the early ’60s
I stopped transcribing his statement with a few seconds to go. He does acknowledge the rising costs, but blames it on government’s attempts to insure more people. There’s probably some truth to that, but I don’t see how people not having insurance helps the uninsured get medical care.
I wonder if Rep. Paul has ever thought about how much health care costs have gone up since the early ’60s, and what impact that might have on the ability of people (and their churches) to pay for them..
He didnt’ even consider the fact that the only reason his hospital could afford to treat poor patients was the existence of health insurance for the rest of them.
Health insurance, which until World War II only a handful of Americans could even own, much less afford. Healthcare was a pay-as-you-go system and people died under it in droves. Just ask the victims of the Spanish Flu of 1918.
Health insurance, which grew out of FDR’s insistence that employers provide disability insurance.
So even in the 1960s, health insurance was a quasi-government program.
Why, isn’t that what’s being asked in a society where the only place you should expect help is from family, friends, and church members.
If you read my entire comment, you’ll notice I put a disclaimer on it at the end.
Since the threading is borked, FYI I’m quoting Ian, wherever this appears.
You’re thinking of church in the wrong way. For the low-tax / de facto (and de jure) dominionist crowd, Christianity is a means of social control. So all social services should be handled by churches who can sort out the deserving and undeserving cases and evangelize by punishment and shaming. The problem with government provision of social services is that it’s not sufficiently morally strict.
This becomes very clear if you notice the complaints of this crowd when churches are taking government money (i.e., everyone’s money) and are required not to discriminate against some people. They HATE THAT. The church as a mechanism of social control means that churches’ morality is an appropriate filter (indeed, the only correct filter) for the availability of social services, NO MATTER WHO IS PAYING.
Because:
1. He doesn’t say anything about getting rid of insurance for everyone, just non-state entities stepping into the gaps, not the state.
2. No health care system operates on the basis of being able to pay for everyone if everyone got sick at once. They approximate the risk and save up accordingly. Presumably, the idea is that enough disposable savings would be built up amongst the community to pay for such things.
I think a lot of people underestimate the degree in which welfare programs propogate callousness.
People begin to swap out their more natural moral notions for legal abstract ones. “I help my neighbors” turn into “I pay my taxes.” There are certainly problems with completely private provision of health care, but I am not entirely sure selfishness is one of them.
Why, isn’t that what’s being asked in a society where the only place you should expect help is from family, friends, and church members.
Help me out. I thought that in the moral universe of the great philosopher after whom Ron Paul named his son, you shouldn’t “expect help” from anyone. “Expecting help” is the mark of a parasite.
Maybe by the 5th or 6th debate the Republicans will be ready to drop all this “friends & family” bullshit and let loose with the full-throated chant they’ve been holding back for so long: “TOO FUCKING BAD! TOO FUCKING BAD!”
Health insurance, which grew out of FDR’s insistence that employers provide disability insurance.
Not true. Health insurance grew out of wage controls during WW2.
Health insurance, which grew out of FDR’s insistence that employers provide disability insurance.
This is not actually true. Health insurance grew out of wage controls during WW2.
[link removed to get post thru]
“I help my neighbors” turn into “I pay my taxes.”
And, especially in a nation where residence is highly stratified by income, that actually works a whole lot better.
I think a lot of people use welfare programs as an excuse for their callousness.
Why is it that there aren’t any private charity foundations to help the poor named after libertarian icons, if private charity replacing government programs is something they believe in so strongly?
Could it be because the whole line of argument is just an excuse?
FTW!
Malaclypse: You know, I actually have seen churches run spaghetti dinner fundraisers for sick people.
So have I, and you know what else? It was for one family that was hard-hit, and it was a one-time fundraiser to pay some hospital bills. I can’t see it being used every time anyone in the church needed to use medical care.
I think a lot of people you assign an inherent callousness to would turn out to be really decent people outside the realm of political arguments.
I also think the word “excuse” has a meaning that you aren’t quite incorporating into your thought process. Excuses are justifications, both to ourselves and others. If we remove an excuse, we are removing justification, and if the justification is gone, it should stand to reason that the callous activity would decrease.
Of course it’s all an effing excuse. The old “if you cut my taxes I’ll hire more people and give more to charity” bullshit has been tried for thirty years. There is no proof yet that with the steady cuts in personal and corporate income taxes that there is some drop in unemployment, poverty or homelessness.
It’s actually the reverse. We have more homeless people than ever. More people in poverty and more folks without decent jobs or jobs at all.
These are people that have been butthurt since kindergarten when they found out that other kids would get cupcakes too on their birthday. They do not want to share with anybody.
Well, let’s see. Libertarians complain about spending money on “welfare” and social services that benefit the poor.
One explanation is that they want private replacements for these services.
The other is that libertarianism is a selfish and greedy philosophy; that they just don’t want to pay taxes and don’t care about other people.
I’d say door #2 is closer to the stated philosophy of Rand, etc. and a lot closer to the truth.
I can’t see it being used every time anyone in the church needed to use medical care
That was my (badly expressed) point. I can’t imagine a less rational way of paying for necessities.
What is unfair about expecting people to own up to the logical conclusion of their beliefs?
Hard to tell with the screwed-up comment sequence… but I think the target of Peter’s question was the complaint that Ron Paul was being asked Gotcha questions, i.e. unfairly expected to own up to the logical conclusion of his beliefs.
Actually, Paul said no.
Paul lied, then.