Slate - "Democrats Calling the GOP Health Care Bill Mean Are Impotent and Pathetic"

[NRaleighLiberal]

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/06/22/democrats_calling_the_republican_health_care_bill_mean_are_pathetic.html

by Katy Waldman

Last week, behind closed doors, Donald Trump apparently called the House health care bill mean. Unlike pretty much everything else the president has done since taking office, this description played to great popular acclaim. The word was like a wisp of a song that got caught in the country’s head—a tune by Taylor Swift, perhaps: Why did the Grand Old Party have to be so mean?

On Thursday, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer upped the rhetorical ante, critiquing the Senate’s Better Care Reconciliation Act by dramatically scribbling an -er on a piece of poster board.

Democrats slam the new Republican health care bill as “meaner” https://t.co/Xks9vtvY3x pic.twitter.com/tBcxZzp1te

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) June 22, 2017
Also on Thursday, Barack Obama wrote a Facebook post decrying the “fundamental meanness at the core of this legislation,” noting the act would snatch coverage away from 23 million Americans.

While we wait for the bill to pass and plunge whole swathes of the nation into crisis, let’s muse for a moment on this childlike descriptor. Mean. It contains the requisite letters to compose the word men, which is great if you’re racking your brain for epithets for a law that identifies womanhood as a costly preexisting condition. It rhymes with green, which is the color of the dollars that insurance and drug companies will bathe in as old people, pregnant people, and people with mental health issues lose their access to affordable health services. Mean also carries the slightly archaic connotation of miserliness or selfishness, and of shoddiness, too. I don’t need to belabor the salience of those qualities as we watch a measure scotch-taped together out of the cruel fragments of Scrooge McDuck’s id work its way through the House of Representatives.

snip - more to read at the link.

[hlthe2b]

1. It is probably best if I censor how I feel about that Slate "reporter"....

[NRaleighLiberal]

2. did you read the whole article? I think the point is a valid one.

Make sure to read the whole thing, not just the four paragraphs extracted.

[hlthe2b]

3. ok.... I see the point....

Just hard not to reflexively react to those critiquing Dems, when such a catastrophic REPUG bill COULD actually make its way through.

[NRaleighLiberal]

5. We continually bring butter knives to nuclear fights. The approach is not working.

[WyLoochka]

4. The title of the article sucks

It doesn't really convey the sense of what the author wrote.

[NRaleighLiberal]

6. it does get the attention. Somehow the left needs to be slapped awake.

Apathy is leading to our doom.