Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Not even the slightest pretense of objectivity.

Showing that they can pull the train for Barry O. just as hard now as they did in November, CNN is all in harness for health care reform.

Seriously, if you took the quotation marks out, you couldn't tell which parts of this article came from Democrat apparatchiks and which came from the "journalists" at the propaganda organs of the White House CNN.
Obama's health care battle has been compared to former President Bill Clinton's failed effort more than 15 years ago, but CNN senior political analyst Bill Schneider said the climate toward health care reform was actually more negative back then.

Clinton's plan had less public support than Obama's, and Clinton himself was less popular than Obama, Schneider said. Clinton's plan also barely got off the ground when it went to Congress, and Obama's proposals have already been through a few congressional committees.

So why didn't lawmakers experience the same backlash during the Clinton years?

"Three reasons," Schneider said.

First of all, "the calendar." Clinton proposed his plan in September 1993, and by the time Congress went on recess in August of the following year, the plan was dead.

Secondly, people didn't use the Internet the way they use it today, "so you didn't have the viral communications that rally people to attend town halls."

And finally, experience. "Conservatives are emboldened by what happened to the Clinton plan. They want to relive 1994," Schneider said.

Democrats have accused conservative groups of manufacturing the outrage, while others say the uproar is a reflection of the opposition to Obama's plans.

7 comments:

Canthros said...

... I thought lawmakers did get the same sort of backlash. Or are they really claiming that Clinton's healthcare proposals in no way contributed to the 1994 Congressional elections?

Fuzzy Curmudgeon said...

Speaking of pulling trains...

staghounds said...

The Schneider part, which you quote, is pretty factual. The word choices, emphasis, and speaker/quote/identification selection in the rest of the article are the bits.

locomotive bits.

And this might not be our President- but plenty of Strelnikovs do his bidding.

Tam said...

That was probably the most factual part of the article, true, but it still was imbued with shades of meaning.

For being "CNN's in-house political analyst" there was still a soupcon of Us v. Them flavor in there.

Steve Skubinna said...

I wonder how much of an analyst you are if you ignore an obvious hypothesis: that these protests are true grassroots affairs, by ordinary citizens angry at what they see as an out of touch and unaccountable government?

I mean, you could bring it up, even if only as a strawman in order to shoot it down.

And of course you shoot it down with the time honored "some say" formulation. "On the other hand, some say these unruly violent mobs of illiterite teabagging racist Nazis are only following the orders of their vile paymasters, the eeeeee-vil insurance companies, as opposed to the billions of concerned citizens who turned out to democratically voice their concerns at the illegal and immoral Smirkychimp W. McHitlerburton war for oil."

Now that would be balanced analysis.

NattyBumpo said...

This is from a newsletter I get from the Libertarian party--some of you may already have it--

Gee, you’d think there’s stuff in the Obama health care takeover Democrats don’t want people to hear about. Probably page 16 outlawing private health care, page 167 and others calling for new national taxes on people with “unacceptable” health care plans, or the sections calling for “end of life planning” for the elderly and sick. No wonder Democrats seem to be trying to turn town halls away from serious discussions of their bill and into WWE wrestling events.

---They also include a link to a pledge to make your local representative sign that says they will read the ENTIRE bill before voting for it, and that in signing it they will be held responsible for it. Rather good plan that, I will be finding out when my two crooks will be in town and give them a visit.

Here is the link:

http://www.lp.org/files/ReadTheBillPledge.pdf.

BadIdeaGuy said...

As if the healthcare plan itself doesn't have enough to piss law abiding citizens off, I would point to the provisions given for healthcare data collection and the existing data that several bloggers have identified about the pediatricians and General physicians asking if there are guns in your house- can we say "de facto national gun registry"?

It'll take about two days into national healthcare for Johns Hopkins' or "George Washington University"'s school of public health to say that private firearm ownership is too much of a burden on the system.