Lincoln Mitchell’s Disingenuous Huffington Post on Healthcare

On Huffington Post, Lincoln Mitchell bills himself as the “Assistant Professor in the Practice of International Politics” at Columbia University but I think he’s better suited to a job as a minion in a ministry of truth in some Orwellian dystopian fantasy novel. In any case, his latest screed on the evilness of evil Republicans and their Nazi-like attack on those peace-loving, kind, and pure Obamacare policies certainly serves as a perfect sample of his propensity to propagandize. Truth be damned because here comes Linc Mitchell to the rescue of Obamacre.

In his HuffPo piece Mitchell attacks anyone that opposes Obamacare casting them as evil monsters yet in this perfect example of propaganda offers not a shred of proof or a single example to prove out his claims of the evil machinations of anti-Obamacare protesters. In his sycophantic support of Obama he makes all sorts of charges about the motives and organizations supposedly behind the healthcare townhall protests yet offers nothing to connect the dots. He just says it’s so and moves on as if it is all a matter of obvious fact.

Mr. Mitchell also makes several pronouncements about the kindness and soft-spoken nature of the American left and makes to compare their supposedly more intelligent and mature form of debate to that of those loud, crass Republicans. Again, he simply states this nonsense as it if is true regardless of the last 100 years of loud, crass liberal riots, bombings, murders, and protests that prove his claims an outright lie.

It is amusing to me that extremist lefties like this Mitchell fellow are attempting to portray themselves as the even-tempered side of the argument when the history of the left in America is so filled with hatred and violence. These propagandists are sitting in faux wide-eyed shock as conservatives and Republicans are finally, practically for the first time since the birth of the party over 100 years ago, getting passionate about politics. (If you’ll remember, anti-slavery sentiment served as the imputes to start the GOP in the 1850s)

Any look at American history will see repeated examples of left wing violence. In 1910, for instance, union thugs went on a nation wide bombing spree that left many dead. And let us not forget the many race riots started by the unhinged left during the counter culture years, nor the many acts of arson perpetrated by animal rights nuts today, or the property destruction by the lefty anti-WTO protests. For more lefty ties to political violence we have but to recall that unions have been assaulting people for generations not to mention that three of our four presidential assassins were associated with leftist groups and ideologies.

And what of right wing groups? Well, there is little history of violence by comparison.

Now as it happens, I agree with Mitchell’s second paragraph.

This is unfortunate because health care reform is long overdue. A more efficient system that insures more people, simplifies the health care process, brings costs down and creates rational incentives for health care providers, health care seekers and everybody else would be of great value to the entire country. The creation of such a system would be very difficult, and perhaps not fully possible, but it should be the goal of Obama’s policy.

Certainly it would be great to have all those wonderful reforms that Mitchell waxes eloquent about. Of course, the problem is that not one of the bills currently wafting through Congress like a bad odor achieves any of these worthy goals.

But that is about the last sensible thing Mitchell says in his HuffyPo blather because he then goes on to attack those protesting Obamacare as but puppets of evil, shadowy conservative groups.

Moreover, any chance of a serious debate about how to balance competing needs and political realities has been shouted down. Because the anti-health care reform interests, in collaboration with broader right wing organizations, have invested in scare tactics, rumor mongering and fear to the preclusion of negotiation, communication or compromise, the Democratic health care bill will probably not be as inclusive as many of us would like; and a major progressive goal of more than half a century will still be unmet.

Sadly, Mitchell utterly discounts the real and wide anger felt by millions of common citizens deciding it is merely ginned up by mysterious forces. Yet does Mitchell name any of these shadowy “broader right wing organizations” that have stolen the debate from the fair-minded? Nope. He just states it as fact and moves on.

Also, notice that Mitchell uses his propagandist’s art to present the left as those interested in “negotiation, communication and compromise.” So can we for just a moment visit the sort of “compromise” that his leftists have offered?

