Over on the right, there isn't a lie vomited out by Fox "news," Breitbart, or President Trump (all increasingly one and the same) that their followers will not believe. Yesterday, on the Twitter machine, I got into a pissing match with a fuckwit who insisted that "The Democrats passed Obama care by shoving it through without allow a single GOP member to read the bill." (All the errors are his.) Loads of conservatives believe this utterly easily disprovable bullshit.
Also yesterday, Chuck Schumer got Joni Ernst, acting as Senate President, to admit how much goddamn time was spent on the Affordable Care Act. Ernst sounds like she's swallowing rotten pig balls when she has to state that the ACA got "25 days of hearings and 169 hours of consideration." That's not counting weekends and recesses. In all, Senators had over 2 months from the first introduction of the bill to the Senate floor to the final vote. And Democrats weren't hiding it in the first place, since there had been a year of discussion and hearings prior to it coming to the entire Senate. So, you know, go fuck yourself with the sharp end of your talking point.
The only reason we're in this ludicrous mess with the American Health Care Act, the garbage bill that passed the House and is being rewritten in secret in the Senate, is because Republicans and their enablers were great at making the ACA seem like it was going to put on jackboots, walk into your home, kill your parents, and beat your spouse. Remember the "death panels"? How people actually acted like that was in the bill? How no one could successfully articulate that the real death panels were called insurance companies denying benefits for pre-existing conditions or when a limit on a benefit was reached?
Nothing could break through the thick layer of lie and hyperbole that was heaped on the public. Democrats were terrible messengers, either running away from the ACA because they bought the GOP's cruel fraud. Or they just sucked in even delivering positive news. Obamacare could have provided people with daily multiple orgasms, and Democrats would have fucked up articulating how that's a good thing.
Here we are, in the thick of a battle against some vague, but no doubt savage piece of legislation, and the left is just really gearing up for it. At this point, there should be ads from SuperPACs running constantly about how bad the AHCA is. And you know what? A little hyperbole wouldn't hurt about now. Mitch McConnell is trying to rape the nation with this spiked dildo of a law while so-called "moderate" Republicans do their usual dance of fake dignity, pretending like they actually give two shits about what McConnell is doing in the writing of the bill.
So there is a space for Democrats to creatively show the effects of a bill that quite simply takes money from the poor, the elderly, the addicted, and the sick and gives it to the very wealthy in the form of a tax cut. That's an easy ad right there: Rich people saunter into a doctor's office and rob a bunch of ill people in the waiting room, leaving them dying and sicker, only without hope of seeing a doctor.
Or how about a real death panel: a row of wealthy people behind a table, making a decision on whether or not each suffering poor person deserves help. Is it over the top? Yeah. That's the fucking point. Subtlety and well-reasoned arguments aren't going to win here because people don't respond to that. They respond to a rich puke punching Gramps in the balls until he hands over his wallet.
Enough with the calm, rational discussions. Enough with the speeches. Go for their throats with an emotional appeal. And that means crying people who would lose health care and the image of the uncaring Republican, ready to intentionally inflict more pain.
