Obama = Hitler? Your Logic Is Not Earth Logic
Aside from my deep seated belief that at least some of the Obama = Hitler people are being paid to make these appearances, I’ve often wondered why anyone entertains their nonsense. Finally someone does not and it is amazing. I’m still trying to work out how Obama’s health care plan = return to Nazi Germany when France, Italy, Israel, Canada, the UK, and a few other countries that have absolutely nothing to do with Hitler all have socialized medical plans. But, I’m pretty sure that’s me trying to apply logic to insanity. The more I look at the bill, the less sense the tone of the opposition makes to me unless we go back to the idea of paid shills hyping the crowd and false propaganda being deliberately spread by folks in the pocket of the American insurance industry. If someone has a better explanation of what is behind the conspiracy theories and screaming of “Heil Hitler” I’d love to hear it. Because from where I’m sitting incidents like this one:
are pretty much proof that the inmates are trying to take over the asylum. For weeks now these town hall meetings have been overrun with folks who seem to have left their humanity and critical thinking skills at home. And I can’t figure out the logic behind the incessant hyperbolic attacks (Sarah Palin really believes there are death panels? Really?) and the huge quantities of misinformation that seem to be professionally condensed into nice little soundbites of crazy rhetoric designed to amp up the fear. I have government run healthcare through the VA (I’m a vet with a service connected disability) and there is no better feeling than knowing that if I get sick I can see a doctor. Without the VA I wouldn’t be eligible for most (nearly all) private insurance plans because of my pre-existing condition and my choices would be no coverage or (since I have children) Medicaid. Which is…government funded health care. Just like Medicare. And I have to say that my kids had Medicaid at one point and it was great. There were problems at times but they were the same problems we had with private insurance. Namely long wait times and irritating conversations about the bill. The big difference was that Medicaid actually covered everything without me having to fill out half a dozen forms in triplicate and without any arbitrary spending limits. From my perspective I’d rather have the public option because then my entire family could be covered under one plan. I have no problem paying for it either as long as we have decent coverage and can’t be retroactively dropped.
I love Barney Frank. He may not be perfect, but he’s always entertaining. If I just lived three blocks west of where I live now, he’d be my representative. I dearly hope he runs for Ted Kennedy’s seat when Teddy’s no longer with us.
I don’t understand who’s telling all of these people that extending health care to all was one of Hitler’s policies. Like, what does that mean? Step 1) Kill all the Jews. Step 2) Extend health care to all! Step 3) ??? Step 4) PROFIT!
The claims that somehow Obama is like Hitler make absolutely no sense and I wonder why anyone is passing them along. My mother is a Conservative Republican and though we disagree about a lot of things she’s told me she’s really ashamed of the fuckery that’s going on lately.
It’s a doggoned shame that some people have lost their minds during this health care debate. The sad thing is, this insanity has very little, if anything, to do with health care.
I was in Montreal this past week, and while there someone had set up an “Obama = Hitler” sign and table en francais.
It left me completely confused. If he’s so afraid of socialised health care, what the heck is he doing living in Quebec?
Wait, WHAT?
Long wait times on private insurance?
WTF.
See, here’s the thing.
I live in Australia, where public universal health care and private insurance live in happy coexistence. Everyone is covered by Medicare, everyone has access to health care; we bitch and complain about things like having to wait a while for non-urgent procedures to be given to us free.
By non-urgent, I mean “not life-threatening, will never be life-threatening, will just be annoying/unpleasant” issues.
Things like vaccinations and immunisations are generally government-funded because prevention is cheaper and easier than cure, by the way.
The reason we get private health insurance is because if you have private cover, you DON’T HAVE TO WAIT for *anything*, and your treatment is shinier. (A private hospital my mother stayed at looks like a luxury hotel in terms of decor, it really does.)
A friend of mine had to wait over a year to get her wisdom teeth removed surgically, because there was no risk of complications or anything, it just needed to be done at some point and she’d not got around to it earlier, in the meantime it just ached mildly.
I was on private, so I scheduled my wisdom teeth operation for the first week of the following holidays, at my convenience.
Private health cover also reduces the burden on the public system – because a public option for the entire population *is* hard to manage – so there are certain incentives to have private cover regardless. If your income is above a certain level, there’s an extra Medicare surcharge if you don’t have private cover, for example.
Me, I’m not in that bracket, but my private cover costs me around AU$40 a month and it’s nice to have.
The idea that you can have private health insurance AND shitty treatment is blowing my mind.
By the way, under the Australian health care system, I:
– Have never paid for an X-ray in my life. You go in, you get x-rayed, you sign a form, you walk out with your pictures.