How about when Obama said that he wants his opponents to shut up as he did on Aug 7 ? Is that the spirit of “compromise” we should emulate? Or how about when Speaker of the House Pelosi said that she doesn’t care what opponents think on healthcare because she has the votes to do what she wants to do? Or when she said any opposition to her rule is “un-American”? Or how about the fact that many on Mitchell’s extreme left side of the aisle are asking why they even need to have any bi-partisan effort at all? Again, is this the spirit of “compromise” that Mitchell claims is coming out of his side of the aisle? If so, it just doesn’t feel all that compromisey to me. How ’bout you?

Amusingly, Mitchell next goes into a spasm of despair over the lack of hope-n-change that Obama claimed he wanted to institute once he triumphantly entered the White House. Why, the wonderfulness of hope-n-change is all doomed because of the evil status quo Republicans that refuse to let the new day dawn. Of course, the propaganda here comes in when Mitchell simply states as a fact that Obama is even trying for all that hope-n-changieness in the first place.

Mitchell ignores, for instance the fact that Obama has thus far lied about transparency, lied about excluding lobbyists, lied about stopping many of Bush’s war policies, and lied about eliminating the usage of signing statements just to name a very few of the hope-n-change promises that Obama has broken since he took the oath of office. And not one of these things have been opposed or stopped by any status quo Republicans. They are all, each and every one, wholly in Obama’s power to affect. But he has not done so.

Yet, Mitchell characterizes Obama’s failures as all the fault of those nasty, brutish Republicans… yes those same Republicans that are in such a minority that their votes hardly count for anything. Conveniently for his blame-the-GOP argument, Mitchell ignores all these facts.

Fittingly, Mitchell saves his worst lies for his ultimate paragraph.

The health care debate so far has clearly shown that Obama has brought change to Washington. Before Obama was president, major media figures did not compare the president’s administration to Nazi’s, opponents of the president’s policies and once and perhaps future leaders of major political parties did not suggest that the president was going to establish death panels, and elected officials of the party out of power sought to calm, not stoke, the noisiest and most radical opponents of the president. These changes are not the fault of the president, but speak to the extent to which the president’s opponents will go, and their willingness to use increasingly outrageous tactics, to oppose the president. Seven months into the Obama presidency the Republicans’ biggest, and perhaps only, success has been drowning the optimism from earlier in the year in a pool of red baiting, misinformation, comparisons to Nazis and intimidation. Defeating Obama on health care will be a big step towards making this Republican success permanent.

You just have to laugh at this claim that no one compared the Bush administration to Nazis and that such a calumny is all new only to Obama. Can anyone deny that all we heard the last 8 years was “Bushitler” this and “Dearth Cheney” that? All one need do is type Hitler and Bush into a search engine and many thousands of hits from the DailyKos, MSNBC, CNN and any manner of left wing blogs and websites will disabuse you of any notion that no one ever called Bush a Nazi. A recent story even reminds us of how badly leftists treated President Bush during his tenure.

Mitchell also seems to have forgotten that high placed Democrats repeatedly fanned the far left’s fury during Bush’s presidency. Did Mitchell forget when the number two Senate Democrat, Dick “Turbin” Durbin, compared American troops to Nazis? Or, how about when Al Gore screamed at the top of his lungs that Bush “betrayed this country“? Did our pal Linc forget those bits of political theater?

The simple fact of the matter is that Lincoln Mitchell is an out and out propagandist. He makes statements that he knows to be untrue, he sets up straw men arguments that he happily batters down for his Obammessiah, and he makes no efforts at all to prove his case with any actual facts, merely stating his propagandistic opinion as fact.

And then he wonders why Obamacare is starting to lose the argument?

Unfortunately, there isn’t much to see on Huffington Post that is any different than the nonsense offered by Linc Mitchell. In fact, his is pretty tame by comparison to the left wing hate so often on display there.

(Cross posted at HealthcareHorseRace.com.)

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