Sporadic

Let’s talk about the Tea Party and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. I need to understand why folks don’t like it.

I have,  throughout the past, made my political leanings clear. I am so far left that you can’t see me from the middle. I know this.

For godsakes I supported Kerry.*

So yes, I know what you’re thinking- of course he supports something that President Obama supports. And yes, I probably would, however….

Here’ the thing I would love to have someone explain for me:

Why is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act or “ObamaCare”** bad?

I like to understand the arguments for and against something. I want to at least know that I understand the point that someone else is making before I decide that they’re wrong. As far as this goes I don’t even understand what the fake reasons are so I can understand the real reasons.

Example:

Issue: Off Shore Drilling laws

Fake Reason: We need to do more off shore drilling. If we hem the oil companies in by making them subscribe to overly protective environmental laws the oil companies won’t be able to make profits and therefore won’t drill. This will mean we have to get all our oil from terrorists and gas will get really expensive.

Real Reason: Big oil is making record profits and can spread that money around to politicians.

So, back to health care.  I need to know both real and fake. I hear this whole “death panel” argument, but that’s a load of hooey. There’s also the “it’s gonna cost us money” argument but yesterday during the supreme court hearings the lawyer against the health care act admitted that most of the cost of the health act would be from people who already qualify for government health benefits actually signing up for them.  This comprised 95% of the expense calculated by the state of Florida.

How is someone signing up for something that they are already allowed to have bad? That’s like Kellogg’s saying that they had too many expenses because everyone actually clipped out the coupon for frosted flakes and used it.

Also I don’t know the real reasons. Is there money that Insurance companies will lose? Where is the funding coming from? Why is the right against it?

I found this article, but not only is it poorly written and unnecessarily confusing, I didn’t know any more at the end.

So seriously, if you can explain either the real or the fake reasons, please comment below. I won’t delete anything that’s reasonable (and lacking in  swearwords) and maybe it’ll help me make some sense or what’s going on.

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*And there was never a blander more unelectable presidential candidate from Mass who wasn’t Mike Dukasis

** Such an idiotic rebranding

*** Other links, HealthCare and women

Just a quick follow up to my last post. I got this in my email today and it pretty much sums up Tea Bagger Beliefs:

Here’s my favorite part… Culture: Constitution and Bill of Rights follows the Religion: Christian. Maybe they ought to check out the third thing on the Bill of rights?

http://www.constitution.org/billofr_.htm

Bizarre! It’s like they’re trying to prove me right.

BTW if you’re like me, any chance to use the tags “tea bag” and “nut job” on the same post makes you giggle

I was running yesterday and I was also thinking about the Tea Party.

I am trying to understand why they exist. It makes no sense to me that people from lower middle and middle class would support politics that actually affects them in a negative way. The great majority of people that self identify Tea Bagger, are folks that are not of a wealth class that benefits from any of the tax cuts that are being put forth by the party they identify with. I think we have an issue of nuanced hate and fear of change. To understand this I think we have to compare historically to modern times.

So let’s start by painting the whole room “President Obama is bad and isn’t doing the right stuff” colored. That way all the conversation we have going forward can be in the President Obama’s bad room. I imagine that the room is sort of Robin’s egg blue but maybe the tea baggers would say the room has been painted black.* It’s important to recognize that for what I consider largely irrational reasons the entire right side of the political spectrum has decided that President Obama is to be handled by digging in their heels and refusing even the most basic of compromise. If the President declared that he was for kittens the Right might very well put out a bill to have all kittens catapulted** into the sun.

Now into this freshly painted room let’s put three tables. A table of the past, a table of the present and a table of the future. Let’s start by sitting down at the table of the past.

The folks in the Tea Party leadership space are all in the late 40’s and early 50’s, which means they all grew up in the era of the cold war. The cold war was easy to understand: All of our enemies were communists and all Russians were communists. All you had to do was be afraid of foreigners who weren’t either British or Canadian and you were good to go.

The cold war, graphed

The thing about the world today is that we now have the relationships switched. All the people who used to hate the larger group and know that they had everything covered now have to understand more complex interactions.Let’s more over to the table of the present.

All terrorists are Muslim but not all Muslims are terrorists. In fact it’s a tiny, tiny sliver of the larger group. Now instead of hating an entire people, the Tea Party has to hate just  .0001% of a group.  That’s hard to understand, and frankly the folks in the tea party aren’t really used to working with nuance. These are more broad stroke brains**.

The Dangerous dot

So the problem is there. People who are used to hating others because of the language, religion, the color of skin or what-have-you, now have to understand that here’s a huge population of people who are smart, decent, friendly, hard working and generally pleasant have a tiny subset of lunatics. Those lunatics who are out to get us who are a very small number (globally) are the people to be hated and not “all brown people”.

To get an understanding of how this might work in another subset, what about we show the group that say Timothy McVeigh came from. Who were they? Oh right Americans. Oh and subset of that: right wing jingoistic Americans… the self same place that the Tea Baggers live in. Now come over here and take a seat at the table of the future.

Let’s also take a look at the room we’re in. Whoa that’s a funny paint job. Let’s also look at the state that the government wants us to live in. Why do republicans insist that President Obama is wrong? What’s he done that is wrong? Why was the thing that people said about him during the campaign “He’s a Muslim” viewed as a bad thing (just to be clear he’s not)? Well because we need a big room to hate. We can’t just hate the people who are out to get us, we also have to hate anyone who looks like them. So if you aren’t white, christian and male… you’re up to no good. President Obama was missing one of those.***

Here’s what I really don’t get: How come President Bush, who really did lie and cheat and screw stuff up, gets a free pass and President Obama, who has tried to save the economy the Bush screwed up, get us out of the war Bush lied to get us into and give the poorest people a chance to have health care, doesn’t.

I was about to say something about how why do people support politicians who vote differently than their economic bracket (i.e. vote for republicans who are shopping for tax cuts for people who make 90% more than you do) but then I realized: I want programs for the poor and I do well for myself. I don’t believe in cutting social services. But really, I should be a supporter of screwing the poor and letting them figure out what to do on their own.

Damn you compassion!

Anyway. So that’s what I came up with. I think the Tea Baggers just don’t understand nuanced hate.  It’s why they are so excited about the Sept 11 anniversary. It brings them back to a happy time when they could hate people because of the color of their skin or where they came from. Sorry to tell you, Baggers: This century we have to hate people for the stuff they say or do!****

Stupid Russians! Stupid Arms Race for destroying a perfectly good villain!

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* Hello Irony

** See what I did there? Kitten? Cat-apult? Cat?

***And maybe not the smartest bulbs either- looking at you Mrs Palin.

****Guess which!

***** I always said that I didn’t understand racism because there were so many really good reasons to hate people on an individual level that it seems pointless to group them.

***** Thank you to This is Indexed for the stolen Venn diagram idea*