– Once found myself without my vital medications due to them getting misplaced during a house move on a weekend. I went to the Emergency department, explained my problem at the admit desk, and waited in chairs. When it was my turn to see a doctor, he came to the door holding a week’s supply of my medication, to tide me over until I could see my doctor and get a new prescription, and so on. He figured since that was my issue, he could save us both time by just calling the pharmacy and having them supply it before he spoke to me.
I didn’t pay a cent then either. Not even for the pills.
Nor have I paid for antibiotics, oxygen, saline drips, stitches, or any other emergency medical services I’ve received.
Or any vaccine I’ve been given. Not even the HPV one.
Or… but you get the idea.
And because it’s not even vaguely related to employment, the private health cover I have – with HBF, who, when I was in my mid-teens, sent us a letter to advise us that they were contributing $1,000 more to the cost of my braces than we’d thought they were, and apparently we weren’t aware of it so they thought they should tell us – has stayed with me since I was about two years old, when my father changed jobs, in the brief period when he was unemployed, when I stopped being eligible under my parents’ coverage and switched to my own, when *I* was unemployed…
And while there’s no such thing as a pre-existing condition for me and HBF, if I wanted to change insurance companies (which I don’t, I’m totally happy with HBF), it is NOT LEGAL for a company to refuse to cover me.
Being able to access health care is, literally, something I have never in my life been worried about. It’s mildly annoying when I can’t get a doctor’s appointment *the same day I call* for me.
On the other hand, I find it deeply distressing how all of this stuff, that we in Australia take for granted, is just not possible somehow in America.
I don’t get how terms like “socialised medicine” are so demonised there – here it’s taken for granted that socialised medicine is not only a good thing, but a fundamental right of Australian citizens and a duty for our government to supply. Any politician suggesting otherwise would be committing electoral suicide.
In Canada it’s much the same thing, except from the other direction. Any attempt to make our system more flexible results in comparisons to George W Bush and US health care. All this talk detracts from the real debate that we should be having.
And by the way .. Hitler wasn’t a socialist. He had elements on socialism in his policies, as well as elements of extreme conservatism. Very few comparisons to Hitler make sense. Anyhow … good luck.
As a Canadian, this whole business with the health care debate is kinda incomprehensible to me, in a “why the heck is there even a debate, again?”
It’s also getting kinda… well, scary. Government-funded health care seems to make many Americans angry and crazy and yell-y. WE have government-funded health care. Those Americans who consider health care Adolf Hitler level Evil, are they likely to start pondering and decide we’re Nazi Central for having it, do you think? Because, um, they have guns. It’s just making us really nervous, is all.
I know it’s not all of you who are making with the crazy, but frankly, if Canada could do the national equivalent of casually inching away from the insane dude at the bus stop, maybe just dig up the whole country and move it a couple extra kilometers to the north, we would probably do it right now. At least until this thing blows over.
I can appreciate why some are upset about the Obama/Hitler comments, but unless anyone here was outraged when the comparisons were made about Bush and Cheney, then it’s hypocrisy. The comparisons didn’t help us in Iraq then, and the comparisons won’t help us with health care now.
I was outraged. Does that help? It’s never a useful contribution to discourse and it is wrong, for the sake of his victims, to equate Hitler’s crimes to those of someone you disagree with or the egregious wrongs of the Bush era.
Nonetheless:
Obvious concern troll is obvious.
I wonder if Americans would be interested in my story of being jumped at Queen and Spadina (a major Toronto intersection), where I received a concussion, broken nose and teeth. I was subsequently given Emergency Ambulance Treatment followed by Emergency Hospital Care at Mt Sinai, which included a CT scan and emergency root canals. At Mt Sinai I was offered Psychiatric Care through its on-site Trauma Clinic. My nose was re-set by a doctor at St Joseph’s Hospital not long after that. Not a dime ever came out of my pocket… until I got to the dentist… where my Union covered my costs.
I’m not going to pretend that I don’t have constructive criticisms of the Health Care System in Canada, but I’ve often wondered, “What would have happened if I’d lived in Chicago, or NYC, or Seattle, or any number of places I’ve enjoyed visiting in The States?
Since the arrival of our daughter this past winter, I’ve asked myself this question again. We received full term midwifery care, including six weeks of post-natal care, five ultrasounds (including one late in term), hospital care, and regular visits to the Family Doctor. I have no idea what kind of care is offered to expectant parents in The States, or what neo-natal/infant care is like, but what we’ve received through socialized healthcare has been exceptional. And, again, not a dime came out of our pockets.
