Hypocritic Oath: First Do Harm

I try hard to love my country, but damn it’s hard when Americans seem to be the most ignorant people on the planet and they elect liars and demagogues who harm the most basic interest any person has – personal health.

Here is who I am talking about:

Republican Rep. Brian Bilbray, of San Diego is asked about the verbal thuggery his party is fomenting at town hall meetings held by Democratic lawmakers and says this “fear” and “paranoia” is the reason why health care reform should not be rushed through Congress. Until two weeks ago, when the Republican Party and its paid cheerleaders, decided to spew lies, frighten the elderly to death and stand silently by their henchmen disrupt democracy, no one at all had any fury at all about this legislation. So, maybe Mr. Bilbray should have been asked by the wimps on MSNBC who was spreading the fear and paranoia?

We know who they are. They are the four horsepersons of the Apocalypse. Their names are Gingrich, Palin, Limbaugh and Shirley. The last one is Craigon J. Shirley, whom I met fairly pleasantly about 25-30 years ago when he was a young radical bomb thrower. He is a p.r. operative for the rightest of the right wing. He is beyond conservative, although to call someone a verbal stormtrooper would not advance any argument.

He was behind the infamous and racist Willie Horton ad on behalf of George H. W. Bush and behind this ad now appearing wherever ignorance and hatred are a matchstick away from open violence.

As for the other well known hypocrites, we know who they are. Thanks to Rachel Maddow of MSNBC , we learn that Limbaugh, who is calling health care supporters pro-Nazi, actually has been paid to promote the living wills he and others now claim are a Democratic plot to kill the elderly.

Also, thanks to Maddow and others, we learn that Sarah Palin signed a proclamation during her brief governorship favoring living wills. And Newt Gingrich, who has called Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor a racist and the Obama health care plan Naziistic, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post earlier this year calling for – you guessed it – living wills as part of the Medicare program. So Limbaugh, Palin and Gingrich were for "death panels" before they were against them.

And then there is that cowardly little hog farmer Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the chief Republican negotiator on health care legislation, who has been pretending to be bipartisan and who President Obama naively believes is a moderate.

Grassley doesn’t have town hall meetings; he has pig sty meetings, and this week, while having led America to believe he was delaying action in Washington to improve the bill, he was telling his rube electorate that he opposes “pulling the plug on Grandma” (which is not in any bill) and that he is to be lauded for “putting my finger in the dike.”

Meaning he never had any intention of getting health care reform legislation at all, much less improving it. The next time Iowa is flooded or hit by tornados, Obama ought to put his finger in the dike of disaster assistance.

Why do I call the American people stupid? Aside from the foregoing, consider the following, courtesy of Bill Maher.

• About one-third of the American people – Fox News viewers – believe that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks.
• A majority of Republicans and majority of southerners do not know whether President Obama is American.
• A majority of Americans cannot name their member of Congress.
• Two-thirds cannot identify Roe v. Wade and two-thirds do not know what the Food and Drug Administration does.
• A near majority of Americans believe God created mankind pretty much as it exists now.
• A majority believes U.S. foreign aid is about 25 times higher as a percentage of the budget than it really is.
• 18 percent believe the sun revolves around the earth.
• Half don’t know that Judaism preceded Christianity.

And that, my fellow Americans, is why I believe this country deserves what it elects. Fortunately, I will be dead (and I have a living will) before this country collapses from sheer ignorance.