Truth means little to American Media
Republicans, Conservatives, Town Hall Mobs, the Radical Right & Religious Right & health Care Industry Defeat Obama
And given this win they will continue to use the same tactics over other issues
Meanwhile not just liberals and progressives are betrayed but also the American people & they will continue to be betrayed as those in Power Play their Little Games mobilizing Americans to fight against their own interests.
"I also strongly believe that one of the options in the exchange should be a public option in order for us to create some competition for the private insurers to keep them honest," Obama had said in an online town hall on July 1.
But on August 16, 2009 Obama explained in order to defend his dropping of the public Option:
"The public option, whether we have it or we don't have it, is not the entirety of healthcare reform,"... "This is just one sliver of it. One aspect of it. And by the way, it's both the right and the left that have become so fixated on this that they forget everything else."Obama August 16, 2009
See: Obama Picks Fight with Left on Health Reform by Ian Swanson at TheHill, August 17,2009 Via Common Dreams
So have the Republicans and their angry mobs and the Health Industry Lobbyists and their fron groups beaten Obama on real substantial Health Care Reform.
" What's changing as we enter the wild west of information dissemination is that the concept of journalistic integrity has nearly disappeared and concepts like "the truth," and "reality," have become so abstract as to be meaningless. Anyone for some Reality TV?"Schuyler Brown at Huffington Post
"The higher I rose in the company, the more I learned about the tactics insurers use to dump policyholders when they get sick, in order to increase profits and to reward their Wall Street investors. I could not in good conscience continue serving as an industry mouthpiece. And I did not want to be part of yet another industry effort to kill meaningful reform.
... the industry funnels millions of its policyholders' premiums to big public relations firms that provide talking points to conservative talk show hosts, business groups and politicians. (And )... how the PR firms set up front groups, again using your premium dollars and mine, to scare people away from reform."
Quote from Wendell Potter Formerly worked in Health Insurance Public Relations
And Howard Dean chimes in:
Former Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean, a leading figure in the liberal wing of his party, said Monday he doubts there can be meaningful health care reform without a direct government role.
Dean urged the Obama administration to stand by statements made early on in the debate in which it steadfastly insisted that such a public option was indispensable to genuine change, saying that Medicare and the Veterans Administration are "two very good programs that have been around for a long time."
..."You can't really do health reform without it," he said. Dean maintained that the health insurance industry has "put enormous pressure on patients and doctors" in recent years.
He called a direct government role "the entirety of health care reform. It isn't the entirety of insurance reform ... We shouldn't spend $60 billion a year subsidizing the insurance industry."
Howard Dean On Public Option: "You Can't Really Do Health Reform Without It" at Huffington Post,August 17, 2009
This is what Republicans such as Senator Tom Coburn and Town Hall Protest organizers such as Dick Armey call legitimate debate:
"Americans for Prosperity Compares Health Care Reform To Holocaust, Tells Protesters To Put 'Fear Of God' In Members Of Congress" By Brian Beutler - August 7, 2009, at Talking Points Memo(TPM)
During the course of the last week, you may have wondered why anti-health care reform activists are so riled up--what buttons are being pushed by the people encouraging the town hall disruptions.
Well, here's video footage of a Patients First bus tour event in Pueblo, CO, that shines some light on that.
Maddow Battles Dick Armey and Republican Senator Tom Coburn on Meet The Press -August 16, 2009
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Armey says he bears no responsibility for Mobs , Hooliganism and talk about violence
Armey erroneously claims several times that Moveon.org in ads compared President Bush to Hitler
Armey also erroneously claims the Tea Party movement is 100% grass roots which it is not but rather a Republica and conservtive movement begun and orchestrated by well funded organizations on the right.
While Republican Sen Tom Coburn explains that the anger and frustration and over the top rhetoric is genuine and merely a symptoms of a lack of confidence and respect for the current government. The Obama administration Coburn believes has earned such distrust and anger over its policies and therefore deserves to be attacked by the American people.
Coburn tries to wiggle out of the issue of anger, rhetoric and possibility of violence is a result of federal governments out of control in their spending which has been going on for decades .
But one wonders where were these fiscally conservative anti-Big government Republicans and conservative groups when President Bush was in power and running up record deficits while expanding the role of government by way of the Patriot Act spying on the American people or racking up big bills in its unnecessary war in Iraq . Companies such as Halliburton ( Dick Cheney's Company) and Black Water (run by a fanatical Evangelical Christian on a Crusade against Islam) received no bid contracts and there was little or no oversight of these companies .
Where were these Republicans and conservatives when soldiers were sent into battle with inadequate armor or other equipment . Where were they when New Orleans was left abandoned for days and when the clean up has taken years while companies have defrauded the government out of millions while inadequately performing their tasks.
Tea Party patriots website appears to promote rowdiness & violence
Wendell Potter formerly worked in Public Relations for the Health Insurance Industry creating misinformation to boost the profile of the Industry and to spread fear about a government run Medical Care Progrem argues the industry uses various tactics and propaganda techniques to shape public opinion on the issue.
