Despite these obstacles, however, and because the situation seems to have gotten immeasurably worse over time, it’s both tempting and easy to dive in, since the more cuckoo the right gets and the more often they’re defending the indefensible, the more rote and demented their declarations become.  Indeed, the lack of media diversity they so maniacally defend has, paradoxically, made this strategy so much more transparent and even less convincing, such that it deserves some examination; their arguments, using that word with undue generosity, collapse under the lightest scrutiny, leaving one to conclude that they’re only designed to “convince” utter nincompoops like themselves.  Guys, could you please get about three more people to help think up your material?  This is getting kind of boring.

The health care debate is a vivid example: unable to defend the current system, the “thinkers” on the right have come up with some sound bites so pathetic and easily refutable that I kind of feel sorry for the addlepated automatons who think they’ve latched upon such world-beating winners that they repeatedly call in to even liberal talk shows to mouth them, for what they evidently think is the first time, to an audience they assume just needs to be set straight, once and for all.  Too often, the hosts waste their time treating such redundant piffle with respect it simply doesn’t deserve, and bother to try to refute it while the caller keeps plugging his (nearly always male) ears and loudly singing “Frere Jacques.”

“Medicare’s  bankrupt, Social Security’s bankrupt, and so’s the Post Office; why would you want the Government running health care?”

First of all, so is everybody, thanks to the ruinous economic policies of the Bush Administration, whose very existence has suddenly been neatly excised from history.  No matter.  Secondly, the bankrupting of Medicare and Social Security were by design, the looting of the treasury and the ruinous giveaway of Medicare Part D were, back in the day, some of Bush’s most famously trumpeted “successes.”  The “reforms” once proposed for the Post Office by Bush: raising executive salaries and lowering them for everyone else, were never enacted, but having the top people flying around in private jets to their multiple vacation homes while letter carriers collected food stamps seems unlikely to have alleviated the huge drops in revenue precipitated by the Bush Recession.  Dumber still, this self-contradictory statement overlooks the fact that overhead is 3% with Medicare, and upwards of 25% for the private health “industry.”  It’s really rather astonishing that people who would proudly recite such an absurd argument on national radio are nonetheless smart enough to tune in a radio and dial a telephone, and in that order, to boot.

“Canadians come here for their health care.”

Aside from being utterly false, this one is particularly audacious.  As anyone with a passing acquaintance with our health care system knows, much of the time, employees, and even square footage of any hospital in the US is devoted to bilking the ill out of their money; unless these invented Canadians are wanting to improve their penmanship and dispose of their estates before their greedy heirs get their paws on them, none of them would be dumb enough to try such a thing.  Worse, no one is proposing such a rational, cheap, and humane system as Canada has here, so even if the argument weren’t pure hogwash, it’s still irrelevant.

Why should I pay for some (worthless, brown, fat) person’s health care, if they won’t pay for it themselves?

This one, admittedly, isn’t really meant to be an argument, but merely a plea to the racists to take one for the plutocrats, yet again.  Although it plainly seduced South Carolina wingnut Joe Wilson and goes over big in the tooth-deficient parts of Dixie, it really is too nonsensical and offensive to utter in those precincts where very few homes have license plates and/or appliances in the yard, but utter they do.  You see, righties just glory in the cleansing suffering of others, which they see as richly deserved, and thus rather impolitic and hateful notions such as this must therefore be included, to keep the base both happy and tuned in.  (This strategy is anything but ineffective, by the way.)

In short, the right is currently so bereft of ideas at the moment that they make Arthur Laffer look like John Maynard Keynes; Richard Nixon like Franklin Roosevelt, and what’s rolling out of the Wurlitzer at the moment makes the Barney song sound like Rhapsody in Blue.  Maybe it’s just the bleeding heart liberal in me, but I hope we get health care reform soon, because otherwise a significant number of Americans will die without direly needed brain transplants.