The Seminal: Grassley brings the crazy...

Apoliticus: Top Five Campaign Mistakes

Mother Jones: George Bush, appeaser?

Submitted to a Candid World: Objection! Republican talking points and prior inconsistent statements

ANNALS OF JOURNALISM: Rich Lowry has lot of s'plaining to do...Gibbs To Media: How about reality?...Facts are stupid things...WaPo scraping bottom...Lane violation...Shrill...Whiney, Self-Serving Crapola....The New Yorker thinks Savage is just misunderstood...Our liberal media...Lou, you're an as*hole but we'd still like to see your birth certificate...Here's ours!...Humungous Hypocrisy at The Atlantiic

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Eleanor Clift and Clarence Page (two actual liberals for once) beat back host John McLaughlin and pundits Rich Lowry and Monica Crowley's patented GOP talking points on health care reform on The McLaughlin Group. Clift gets in the best line of the day when Lowry tried to claim that a private option would put the insurance companies out of business. Lo and behold, Lowry and Co. seemed to be reading right off of this list of health care reform myths.

Lowry: That's the entire point. Unless this is stripped down radically, that's what will happen, and that's what the liberals want.

McLaughlin: Eleanor.

Clift: There will be 40 to 50 million new customers and a lot of those customers are customers that the private market doesn't even want, and there's plenty to go around that you can coexist with add-ons, and the government is providing, is going to provide a subsidy, a very basic plan and people will buy extras. The insurance industry will flourish but, I'm with Clarence. Since when is this about protecting the insurance industry? This is about protecting people's health care. They're making a ton of money. [..]

Lowry: Do you want your insurer to go out of business, Clarence? Do you want your insurer to go out of business? You want to get dropped from your employer coverage?

Page: My coverage has been going down, Rich, and so have a lot of other people's and I'm not in bad shape....

It was pretty amusing watching Clift and Page basically get Lowry and Crowley to admit the truth: The GOP only wants to protect the private insurance companies. Even if it led to something close to single payer as Clift notes, it would not mean the insurance companies are out of business. To the horror of conservatives and the conserva-Dems who are in the pockets of the insurance industries, it only would mean they'd be making a hell of a lot less money for basic health care and offering supplemental plans to those who could afford it instead.

It was also nice to see someone take one of these talking heads to task when they bring up the Lewin Group and let them know that "non-partisan" doesn't mean "unbiased". I noticed Lowry didn't have much of a response when Clift called him on that nonsense other than to try to keep talking and pretend he didn't hear her.

I'd personally prefer that Congress focused their energies on Single Payer (as we all know, including The Lewin Group, that makes the most sense)--as would everyone who contributes at this site--but that unfortunately is not the political climate we're living in right now. Until we clean up the legalized bribery going on with corporations and lobbyists buying and selling our members of Congress, this is going to be a huge uphill battle. Until that reform happens, if ever, we need to hold their feet to the fire to do the right thing.

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From Washington Journal April 9, 2009. Rich Lowry and C-SPAN get taken to task from a couple of Democratic callers. It's pretty pathetic that every day citizens do a better job of holding these people's feet to the fire than our media does.

As Think Progress noted the second caller in the above clip's point about the balance at C-SPAN is a valid one.

The caller’s criticism has a ring of truth. A 2007 Center for Economic and Policy Research study found that C-SPAN “overwhelmingly favor[ed] conservative think tanks in its coverage by a three-to-one margin over all left-of-center think tanks.” Indeed, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow recently asked of the neocons, “Why is it that people who are catastrophically wrong about big important things like foreign policy and war never, like, flunk out of that as a subject?”

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I'm so sick of the false equivalencies and lack of context of the conservative commentators and pundits out there, who get opportunity time and time again to spin their failures as somehow the fault of Democrats.

On Meet the Press, David Gregory notes that the tone of the Bush administration changed from the promised "compassionate conservative/uniter, not a divider" to its take-no-prisoners partisanship reality. Rich Lowry acknowledges that it was so, but blames it on the sixteen year warfare of Democrats and Republicans refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of the other party's president.

A couple of things…one, Bush had a very simple view of how this works. You run on your agenda, and then you’re elected and you try to pass your agenda. And that seems pretty straightforward and basically admirable to me. But a couple things happened with the tone. One, he had entered into Washington where there is this ongoing revenge warfare, between the parties. Where Republicans were going to get revenge for Iran-Contra with Whitewater and the Monica scandal and the Democrats were going to get revenge for that. And you had about a sixteen year period where neither side would really accept the legitimacy of the other party’s president.

Um, Rich? Was Bill Clinton legitimately elected to office? Was there an extraordinary and so-legally-questionable-that-SCOTUS-specifically-limited-the-precedent-to-that-one-case decision that placed Clinton in office? No? So what was the basis of the lack of respect of the legitimacy of Bill Clinton's claim to the presidency? Sour grapes over Iran-Contra.

Let's remember, Mr. "History in a Vacuum" Lowry, were the Republicans guilty of crimes in the Iran-Contra scandal? They were? Quelle suprise! Was Clinton guilty of anything besides bad investing in the Whitewater scandal? Hmmm....isn't that funny...he wasn't. So the last eight years have been bad for poor George Bush, forcing him to be the nasty partisan war criminal that he is because of a sixteen year partisan war based on reality on the Democratic side and on the Republican side based on what? Being pissed that they've been caught outside the law? Well, to quote another blogger, boo-freakin'-hoo. How typically Republican.

And for the record, it's unadulterated crap that the left would never accept Bush. In the days after 9/11, Bush coasted on record approval ratings, ratings that showed that the WHOLE country--right, left and sideways--were all pulling for him. He pissed it away with declaring war on a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 and ignoring the entire Gulf Coast during Katrina. The left looked at his actions, not some made-up reasoning of entitlement to the office.

Figures that once again, Lowry doesn't know his ass from his elbow. Why does he keep getting on these programs? Isn't it about time we get someone who knows what they're talking about?

Transcripts below the fold

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On Meet the Press Richard Wolffe takes Rich Lowry to task for his statements about how important no attacks on US soil are as opposed to attacks overseas and how that lack of concern is extremely short sighted and unfortunately David Gregory makes sure Lowry gets to spew some more right wing talking points in response to Wolffe without giving him a chance to respond.

Full transcript to follow.

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