The debate over Barack Obama’s healthcare overhaul/reform/government takeover has been upgraded to “hostile,” according to this New York Times report.
The bitter divisions over an overhaul of the health care system have exploded at town-hall-style meetings over the last few days as members of Congress have been shouted down, hanged in effigy and taunted by crowds. In several cities, noisy demonstrations have led to fistfights, arrests and hospitalizations.
Sounds like all-out warfare to us, and as the feller (anyone from Aeschylus to Rudyard Kipling to 1918 California Sen. Hiram Warren Johnson) says, the first casualty of war is truth.
In this case, though, truth is also the second and third casualty. The most widely publicized information about healthcare legislation in news reports up to now ranges in reliability from little to none.
[Healthcare overhaul/reform/government takeover advertising is a whole nother issue, which the hard-working staff at Campaign Outsider is trying to wrestle into submission for a later post.]
But it’s not just the facts that are questionable in this dustup. The tactics – mostly at town hall meetings – have been downright disgraceful.
On the opposition side we’ve seen or heard about mock tombstones with a Congressman’s name on it, at least one lawmaker hanged in effigy, and a Nazi swastika subbing for the S in a U.S. Senator’s title.
Democrats say the opposition effort is not a grassroots movement, but an Astroturf movement manufactured by the healthcare-industrial complex and the GOP – which is somewhat, but not entirely, true.
Beyond that, the Obama administration is telling the Demroots to fight back, according to the Times report.
“If you get hit, we will punch back twice as hard,” said Jim Messina, the deputy White House chief of staff.
Pronoun agreement issues aside, that sounds like Sean Connery’s Jim Malone in The Untouchables telling Kevin Costner’s Eliot Ness how to bring Al Capone to justice.
You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way!
We’ll see if Pres. Obama remembers his Chicagoroots. Leading indicator: He’s already backstabbed pharmaceutical companies on the deal they thought they had with the White House.
All together now: That’s the Chicago way.
Campaign Outsider 
The ease with which labels such as “Naziism” and “socialism” have attached to the health care debate makes one wonder what they’re teaching in social studies curriculums these days. The level of discourse from tv commentators such as Glenn Beck (who joked about poisoning House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s wine) is depressing and the authenticity of the citizen protests at town hall meetings is questionable. Still, the news media’s failure to examine health care reform seriously (evidenced by the widely held perception fostered by the GOP that our system is fine despite our poor ranking among civilized nations in areas such as infant mortality) and the Obama Administration’s henhouse eagerness to cooperate with insurance companies, pharmaceutical giants, and other foxes to enact legislation and unwillingness to get tough on the “public” component of health care reform are the real culprits.