Current Comedy: Less & Moore, More or Less

Well, truth is this week I personally have no regular full-length column for you; somebody else already wrote it for me. On March 31st, AlterNet along with dozens of other liberal sites posted the brilliant and comprehensive "Exposing the Deep Swamp of Republican Hypocrisy -- How a Party Alienated the Nation" by Russell King's (originally posted on Russ' Filtered News) and the man has hogged all of this week's good lines. His article does a superior job of documenting the hypocrisy and hyperbole that so turns the mainstream away from the (not-so-)grand(-seeming-when-they’re-being-led-by-) old (racists) party. In fact King does such a good job I would rather plug his article than write my own.

Line by line King enunciates the problems the rest of America has with the GOP and links to dozens of sources documenting outlandish Republican audacity. Unlike the demon image of Obama they work so hard to create, a person does not have to make crap up about their behavior to hate them. So, to just blatantly appropriate a random stretch of King's massive compendium of recent GOP insults and injuries:

You can’t cry that the health care bill is too long, then cry that it’s too short.

You can’t support the individual mandate for health insurance, then call it unconstitutional when Dems propose it and campaign against your own ideas.

You can’t demand television coverage, then whine about it when you get it.  Repeatedly.

You can’t praise criminal trials in US courts for terror suspects under a Rep president, then call it “treasonous” under a Dem president.

You can’t propose ideas to create jobs, and then work against them when the Dems put your ideas in a bill.

You can’t be both pro-choice and anti-choice.

You can’t damn someone for failing to pay $900 in taxes when you’ve paid nearly $20,000 in IRS fines.

You can’t condemn criticizing the president when US troops are in harm’s way, then attack the president when US troops are in harm’s way , the only difference being the president’s party affiliation (and, by the way, armed conflict does NOT remove our right and our duty as Americans to speak up).

And so on.

If there are conservatives who don't understand why liberals are so antagonistic to your leaders, here's your sign.

Also, there’s this:

Man Most Responsible for Health Care Reform? Michael Moore?

No, i'm not just kidding. On the March 23 episode of Democracy Now with Amy Goodman, two days after the historic vote, celebrity provocateur Michael Moore explained that it was his Northern Michigan coalition of citizens that should take credit for being the straw that broke Bart Stupak's camel's back, swinging the final set of votes over to the yea side in the health care bill battle royale Sunday March 21st. You may recall earlier in the process Stupak (Mich-D) had grabbed his 15 minutes of fame by making a show of hand wringing over potentially hypothetical aborted babies purposefully bought on the public dime and so on, so Stupak stalled the bill.

Then in the final week's push, the ever-sanctimonious Stupak led a group of 8 House Blue Dog Dems in opposing the Health Care Bill, threatening to derail the entire bill and self-inflict a possibly mortal wound in the backpedaling Democratic Party right up till midday Sunday, when Stupak led his crowd to the mic to announce a deal had been struck. The bill passed 220-207, despite purported hypothetical aborted babies potentially on the horizon. Some Stup’ calls Stupak “baby killer,” Bart gets to look all buff and righteous in a round of liberal talk shows, meanwhile the remark along with the other wave of petty violence gets swept under the rug on the right-wing talk shows. The GOP and their lapdog pundits finger Obama as the force that turned the tide. Meanwhile Moore says, no, it was the fat guy from Flint and few thousand of his closest friends.

On Moore's own website the day after the vote, he described the key swing bloc swinging towards the yea column this way in a widely reprinted letter to his supporters: "Our full court press on my congressman, Bart Stupak worked! Hundreds of my neighbors here in his Michigan district spent the weekend organizing thousands of voters to get busy and save the health care bill. We called Stupak's congressional office non-stop and we got thousands of people up here to flood his email box."

True enough, the day before the final vote Moore posted extensive info online explaining to interested citizens how to contact Stupak and his staff throughout his seven district offices and apply pressure.

There is an odd irony that in the end, Michael Moore of all people should emerge as a key player in the final push to pass this health care bill since it is one that he loudly and frequently publicly detested. Unlike GOP leaders whose hatred of the health care bill was, they claimed based its price tag. Odd then that they insisting on rejecting the more cost effective single payer system. Moore, like many liberals, was greatly disappointed the nearly universal concept of universal health care had again been rejected by our ruling class, who insist on profits over people. “We are not to help unless there is money to be made from it,” Moore lamented.

And so do I.

-mikel weisser writes from the left coast of AZ.