Someone in Facebook or Google+ posted this article on Friday…
The American Politics of Canadian Health Care
She’s back. Shona Holmes, the Hamilton, Ontario native who became a poster child for the American right wing in 2009 as the debate over health care reform roared to life, is starring in a new Koch Brothers-funded Super PAC ad warning voters about the pitfalls of socialized medicine — and not only that, she’s hanging around the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte all week and available for interviews. Given all the talk about the tidal influx of corporate money into the American electoral process since the Citizens United decision, if the best spokesperson the Kochs can come up with to star in their $27-million fear-mongering campaign against the ACA is an outsider whose complaints about her native land’s health care system have been thoroughly debunked, that’s some pretty weak-ass sauce. Can you imagine the reaction on the right if an Obama-supporting Super PAC ran an ad featuring Canadians demanding higher taxes on the rich? Cries from the Fox News cabal about filthy foreigners tampering with the sacred trust of American elections would be positively deafening.
Now the reason I post this here today is because of the second paragraph – or at least the final two thirds of that paragraph – which reads:
I find the right wing’s approach to attacking programs they don’t like (read: They haven’t figured out a way to make money off) amusing in that it’s always the all-or-nothing gambit. They’re always looking for the insignificant opening into which they can bludgeon the moneyed weight of their angry wedge. A single slip-up, to them, warrants the dismantling of an entire organization — just as the appearance of a couple of bad apples in a malicious, heavily edited, out-of-context amateur video was grounds for taking apart ACORN (the real reason being that ACORN was instrumental in getting a lot of Democratic voters to the polls). It’s as facetious and flimsy a position on which to build an argument as suggesting that if a single brick in the Great Pyramid of Giza cracks, the entire thing might as well be dynamited. But it’s all you have when the only reason you can offer for being against something is that you don’t happen to like it very much.
Don’t you think that this text could have just as easily been written about public education in the United States? Doesn’t it sum up the neo-liberal approach to educational reform and K-12 online learning quite nicely?
