Cooperation Will Not Come from the Rabid Right

I have previously expressed my unhappiness with President Obama insistence on reaching out to Republicans who will not support any efforts to reform health care delivery for our citizens or to stabilize the continuing economic crises which began during the last administration. While the president aims to fulfill the mandate of the last election, his political opponents have a baser goal - to delay, destroy and create mobs of angry frustrated people - all for the purpose of having President Obama fail. To some extent this is racially motivated but not exclusively. Sometimes the motives of the GOP involve excessive and overpowering partisanship. Whatever the rationale, the president needs to control his wish for cooperation and a "kum ba ya" universality of goodness.

I must backtrack and set the stage. Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Times:

"I am in this race because I don't want to see us spend the next year re-fighting the Washington battles of the 1990s. I don't want to pit Blue America against Red America; I want to lead a United States of America." So declared Barack Obama in November 2007, making the case that Democrats should nominate him, rather than one of his rivals, because he could free the nation from the bitter partisanship of the past.

Some of us were skeptical. A couple of months after Mr. Obama gave that speech, I warned that his vision of a "different kind of politics" was a vain hope, that any Democrat who made it to the White House would face "an unending procession of wild charges and fake scandals, dutifully given credence by major media organizations that somehow can't bring themselves to declare the accusations unequivocally false."

So, how's it going?

Sure enough, President Obama is now facing the same kind of opposition that President Bill Clinton had to deal with: an enraged right that denies the legitimacy of his presidency that eagerly seizes on every wild rumor manufactured by the right-wing media complex.

This opposition cannot be appeased. Some pundits claim that Mr. Obama has polarized the country by following too liberal an agenda. But the truth is that the attacks on the president have no relationship to anything he is actually doing or proposing

The latest wild rumor that has been created, dramatized and used with some success among those who hate President Obama, involves the creation of "death panels" of bureaucrats who would determine which individuals were worthy of life and which should be deemed of such little societal value that they should die.

Sarah Palin wrote on Facebook:

The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's "death panel" so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their "level of productivity in society," whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.

President Obama described this notion as absurd; but he did so in a calm, rational mode. He should have shouted out his scorn, his disgust at the falsehoods and the allegedly competent members of Congress and GOP political leaders who have allowed this nonsense to continue. Where is his rage?

Because it is not just the Rush Limbaughs, the Glenn Becks, the Michael Savages and the rest of the Fox Loonies who have cynically used the "death panel-euthanasia - Obama wants to kill Grandma", some Republicans to whom the president has been looking for cooperation have joined the chanting!

Representative John Boehner, Republican from Ohio, states on his website that

He has challenged Republicans in the 111th Congress to be not just the party of "opposition," but the party of better solutions to the challenges facing the American people.

He is also responsible for this whopper: the House bill "may start us down a treacherous path toward government-encouraged euthanasia." In fact, the House Bill never requires anyone to discuss end-of-lifecare. Rather, the bill ensures medical professionals who do offer this type of counseling at the patient's request are reimbursed for their time, just as they would be for other types of counseling or medical services. Actually this is the same policy that has been in effect for decades - people are encouraged to create a living will to declare personal wishes - except that doctors would be able to bill for such discussions.

Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Ohio, is senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, a man to whom the president had been depending upon for cooperation. He is perfect example of the impossibility of Republican cooperation and a willingness to join in meaningful discussions with the administration. The statement of Senator Grassley

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2xVamHocZk for Senator Grassley's speech and, for the comments of a fellow Senator,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qYBV0M6-c4

It makes no difference to the Palins or Boehners or Grassleys that the government has been suggesting for years that people execute Living Wills so that end-of-life decisions are made by the individual involved. As for the Republican insistence that government have no role in these determinations, have they forgotten the Shiavo situation of several years ago when GOP stalwarts wanted nothing more than to intrude. As a matter of fact, President Bush shortened his vacation to return to Washington to address the issue; he was not similarly moved by warnings that Osama bin Laden was determined to attack the United States or that a hurricane had wiped out an American city.

If one seeks the ultimate irony and hypocrisy, the 2003 Medicare expansion statute, which had support of 204 Republican Representatives and 42 Republican Senators made the following as "covered services": "evaluating the beneficiary's need for pain and symptom management, including the individual's need for hospice care; counseling the beneficiary with respect to end-of-life issues and care options, and advising the beneficiary regarding advanced care planning".

President Obama: get pissed, show emotion; the Loonies will not love you anyway, so push the agenda for which you were elected.