How DARE Anyone Protest This Bill!

In the days before the vote on the allegedly "historic" Obamacare bill in the House of Representatives, recalcitrant Democrats were receiving threats overt and covert from constituents, unions, and others. A number of them had to deal with obscenity-laden threats from Rahm Emmanuel, courtesy of the Obama White House.

However, such actions were not extremism. No, they were statesmanship, or at least in the Wonderland inhabited by the likes of Paul Krugman.

However, whatever rumors or even lies about the protests of those who were against this monstrosity of a bill are being told, Krugman is there to repeat them, and he does so again in his column today, "Going to Extreme."

Before taking on today's missive, I want to deal with a Big Lie that Krugman was helping to spread. Remember the supposed screaming of the "N-word" at black members of Congress last week? Krugman and all of the others in the media made hay of it. However, it turns out that the account was a fabrication, made up by a reporter from the McClatchy newspaper chain.

(In case you are not familiar with the leftist McClatchy chain, one of its newspapers, the News & Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina, started off the infamous Duke Lacrosse Hoax with a fabricated account written by a female reporter who now works for a Marxist publication. More than any other media outlet, the McClatchy chain was responsible for this patently-false hoax and subsequent attempted frame of three young men by the prosecution and police of Durham. That McClatchy would promote another Big Lie does not surprise me in the least.)

That it turns out that no one -- not one person -- has been able to pick up any of those supposed slurs on the numerous videos made of that moment. This was a fabrication, pure and simple, yet Krugman gleefully jumped on it because it was "proof" that anyone who opposed Obamacare is a racist.

Ironically, Krugman's employer put a correction in his "Fear Strikes Out" column because Krugman had falsely claimed that Newt Gingrich was saying that "civil rights" damaged the Democratic Party. So, Krugman himself is not above promoting fabrications when it suits him. (Of course, Keynesian economics is a fabrication, but that is a discussion for another time and post.)

So, in today's column, we read more of the same:

But back to the main theme. What has been really striking has been the eliminationist rhetoric of the G.O.P., coming not from some radical fringe but from the party’s leaders. John Boehner, the House minority leader, declared that the passage of health reform was “Armageddon.” The Republican National Committee put out a fund-raising appeal that included a picture of Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, surrounded by flames, while the committee’s chairman declared that it was time to put Ms. Pelosi on “the firing line.” And Sarah Palin put out a map literally putting Democratic lawmakers in the cross hairs of a rifle sight.

All of this goes far beyond politics as usual. Democrats had a lot of harsh things to say about former President George W. Bush — but you’ll search in vain for anything comparably menacing, anything that even hinted at an appeal to violence, from members of Congress, let alone senior party officials.

So, we are back to the same partisan vitriol: We Democrats are nice people, those Republicans are a bunch of violent kooks. Now, to me, both parties are full of people who have advocated violence against Americans and much of the rest of the world, and currently are carrying out those threats at home and abroad.

Krugman then makes this astonishing claim:

Mr. Obama seems to have sincerely believed that he would face a different reception. And he made a real try at bipartisanship, nearly losing his chance at health reform by frittering away months in a vain attempt to get a few Republicans on board. At this point, however, it’s clear that any Democratic president will face total opposition from a Republican Party that is completely dominated by right-wing extremists.

For today’s G.O.P. is, fully and finally, the party of Ronald Reagan — not Reagan the pragmatic politician, who could and did strike deals with Democrats, but Reagan the antigovernment fanatic, who warned that Medicare would destroy American freedom. It’s a party that sees modest efforts to improve Americans’ economic and health security not merely as unwise, but as monstrous. It’s a party in which paranoid fantasies about the other side — Obama is a socialist, Democrats have totalitarian ambitions — are mainstream. And, as a result, it’s a party that fundamentally doesn’t accept anyone else’s right to govern.

Please. This is a president who made the hyper-partisan Emmanuel his chief of staff, and who made it clear that he had the votes, and he was going to do whatever he pleased. Obama told Republicans that if they were not going to go along with what he wanted, then it didn't matter, anyway. Furthermore, the Democrats quickly have turned these alleged "threats" of which Krugman speaks into fundraising opportunities, which always makes me a bit suspicious. That Krugman tries to paint a picture of a naive, trusting Obama who was stabbed in the back by those mean, nasty, vicious, racist Republicans is junk that at best is saved for the Daily Kos or Media Matters.

Paul Krugman represents the Eastern, secular, urban Democrat who absolutely cannot understand nor tolerate anything other than the culture in which he lives. Should anyone be different, well, that person really needs at best to pay taxes, and bend over and take whatever the Krugman-approved government gives him or her. Any opposition to his ideas can be motivated only by racism, and whatever "ism" he pulls out of his hat.