Divas, Zombies and David Broder

by digby

Think Progress depressingly lays out what may end up being the most pernicious and dangerous Big Lie about the health care reform bill:

Despite the fact that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has concluded that Reid’s bill would reduce the federal budget deficit by $130 billion over the next 10 years, opponents of reform are still trying to paint it as fiscally irresponsible. On the Senate floor on Saturday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) quoted a then-unreleased column by the Washington Post’s David Broder in order to claim that “the experts agree with the public opinion polls that this 2,074-page bill is a budget buster.” But as Ezra Klein, Broder’s colleague at the Washington Post, pointed out, Broder is misreading the CBO ‘s score of the legislation. Broder pointed to a section of the CBO report that says “federal outlays for health care would increase during the 2010-2019 period,” which he claimed means that deficit will increase, not decline. But as Klein notes, “The net increase of $160 billion in the first 10 years is part of CBO’s analysis, not a caveat to it. It doesn’t mean the bill doesn’t cut the deficit, it just means that overall spending is larger before you add revenues into the equation.” On Fox News Sunday yesterday, host Chris Wallace made the same exact mistake as Broder by selectively quoting the same section of the CBO report. As the Wonk Room’s Igor Volsky noted, the last paragraph of the same page that Wallace and Broder quote says that “during the decade following the 10-year budget window, the increases and decreases in the federal budgetary commitment to health care stemming for this legislation would roughly balance out, so that there would be no significant change in the commitment.”

Perhaps this sounds like some arcane inside-the-beltway argument that doesn’t have any salience beyond Capital Hill. Sadly, this isn’t true at all, as David Sirota points out in this post called How the media and the GOP turn lies into zombie lies – a health care case study:

As both Media Matters and the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein show, the lie is now framing the discussion over the Senate version of the health care bill. That’s to be expected – it’s Washington, D.C. after all, the beating heart of the American Idiocracy. But where that standard D.C. lie becomes a zombie lie is at the local level. When a lie starts getting repeated as fact in local news outlets where most average non-Beltway Americans get their news, it quickly becomes a zombie lie. In the extended entry I provide a case study – you have to see it to believe it.

You do. (click here) Sirota lives in Denver and he shows the front page of the Denver Post and a segment of the local news to illustrate just how far this zombie lie has penetrated:

So, if you are the typical non-political junkie who glanced at the front page of the Denver Post, giant red font and a whopping 9 zeroes (for extra effect, of course) misled you to believe that the CBO says the Senate health care bill costs $849 billion – not that the CBO actually says the Senate health care bill will reduce the deficit by $127 billion over 10 years and up to $650 billion over 20 years. Likewise, if you are the typical non-political junkie who caught the evening news on Saturday, you were given at least a little more accurate information – but only in a he-said-he-said way that calls into question the whole numbers. Specifically, you heard only that one guy – David Sirota – claims the bill will reduce the deficit, and that another guy – Colorado Republican Party chairman Dick Wadhams – insists the bill costs $2.5 trillion. You didn’t hear that, in fact, it wasn’t David Sirota who said the bill will reduce the deficit – it was the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office that the Republican Party itself cites as an unquestionably credible source. And you didn’t hear that Dick Wadhams literally made up his $2.5 trillion number out of thin air.

We’re back in “opposiute world” again. Sadly, health care reform has not come to this point because someone suddenly had his consciousness raised about the plight of people who are uninsured. It has come about because certain economic forces have created a market for reform, not the least of which is that both the government and businesses are going to collapse under the strain of the current runaway health care costs. This is happening all over the world, but the US, with its obscene rationing system that only guarantees coverage to the wealthy, the lucky and the elderly is at more peril than the others which have at least devised some controls and have their entire society covered.

Now for those of us who would prefer that our broadly prosperous country stay broadly prosperous and at least somewhat decent rather than become a banana republic, health care reform has been on the agenda for decades, for moral as well as practical reasons. It’s disgusting to live in a country where wealthy people arrogantly complain when they might have to pay a tax for their botox treatments while tens of thousands of their fellow countrymen die each year purely because they lack access to adequate health care. But let’s not kid ourselves that such inequality is the reason we find ourselves on the brink of health care reform. If only.

Of course it’s possible to fix this and there were many roads that made more sense than the ones they chose. The only question has ever been whether they have the political will to take on some of the sacred calves that dominate our society and demand that they not be expected to sacrifice anything for their country because they are so damned special. Indeed they must be treated like Diva sopranos lest they decide to withhold their “talent” in a fit of pique.

And even when they are, what do they do? They call it socialism and create zombie lies that it’s doing exactly the opposite of what it’s actually intended to do — which is cut costs over the long haul, through a whole series of measures including universal coverage. And braindead parrots like David Broder, with no proof whatsoever, believe them because it just “sounds right.” After all, everyone knows that the deficit is the cause of the current economic meltdown and everybody knows that any program the government does will raise the deficit, no matter what the CBO says (unless it says it will raise the deficit in which case it’s true.)

This zombie lie that any reform is going to break the bank is precisely the opposite of what the bill is intended to do, far beyond peripheral things like covering sick people. Indeed, if covering sick people were the only motivation we wouldn’t be where we are today. And in the end the usual suspects will probably have their cake and eat it too — the cost cutting will help their bottom lines but they’ll make political hay out of the horrible socialistic takeover of the system. It’s win win for them. The rest of us, not so much.

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