The Joe Wilson Agenda: Racism by any other name is still…

South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson showed the country and the world what he really is during Barack Obama’s Health Care Reform speech to a joint session of Congress last Wednesday…and by that we don’t mean just an ignorant, unprincipled peckerwood with no respect for the office of President of the United States, or the institution to which he was, incredibly, elected to serve. Unfortunately, it’s much more distressing than that.

If it were that simple, President Obama’s subsequent, gracious acceptance of Wilson’s so-called apology would have led us to conclude that it’s time to move on…except that it’s not that simple. Oh, Joe Wilson is everything we said above, but he’s more than that. He’s also a racist who, because of enablers and apologists like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and Lou Dobbs and Sean Hannity and Sarah Palin, now feels it’s acceptable to bring his racism out of the closet and put it on display for the world to see.

So there was Wilson offering to keep the welcome mat out at his Washington office Saturday for somewhere between an estimated fifty and a hundred thousand like-minded people who gathered in our nation’s capitol for something called the 912 Project or the 912 March…a staged event conceived in the twisted, unbalanced, paranoid mind of the aforementioned Beck. And although they arrived both as individuals and groups who claimed kinship with or interest in any number of causes, what they were really there to do was show their true color…WHITE!

They can hide behind any banner they find and call themselves whatever they like, but the truth of the matter is that the vast majority of those who participated in this event are extreme, right-wing ideologues who became unhinged when a black man was duly and constitutionally elected President of these United States. And now, because the enablers are telling them it’s okay to hate the President and anyone who supports him, overt racism is the right-wing flavor of the moment.

If it wasn’t such a sad commentary on what public discourse and deportment in America has become, it would be laughable. Actually, no it wouldn’t. It’s just plain sad!

Two things before we wrap it up for this edition of our PWC blog. First, one of the funniest albeit saltiest journals we regularly follow is the Rude Pundit. For his take on Saturday’s display of lunacy at the 912 event in Washington, go to http://www.rudepundit.blogspot.com/ . Suffice it to say that ‘The Rude One’ has a way of putting things the way we’d often like to put them…if only we weren’t worried about what our mothers would think.

And finally, here’s an editorial that was sent to us by a friend which appeared in today’s Toronto Globe and Mail. It concerns the Health Care Reform debate currently raging in America. It’s short, concise, and, in our estimation, right on the money.


By Eugene Lang and Philip DeMont

From Monday's Globe and Mail Last updated on Monday, Sep. 14, 2009 03:21AM EDT

"It is rare for Canada to get noticed in the United States. In fact, it is almost unprecedented for anything Canadian to be the focal point of debate in Washington. Yet we have seen just that in recent months during the congressional wrangling over U.S. President Barack Obama's attempts to reform health insurance.

Canada's medicare system has suddenly been thrust into the spotlight south of the border. It has been pilloried by the Republicans in Congress, the subject of derisive and distorted television advertisements, described variously as a system of medicine by bureaucrat, a statist form of health care afflicted by gross inequities and inefficiencies, one that pales in comparison to the U.S. model. The hysterical tone of the anti-medicare rhetoric among Republicans would make one think Canada is North Korea.

But there is an inconvenient truth that the Republican ideology cannot dispute. Canada's approach to providing citizens with universal health insurance is superior to the U.S. model of private insurance. When we get beyond the anti-medicare ideology and histrionics on Capitol Hill, we can establish this by reference to four basic numbers that give a good sense of our system versus the system in the United States.

Life expectancy is a basic measure of the quality of health care. In the U.S., a citizen will live 77.8 years on average. In Canada, you can expect to live two and a half years longer (80.4 years). Infant mortality is also a vital indicator of health care. In the United States, 6.37 infants die out of every 1,000. In Canada the number is 5.4 out of a 1,000.

But what about the cost differences of the two approaches to health care? Surely our Leviathan-like system, which produces such enviable results, must cost a fortune relative to the U.S. model.

The best measure of health care costs is the percentage a country spends relative to the size of its economy, or its gross domestic product (GDP). Canadians spend about 10 per cent of GDP on health. Americans spend 16 per cent to achieve inferior results on life expectancy and infant mortality.

Finally, it is estimated that there are somewhere around 40 million Americans – about 12 per cent of their population, well in excess of the total population of Canada – who have no medical insurance whatsoever. These unfortunate people are literally on their own in paying for any and all medical treatments they require. That gap in coverage is staggering, making the United States an outlier among all advanced Western nations.

One might ask how many uninsured citizens exist in Canada? The answer is zero – all Canadians are insured. In this country, good-quality, universally accessible medical care is regarded as a basic element of citizenship, kind of like owning a gun is in the U.S.

So to sum up. We live longer than the Americans do. We are less likely to die at or soon after birth than the Americans are. All Canadians have medical insurance, whereas a huge number of Americans don't. And we pay less as a society for health care than they do in the United States. Four numbers paint a stark picture. And when you strip away the anti-medicare ideological rants and falsehoods on display in Washington, Canada's approach to health insurance would probably sound pretty good to many Americans.

To their credit, by putting public insurance on the table as a supplement to private plans, the Democrats in the U.S. Congress are trying to drag the United States into the club of civilized nations when it comes to health care. We've been in that club since the establishment of medicare more than 40 years ago.

Don't get us wrong here. We are not saying medicare is perfect; it is far from that, and it requires constant improvement, as most Canadians understand. But it is not a bad deal for citizens of this country.

The Republican-led anti-medicare lobby in Congress knows these numbers and facts. But they are regarded as inconvenient truths that must be ignored in the crusade to discredit the Canadian approach to health insurance, to ensure no public option creeps into the U.S. system. Anti-government ideology is running amok in Washington, trumping facts and rational debate, distorting one of the most important public policy issues the United States has grappled with in decades.

Ultimately, the U.S. public will pay the price for that."

So there you have it. As always, your comments and opinions are encouraged. We’ll talk to you again tomorrow.

SC