Pity the Fool

There's a reiterated refrain on right wing radio that asserts, over and over and over, that women are asking the government, e.g., you the taxpayer, to pay for "their" birth control medication. This is a Big Lie, period. It is part of the Big Lie Mr. Limbaugh spun out last week re Ms Fluke, who dared to offer rational, clear, believable testimony to what's really at stake in the contraceptive issue which the GOP has chosen to make one of their emotional rallying cries this season. Here's the simple truth:

http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/article/2012/03/05/health-insurance-is-not-courtesy-it%E2%80%99s-wages

Here's a bit of the poster's piece, but it's all very very good. And unlike Limbaugh, Hannity, and the other right wing mouths who have gigantic megaphones and will shout your house down every day if you let them, this paragraph is actually true:

When I fill my prescription, I assure you that you aren’t the one paying for it. I am. When I go to the classroom and teach, when I grade papers, when I sit in office hours and coach your children on how to write, I am earning my own birth control. So are you. Whether you pay your own premiums or not, you are exchanging hours of your life for insurance. And if you don’t have insurance – how is that something to be proud of? It means you work for an employer who can’t be bothered to invest in its employees. It means you work for a corporation that finds you disposable, that tells you that you’d be a fool to expect your health to matter. Is that “freedom”? Really? Just because the all-seeing entity that wants to decide your fate doesn’t bear the stamp of the United States government? How utterly naive.

Hat tip to Digby, who posted the link. Big cudoes to the author of the piece--another sensible, rational American who happens to be a woman. There's a question over on the left of her page: where are the American men who are in favor of birth control? Good question. Digby suggests that voters should try to get whatever candidates they can find clearly on the record on this "issue" of birth control and access to birth control. The Right Wing is creating an enormous lie out of whole cloth at the moment. It would be nice to think that it's so obvious, and so wrong, that a lot of voters will actually see what's happening if only they look in the right direction--and away from the screed of salacious sanctimony that spews out of the right wing side of the media every day.


Meanwhile, this is how the conversation goes over in the land of the blind:

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/03/05/a-nation-of-mean-girls/

As well as the absurd and laughable argument that Ms Fluke has attacked Mr. Limbaugh, which is the center of the piece, check out the amazing comment thread, were all the false presuppositions (such as the false idea that Ms Fluke and her cohort must be having lots and lots of sex because otherwise their birth control pills wouldn't cost so much) build themselves into a veritable mountain of lies.

This is how the Big Lie works. This is how, for example, a million or so Tutsi people were massacred in a few days by their fellow Hutu citizens in Rwanda. It's how Germany invented a scapegoat--the Jewish people (and the gypsies, and other minority groups). And again I have to wonder just why the United States has allowed Lord Haw Haw to have a baker's dozen radio shows running in every nook and cranny of the nation, 24/7. It boggles the mind. It's a 5th Stage Mind Rot, judging by those comments at pjmedia just cited.

And here at home, my own UNC Tar Heels are carried, on the radio, by a network of stations called "Rush Radio." We've come a long way. Jesse Helms used to call UNC the "Red Nest." Now these people just co-opt. It's a more effective strategy unfortunately.