How Insurance Firms Drive Debate by Wendell Potter CNN via CommonDreams August, 17, 2009
It was my job to "promote and defend" the company's reputation and to try to persuade reporters to write positive stories about the industry's ideas on reform. During the last couple of years of my career, however, I became increasingly worried that the high-deductible plans insurers were beginning to push Americans into would force more and more of us into bankruptcy.
The higher I rose in the company, the more I learned about the tactics insurers use to dump policyholders when they get sick, in order to increase profits and to reward their Wall Street investors. I could not in good conscience continue serving as an industry mouthpiece. And I did not want to be part of yet another industry effort to kill meaningful reform.
... the industry funnels millions of its policyholders' premiums to big public relations firms that provide talking points to conservative talk show hosts, business groups and politicians. (And )... how the PR firms set up front groups, again using your premium dollars and mine, to scare people away from reform.
What I'm trying to do as I write and speak out against the insurance industry I was a part of for nearly two decades is to inform Americans that when they hear isolated stories of long waiting times to see doctors in Canada and allegations that care in other systems is rationed by "government bureaucrats," someone associated with the insurance industry wrote the original script.
The industry has been engaging in these kinds of tactics for many years, going back to its successful behind-the-scenes campaign to kill the Clinton reform plan.
...The industry goes to great lengths to keep its involvement in these campaigns hidden from public view. I know from having served on numerous trade group committees and industry-funded front groups, however, that industry leaders are always full partners in developing strategies to derail any reform that might interfere with insurers' ability to increase profits.
So the next time you hear someone warning against a "government takeover" of our health care system, or that the creation of a public health insurance option would send us down the "slippery slope toward socialism," know that someone like I used to be wrote those terms, knowing it might turn many of the very people who would benefit most from meaningful reform into unwitting spokespeople for the industry.
In this article by Eric Boehlert at Media Matters .org we get an indication of how the mainstream media helps to enable the Republican and the conservative Movement's outrageous attacks and the use of misinformation and lies about President Obama and his administration. During the Bush era the mainstream Media was mostly in favor of the Bush Regime's policies and for years refused to question his policies ie on torture and abuse of detainees to the lies and propaganda to support the unnecessary invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Possibly the media fears if Obama is able to investigate the Bush Regime in a diligent manner it would prove how complicit the mainstream media such as the Washington Post. The New York Times, The new Yorker and TV networks were in spreading lies, misinformation and propaganda on behalf of Bush and Cheney and the Republican party.
But they need not fear the Obama administration has in one issue after another become "A Paper Tiger" which represents the gutless and the Status Quo at any cost. There is little chance of such an investigation since Obama has offered the excuse that all these people in government and the Media were acting in "good faith" and therefore should be forgiven or even rewarded for doing their duty even though there is little evidence that these people acted in Good Faith. That of course is the American way to sweep under the rug any past or current criminal or immoral wrong doing on the part of the government except when it comes to tittilating sex scandals which tend to get more prominence that the unecessary killing of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens.
Limbaugh yells "Nazi" (and the press yawns) by Eric Boehlert at Media Matters.org August 11, 2009
The Houston Chronicle editorial page wanted to be absolutely clear: References to Adolf Hitler or Nazis in American politics had no place in the "discourse of the nation," and the crude analogies were "beyond the pale." The practice was "absurd and dangerous."
The editorial page was disgusted by the rhetoric and firmly believed that dredging up the Nazi comparisons desensitized people to the pain and violence that actual Nazis unleashed in the 20th century.
The condemnation was fitting, given the fact that the country's most-listened-to talk radio host, Rush Limbaugh, last week unfurled shocking rhetoric in which he compared the Obama White House to a Nazi organization and even likened Obama to Hitler. ("Adolf Hitler, like Barack Obama, also ruled by dictate.") The outlandish attacks seemed to be a case of Limbaugh playing catch-up to Fox News' Glenn Beck (Limbaugh = Beck Lite?), who had been pounding the noxious Nazi angle for weeks.
...Because here's the catch: That Chronicle editorial I mentioned above wasn't in response to Limbaugh's latest misguided hate maneuver. The scathing editorial was published on January 7, 2004, and came in response to news that two videos submitted to a MoveOn.org advertisement contest had included Hitler imagery in their 30-second attacks on President Bush. (They were just two of the 1,500 clips submitted.) MoveOn never endorsed the efforts or promoted them; the clips simply appeared on MoveOn's crowded contest website. But when news spread about their mere existence, a controversy erupted, and the liberal netroots group quickly pulled the ads, apologized for their inclusion, and denounced the use of Nazi imagery.
Despite that swift action, the Hitler-MoveOn story, fueled by Fox News (see Glenn Greenwald), became a very big deal and gobbled up days' worth of news coverage, coverage that often stressed how unrestrained and irresponsible the liberal blogosphere was (Hitler?!), to the point where the Chronicle weighed in with a stand-alone editorial on the topic.
