Thomas Paine's Corner
Well, judging from what we are beginning to see, it didn’t take too long for the mainstream media to regain its footing, atone for its earlier honest hoorays for Moore’s film, and figure an angle from which it might preserve the remnants of its tattered honor while still fulfilling the dirty job its corporate masters demanded it to do, which was to badmouth Michael Moore’s brave documentary, SICKO, into complete ineffectiveness. The spectacle makes me sick.
Just a few days ago CNN’s Anderson Cooper offered on his program 360 a glimpse of the subtle and not so subtle maneuvers being frantically worked out by the elites as they scramble to repair the huge breach on their disinformation wall created by Moore’s near irrefutable expose of the American healthcare system, an industry whose cynicism and callousness should have been exposed by the “professional media” in the same manner eons ago.
While Anderson—I’ll give him that—was (for the MSM) uncharacteristically aggressive, one might even say “crusading,” in reinjecting the term “for profit medicine” in his otherwise soft-gloved interrogation of Karen Ignagni, an industry hack, the program only featured some clips from the film and no live panelists to counter Ignagni’s well rehearsed dissembling.
The exchange however was a harbinger of what we now see as a consistent slant underscoring the counterattacks issuing from the for-profit healthcare camp. My bet is that far worse is yet to come, for, make no mistake, this is an issue of incalculable significance to the direction this nation may take in resolving its innumerable politically-manufactured crises and deficiencies, and they—the corporatocracy, the guys who make and benefit from the wounds—know it better than most.
So what’s their prescription for defeating SICKO? Quite simple, actually, something any corporate, Republican, or Democratic sellout talking head will have little trouble parroting. The argument goes more or less like this:
(1) YES! The US healthcare system has serious problems, is broken, and needs revamping…BUT (this is a big BUT, usually accompanied by a pregnant pause for maximum effect)—
(2) Moore’s prescription is
• wrong
• misguided
• alien-inspired
• communist
• inefficient
• will create another huge government bureaucracy (oooo la la!),
• will deny Americans their right to choose (this is a big one in a nation with so many fanatical consumerists),
• blah blah blah…whatever.
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