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Lying liars, etc.
On NPR's Talk of the Nation today, talking about the health care debate, a caller related his experience. His Representative had hosted a town hall meeting to talk about what's actually in the bill that's being debated in the House and field questions and comments from his constituents. The meeting was so well attended that they had to turn people away, but a significant number of the people there had come not to listen, not even to speak, but to shout. Instead of letting the Rep or anyone else speak about health care reform, they were shouting down everything, working just to derail debate. The guest on the show noted that this is a strategy being propogated by the right-wingers on the internet.
The talking heads on the right-wing have been disseminating lie after lie about the Democratic plan; they've fought against it with deceptions of all sorts (the commercial with the Canadian woman talking about how her government's health care failed her, making her wait six months for surgery that she would have died without comes to mind). I'm willing to believe that there are legitimate concerns about the health care bill, that it could be improved, but tactics like these actually suggest the opposite. If the Republicans and their cronies had legitimate beefs with the bill, they shouldn't need to use lies and deception to make their case to the American public, should they?
I saw as well news on The Rachel Maddow Show that a lobbying firm mailed out letters to Democratic congressmen, purporting to be from local minority groups, demanding that their representative vote down climate change legislation. Clever, huh? Have one constituency that supported you essentially threaten not to support you if you side with another constituency that supported you. Too bad they were actually working on behalf of the coal industry. Lies, lies, lies.
Back when the Republicans were in power, they sought to stifle honest debate by calling dissent "unpatriotic" or even "dangerous to national security." Now that they're the minority party, they're working just as hard against debate by spreading disinformation and shouting down their opponents. This disregard for free information and discussion should, on its own, discredit the Republican position irredeemably. They've shown their stripes often enough that they should have zero credibility.
Which is sad, because it's not as though I think the Democrats are infallible. I wish we had honest, well-intentioned critics of the administration, but what we seem to have instead are shills for the entrenched, moneyed elites, utterly lacking in credibility or scruples.