From an AP report this morning:
WASHINGTON – The White House is turning to the Internet to hit back at a Web posting that claims to show President Barack Obama explaining how his health care reform plans eventually would eliminate private insurance.
The three-minute White House video features Linda Douglass, a former network television correspondent and now White House Office of Health Reform communications director, sitting in front of a computer screen showing the Drudge Report Web site. That site carries a series of video clips from another blogger who strings together selected Obama statements on health care to make it appear he wants to eliminate the private health insurance business.
In the video Douglass says the site is “taking sentences and phrases out of context, and they’re cobbling them together to leave a very false impression.“
My Comment
And of course, the government and its minions would never take anything “out of context,” or “leave
a false impression..”
Oh nooooooo.
Drudge must have hit pretty close to get this level of presidential attention…
As for your jaded blogger at this humble site, I am as wary of the word “private” as I am of the word
“public.” Private is just the other face of public, most times. Gates, Buffet, Trump, Welch – they’ve all proved that their companies aren’t “private” enterprise – they all profit from insider ties, knowledge, subsidies, and pay-offs.
The “private-public” divide, like the “left-right” divide, is an elaborate bit of window-dressing intended to camouflage a much more real divide: “honest-dishonest.”
Update: I notice that Barack Obama has now joined Michelle Obama on Vanity Fair’s “best-dressed list.” Look, I agree Mrs O. has a distinctive and interesting fashion voice, but her husband?
Now the president is a runway model too?
Could this have something to do with creating positive spin in the wake of the recently resuscitated “birther” controversy?
“Birther” is the disparaging term applied to anyone who questions whether President Obama was born within the US, or believes he was born in Kenya, or apparently even brings up the subject – as the recent attacks on conservative broadcaster Lou Dobbs suggest. To clarify, I have no idea what positions Lou Dobbs takes or doesn’t take. And to further clarify, my personal opinion is that naturalized citizens should be as free to become president as natives. Of course, that isn’t the position of the constitution, but that’s another issue.
Surely, questioning the president on a constitutional point would seem to be the essence of what free speech protects. Instead, the establishment puts a derogatory label on it that makes it off-limits and a kind of racist “hate” or “fringe” speech, like the speech of holocaust revisionists (‘denialists’), 9-11 theorists (‘truthers’), critics of Israel or Zionism (‘anti-semites’), and critics of the US (‘anti-Americans’)
[how come if you criticize China, you’re not an anti-sinite?]
Please. Talk about feeding a fire…
Fire is a useful tool but a dangerous god. Feed it with too much fuel, and it burns in every direction. It consumes everything in its path.
He who glows in the fire of public adulation today burns in it tomorrow.