While reading the Wall Street Journal this morning (courtesy of my hotel) I was appalled, but unsurprised, to read two extremely partisan opinion pieces on Obama’s healthcare proposals and the ‘reaction’ to them.
In a piece entitled “The Health Care Grail”, William McGurk clearly criticizes the White House, who “yesterday unveiled a new White House Web site accusing critics of scaring Americans ‘with half truths and outright lies'”. Unsurprisingly, Mr McGurk makes no mention that this is indeed a valid, and independently substantiated, criticism of the astroturf campaign against healthcare reform. Instead he attempts to make the case that this administration’s healthcare reform proposals are a “Doctrine” and that “the president and his allies see disagreement over health care as less a political dispute than the trampling of sacred doctrine”
Perhaps he fails to see the huge beam in the eye of the GOP — one put there, and maintained, by a health care industry whose ability to make obscene profits is equaled only by their willingness to engage in any tactic to maintain those profits.
Dorothy Rabinowitz, in the same issue, writes another harshly critical opinion piece: “Obama’s Tone-Deaf Health Campaign”. She raises the much-maligned spectre of anti-fascist Obama supporters/Bush opponents during the 2004 campaign “when cadres of organized demonstrators carrying swastika-adorned pictures of George W Bush routinely swarmed about, and packed rallies”. This is a common right-wing meme that has been hugely blown out of all proportion to its occurrence and bears little if no resemblance to reality. She also admonishes the president, that he “shouldn’t worry about the protestors disrupting town-hall meetings. He should worry about the Americans who have been sitting at home listening to him.” I can only assume that she is in complete agreement with the “sentiments” voiced loudly in those meetings.
It is truly wonderful how ‘newspapers’ can provide so many column inches to attacksopinion, while affording zero to rejoinders. But then, this is only ‘opinion’ — it’s not the newspaper making these allegations, is it?
