Geezers in Space

Remember a few days ago I mentioned the FreedomWorks plan to get young people to burn their Obamacare cards? And I said this sounded like a plan only a bunch of hopeless geezers would come up with? Well, if you want to see the damnfool thing, here it is.

Note the part on the page where it says, “If 3 million Americans refuse to obey this unconstitutional mandate, ObamaCare falls apart for good.” Um, didn’t the SCOTUS say the mandate is constitutional last year, fellas?

As Stephen Colbert notes in the clip below, there is actually no such thing as an Obamacard card, so you’ll have to print it, trim it, and laminate it yourself. But the design is based on Vietnam-era draft cards. Really.

While the military has draft cards, the Affordable Care Act does not. Instead, FreedomWorks took an image of the Vietnam draft cards and grafted the word “Obamacare” to the top. The hope is that students will film themselves burning these cards and upload the videos online.

Would today’s students really do that? Really?

As Joan McCarter says, “nothing says Freedom! like spending hours in the emergency room waiting to see a doctor for the burn you got from torching a fake Obamacare card.”

Not to be outdone by FreedomWorks, the Heritage Foudation is putting “clever” GIFs on Buzzfeed to appeal to the young folks. Judging by the reactions left on the page, this effort is what is called a “fail.”

The plan amounts to persuading younger and healthier people to deny themselves medical coverage so that everyone else’s health insurance is more expensive. Jonathan Cohn explains why this is not likely to work.

See also Timothy Egan, “Saboteurs in the Potato Salad“:

Just now, a cell of several hundred people has been dispatched into the American summer, to picnics, town halls, radio stations, hospitals and Little League playing fields, with a mission to derail the economic recovery and drum up support for sabotaging federal law. They’re not terrorists, nor are they agents of a foreign government. This is your United States Congress, the Republican House, on recess for the next five weeks.

They even have a master plan, a 31-page kit put together by the House Republican Conference, for every member to follow while back home with the folks. It’s called “Fighting Washington for all Americans,” and includes a prototype op-ed piece, with a political version of the line usually reserved for dumping lovers: “This isn’t about me. It’s about you.”

Here’s a sample suggestion, from Page 28, of how to stage a phony public meeting with business owners:

“Confirm the theme(s) prior to the event and make sure the participants will be 100 percent on message. (Note: while they do not have to be Republicans, they need to be able to discuss the negative effects of Obamacare on their employees.)”

And what if I have a child with cancer, and the insurance company plans to dump him if Republicans stop Obamacare in its tracks? Can I attend? Or what if I’m counting on buying into the new health care exchanges in my state, saving hundreds of dollars on my insurance bill?

The kit has an answer: planting supporters, with prescreened softball questions, will ensure that such things never get asked. More important, this tactic will assure that any meeting with the dreaded public will go “in the direction that is most beneficial to the member,” as the blueprint states.

I thought this wasn’t about you.

The last word goes to Professor Krugman:

In the short run the point is that Republican leaders are about to reap the whirlwind, because they haven’t had the courage to tell the base that Obamacare is here to stay, that the sequester is in fact intolerable, and that in general they have at least for now lost the war over the shape of American society. As a result, we’re looking at many drama-filled months, with a high probability of government shutdowns and even debt defaults.

Over the longer run the point is that one of America’s two major political parties has basically gone off the deep end; policy content aside, a sane party doesn’t hold dozens of votes declaring its intention to repeal a law that everyone knows will stay on the books regardless. And since that party continues to hold substantial blocking power, we are looking at a country that’s increasingly ungovernable.

The trouble is that it’s hard to give this issue anything like the amount of coverage it deserves on substantive grounds without repeating oneself. So I do try to mix it up. But neither you nor I should forget that the madness of the GOP is the central issue of our time.

Madness and chronic geezertude.

12 thoughts on “Geezers in Space

  1. Freedom Works is just harvesting e-Mail addresses. Once the rubes join on to the cause they’re gonna find their e-Mail accounts bombarded with offers for penis extenders, barnyard animal action, and every conspiracy scam solicitation under the sun.

  2. Draft card burners from the sixties! I remember them! I was good friends with all twelve of them.

  3. Well, I’ve been placed on a couple such mailing lists by someone who no doubt did it in an attempt to piss me off — not provide the amusement I actually receive. I can’t report any barnyard hijinks, extended or not. But I can say that spam mail for the odd mixture of useless survivalist products, dubious nutritional supplements, investment scams, and homeschool supplies certainly suggests more eclectic tastes — all bad — than I expected.

  4. PipSqueaker of the House, John “OrangeYouAsorryEscuseForAman” Boehner recently said of the Congress, “We ought to be judged on how many laws we repeal.”
    Ok, now, thank about that.
    Isn’t that the most stunning disconnect you’re ever heard, between what the Constitution says is the Congresses job, and what the PipSqueaker say he hopes to accomplish.

    That’s right up there with what Mayor Richard Daley said during the riotous 1968 Democratic National Convention:
    “The police are not here to create disorder. The police are here to preserve disorder.”
    Both are telling statements – and damning ones.

    So, PipSqueaker, you want to be judged on how many laws you repeal?
    Well, LOL!!!
    You SUCK at that, too!

    Democrats who live in Red districts and states should go to their Congressperson’s and Senator’s home offices, and MOCK them.
    Tell them what miserable excuses for politicians they are – because these inept assclowns even FAIL AT FAILING.
    MOCK THEM!!!

    Over the last 40+ years, the Republican Party has done far more damage than all of the “Fifth Columnists” they kept warning us about during the Cold War, could have imagined in their wildest dreams.
    It has done more damage that all of the Dirty F*cking Hippies could have dreamed of when they were tripping.
    And they are doing exactly what Osama bin Laden wanted – they’re helping to create immense economic problems in this country.

    And all of that is not by accident. They intend to do what they’ve done, and lust to do more, and worse.
    They want to repeal the entire 20th Century – and probably the latter half of the 19th, as well.

    While I joke about mocking them, I laugh at them at my own peril. We all do.

    As we speak, they are doing untold damage on the state level.
    Look at what the Republicans have done in just a few short months in NC – they’re repealing all of the things that once separated NC from its inbred backwards cousin, SC.

    And they are doing the same things in almost all of the states that have a Republican governor, and a Republican state legislature.

    Please realized that NC is the blueprint for what the next Republican President will do if s/he has a Republican Congress.
    Unless the Republican Party changes dramatically in the near future, we cannot afford to let that to happen.

    We non-Conservatives will have to spend the rest of our lives in GOTV efforts – especially after how CJ Robert’s SC decided on the VRA.
    We can’t falter, or the country will fall.

  5. When you wrote the earlier post about the plan to burn ObamaCare cards, I really didn’t believe at the time, that it was a deliberate attempt on the part of conservatives to draw a parallel with what the lady in the Colbert video called “big government” VietNam era draft cards. I thought you were just projecting your own memory of the 1960s into something that’s two generations removed, which nearly everyone has forgotten about or was too young to have lived through. Nobody could be that stupid. It seemed like a goofy idea out of high school. Well, you were right, and I learned something today: Never underestimate how stupid conservatives are, especially when they try to be cool.

    @Dolores Stroke – great rebuttal.

  6. I love how you don’t have to be a Republican to go to their events, but you do have to hate ObamaCare and want to tear down the federal government.

  7. I’ll burn my AARP card if I find out that Obamacare doesn’t cover the cost of my Depends.

    Power to the people!

  8. The number of people actually against Obamacare outside the DC circular pundit jerkery must be vanishingly small. I’m a self-employed 50- something dude, and I fully expect ACA to SAVE ME MONEY.

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