Barny Frank said exactly what he should have said, and all the others should too.
Yet all the freakin’ NPR people are going all, “oooooh, that probably wasn’t the best response he could have made. What can we be doing instead to have a real dialog?”
They know as well as anyone that you can’t have a real dialog about anything with these people. They aren’t about dialog, they are about calling people nazis etc., and howling.
These town hells are the equivalent of Orwell’s 1984‘s 2 minutes of hate. Notably they started with the maccainpalin rallies lynch mobs during last autumn’s POTUS election campaign. They didn’t want to stop, because they refuse to acknowledge they lost fair and square.
Love, C.
I always thought the Obama/Hitler comparison might be used by the right to defend itself against charges of White Supremacy. “What? I’m not a racist. Obama is the one who loves Hitler!” This might be it, but no doubt that the health-care protesters definitely have Nazis on the brain, because they keep bringing it up, over and over again. A little obsessed, no? Whatever the reason, this kind of rhetoric is extremely disrespectful to those who are victims and survivors of the Holocaust. It needs to stop.
As a German, I have grown quite tired of the way the wrd “nazi” is thrown around by many Americans under the most mundane circumstances. I think it shows a severe lack of understanding regarding the true horribleness of the crimes committed,as well asalack of respect for the victims. And now this?
Obviusely, the assosiation of Hitler with Socialism a very weak one. it may have been part of the name of their party, but only a few of their policies were based on socialist ideas. In fact, one of the main reasons why so many conservative parties were willing to cooperate with them was the fact that, in their eyes, racism and nationalism,even if radical, was bettr then socialism, which the old power players were afraid of. And the real socialist were punished severly by the nazis for their political opposition.
Anyone you ask in Europe will tellyou that Hitler was a right wing fundamentalist,not a left wing one.
Also:Another thing Hitler did was build and repair highways. Does that mean the American ones should be destroyed to protect the US from “Socialism”? Never mind the fact that socialised medicine is well established in so many other countries.
Ok, where do I start with that ignorant inbred, cretin who yells Heil Hitler and then makes fun of a man, sharing his outrage over an 8000. bill for emergency services. In all honesty, I do not know. One thing is for sure, is that if it were me, she would have been slapped. I know that we can’t solve the problem with violence but she was downright provoking that man, and would have deserved it. Hey, by the way, I came over here to see if you were blogging about the treatment of Olympic runner, Caster Semanye? Come on ABW, get on it…
Funnily enough I’ve been discussing it elsewhere so much I don’t think I thought about here.
I have loved Barney Frank with a fierce adoration ever since someone tried to “accuse” him of being gay in the 80s, when these sorts of revelations might have been career-ending.
His response, and I think I’m close to a literal quote, was: “Yeah, I’m gay. So what?”
@ Jennifer Pelland–
Co-sign. Barney actually was my representative for four years, and much as he drives me crazy on trans issues, he really has his moments, like this one. I appreciate how often he 1) calls a spade a spade, and 2) uses humor as a political strategy similar to the way many oppressed groups (including some of his own) use it as a life strategy. It works!
Obama, discussing the end-of-life expenses as a driver in the entire health care cost system, remarked that we need groups of ethicists and physicians to have the hard discussions.
One of his advisers, Dr. Emanuel, has been more explicit.
The Brit NHS has a formula quantifying how much good life you have left and uses that to decide if you get the expensive stuff or just a pain pill.
You should also see the restrictions on pap smears there, and breast cancer drugs for the elderly. And, it should go without saying, the results.
No, it should not go without saying. Prove your premise. I want three independent sources for every statement you’re positing as fact.
As a Brit: ahahaha!!
As a Jew, and former Israeli: that second video actually made me cry. What on earth is wrong with people?
As to “it should not go without saying”
The reason it can go without saying is that you know it already.
My point is to let you know that I do, as do so many others.
Either you have not done your homework, in which case you look kind of silly pontificating as if you had, or you know better, in which case you’re being dishonest.
In either case, most folks know better, which you should think about.
No it is you that has not done your homework. End of life planning and hospice care is not the same as the death panels keep blathering about endlessly. Stop lying to yourself in order to bolster a ridiculous objection to fixing our broken healthcare system.
I have done my homework, I’m looking for proof that you’ve done yours. Assertions that “everyone knows these things” ring hollow and evade what i asked you to do. If these truths are so universally known, you should be able to find three independent sources backing you up with no problems. I suspect your only source for this stuff you’re spouting is Glen Beck, and he’s only one, and he’s not independent. So. If you can’t pony up, then hush.