But fast-forward to today. As Limbaugh envelops himself in Nazi rhetoric, for some reason, the Houston Chronicle's editorial page, along with so many other corporate news outlets, remains silent about the offensive Hitler comparisons. Despite the fact that Limbaugh has not apologized for his comments -- unlike MoveOn in 2004 -- and is continuing to compare the Obama White House and the Democratic Party with Nazis, many in the media don't consider it newsworthy and haven't condemned it. And more important, journalists don't show any signs of believing that the episode tells us anything about the radically unhinged nature of the right-wing media in this country today. That story's just a non-starter. Period.
...After all, if The New York Times is going to prop up Limbaugh as an all-powerful and deeply important figure in American politics, the way the newspaper did last summer with its worshipful Sunday magazine cover story, shouldn't it dutifully chronicle his radical and outrageous rhetoric, too?
Yet the Times in recent days has managed just a sentence or two about Limbaugh's embrace of Nazi analogies. Of course, the Times is not alone in completely downplaying the story. As of today, The Washington Post has not reported one word about Limbaugh's shocking comments. Then again, The Washington Post also gave Beck a pass when he announced that the president of the United States had a "deep-seated hatred of white people" and was a flat-out "racist." At the Post, which obsesses over the intersection of the media and politics, the jaw-dropping attack by Fox News' superstar host wasn't considered newsworthy.
That's correct: Two of the most popular and powerful conservative voices in America have recently called out Obama as a Nazi and a racist. But, sorry, at The Washington Post, that's just not news. Nothing to see here, people. Just keeping moving along.
...So spooked are journalists by decades' worth of "liberal media bias" attacks that they refuse to connect the glaringly obvious dots on display. They refuse to drill down into the rancid undercurrent that's behind the Obama-is-a-Nazi dementia, the town hall mini-mobs that are wreaking havoc across the country, and the bizarre birther conspiracy theory. The three right-wing phenomena are all related, and they all revolve around a runaway hatred of Obama (as well as the federal government), and they're all being fueled by the Noise Machine, especially Fox News and Limbaugh, both of which no longer recognize common decency, let alone journalistic standards.
Yet instead of putting Limbaugh on the receiving end of well-deserved scrutiny and scorn, rather than turning his comments into a political firestorm, the press plays dumb and actually goes out of its way to legitimize the worst offenders of the GOP's hate brigade.
And so that's why we saw ABC invite mini-mob cheerleader Michelle Malkin onto its Sunday morning talk show and sit her across from Pulitzer Prize-winning writers. Because in the eyes of elites at ABC, Malkin, whose job is basically to blog any semi-coherent smear campaign she can cook up, and who told Fox News viewers last week that health care reform "puts a discount on the lives of elderly people," deserves a place at the mainstream table. She's a very serious and important person.
And instead of examining the obviously dangerous implications of somebody like Michael Savage attracting a large and loyal radio audience as he belches out his hatred for women, liberals, gays, Arabs and other minorities, the prestigious New Yorker recently published something of a Savage valentine, portraying him as "weird" and "fun" and just completely misunderstood by liberals who worry too much about Savage's "addictive," jazz-inspired riffs.
Of course, just days after the profile appeared on newsstands, Savage hosted an interview with a delusional leader of the birther movement, and together they hatched a plan to unleash even more mini-mobs to ransack town hall forums and drive the birther message, all in hopes of forcing the president out of office. (Was that the "fun" The New Yorker had in mind when it toasted Savage in its pages?)
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Schuyler Brown at Huffington Post argues that the truth does not matter as much as advertising , Public Relations style propaganda and the use of misinformation, rumor mongering, outright lies and deceit. So in Health Care issue or any other issue the group which can produce the most convincing propaganda and lies is the one that wins as the real truth is drowned out and as the Mainstream Media acts as the conduit for in this case the Right-wing and Health Care Industries agenda and misinformation. In this way it appears Obama will be forced to give in to those defending the status quo because they have the money and influence over the American media to undermine any actions or policy proposals he puts forth for which they do not approve.
" Enter the Golden Age of PR: Exit Reality"
Schuyler Brown at Huffington Post : August 17, 2009
...What's changing as we enter the wild west of information dissemination is that the concept of journalistic integrity has nearly disappeared and concepts like "the truth," and "reality," have become so abstract as to be meaningless. Anyone for some Reality TV?
...As this new age dawns, the onus will shift to the consumer (literally, consumer of information) to know the source of the information he/she is consuming.
Let's all just be aware that the Golden Age of PR will be golden only for those who do the gilding. As the business of PR diversifies, we'll see the fine lines blur. Reality is going to get even more abstract. I'd like to say it doesn't matter, but when the abstractions change PR to spin to propaganda to lies, dear reader, it absolutely does.
and so it goes,
GORD.
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