I mostly stopped reading the Daily Dish about a month ago when Conor Clarke and Conor Friedersdorf took over for a half-week or so. Suddenly, instead of short diatribes about Sarah Palin and random scatter plots from Pollster.com inexplicably titled “Reality Check”, we were subjected to multi-paragraph treatises on stuff like dating strategies and what it’s really like to live inside the beltway. Who are these dudes anyway? Neither one of them is the guy from Bright Eyes, right? And why does Conor Friedersdorf have a blog on the Daily Beast? I thought you had to be the child of someone famous, like Chris Buckley or Megan McCain, to get that gig. I guess I’d be more charitable if he weren’t writing things like this:
On arriving in Orange County, California, I expected hostility to President Obama’s health-care agenda, especially in my Republican family. But it surprised me to hear my Catholic grandmother say that if health-care reform passes bureaucrats will show up at her door advising euthanasia—and especially to hear my mother, now undergoing chemotherapy, insist that were Obamacare already law it is more likely than not that she’d now be dead.
[….]My grandmother, my mother, and countless other Americans may be misinformed about the particulars of health-care reform, and express certain misbegotten fears, but health care proponents would do well to understand the anxiety’s source: Theirs is ultimately a fear of rapid, sweeping policy shifts, especially those brought about by lengthy, amorphous legislative proposals that leave unclear exactly what might change the month after next.
The changes for people already on Medicare will be minimal. Everyone Everyone who has kept up with the actual legislation knows that. The “death panel” bullshit comes from a (very good) provision about end-of-life counseling championed by a right-wing Republican from Georgia.
But more to the point, how can anyone possibly say that, if people don’t understand legislation perfectly, then it’s perfectly reasonable for them to assume that it will lead to Logan’s Run-style eliminationist dystopia? To me, that makes about as much sense as reading that there are strong gamma bursts 3,000 light years away and concluding that alien civilizations are likely to begin belting us with pints of ice cream traveling at the speed of light.
In other words, it’s just the kind of nonsense we’ve grown accustomed to hearing from second-tier, pseduo-intellectual internet pundits.