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grantcart Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Apr-08-08 12:20 AM
Original message
Hillary Clinton speaks Truth against the Paper Worshipers


SENATOR CLINTON SPEAKS TRUTH

Senator Clinton told a story about a woman who died needlessly. She spoke about a child that died needlessly. I don't care about the details because the story is true. It is symbolic of a society that has grown accustomed to throwing away people. I don't want to live in a society that throws people away like yesterday's newspaper.

I don't care if the woman's name is Sally or Mary, if she went to this hospital or that clinic. I don't care if the form that she was admitted on was pink or blue. She is dead and her baby is dead and 7 soldiers died in Iraq yesterday and 3 today and the last one on the record is Capt. Ulises Burgos-Cruz, 29, of Puerto Rico and I am pretty sure that is correct because the military is very good about that.

The media however is now focused on exactly what happened in the telling of the story. "A hospital spokesperson confirmed to CNN the woman had insurance. She said the hospital decided to come forward after people in the community began to question if they had denied her care."


TRIVIALIZATION OF LIFE IN AMERICA

This is the trivialization of life in America. Some will blame the media. Its an easy target. Here is CNN's headline on the subject:


Clinton drops hospital story from stump speech.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/04/06/clinton.hospital/index.html

Next to that headline is this headline on CNN

Clinton's bowling skills a bit rusty
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=clinton+cnn+hospital&btnG=Search

The real headline should be that the woman and the child are still dead and 30,000 more in America die each year because we can't get the right color paper matched up correctly. That's how somebody from another planet or from some other realm would look at it. If that person had enough green color papers at the right time and matched that up with the right white color paper then she would have been treated and lived. We would not have thrown her away.

There are some very effective writers in our community that will use this and lay the responsibility at the media and they are well reasoned, well researched, and well written. I don't buy it. We (the American people) get the government we deserve and we get the media we deserve.


NEED FOR A NEW METHODOLOGY

Most of the time most Americans do not pay attention. Our side says this and the Republicans say that and 300 million people would rather see Ellen bowl with a celebrity. The incremental approach is not working. The domestic hegemony approach where we get these groups of people (students, workers, unions, soccer moms, etc.) is not working. Even if we can get everyone's attention on a problem for a moment the vested interests are patient and well funded and the system of legal and organized bribery of our Senators and Congressman is codified and only occasionally will someone be so stupid (like my Congressman 'Duke' Cunningham)to actually screw up the details and go to prison.

But again a super terrestrial visitor would be puzzled why its OK for a congressman to take one kind of paper (a check into a campaign fund) is OK and that green paper into his hand is not. The bizarre system throws a man in jail because he takes the green paper and the woman dies because she didn't have the same green paper.

We need a new paradigm. We need something that will not engage the media but that will engage the people on a mass movement. This has to be from the bottom up.


THE CRUEL IRONY OF DU

We are in the midst of a titanic struggle. On the one hand is the system and the profiteers of the system who believe in the sanctity of papers. They were the same types of people who once believed that if a paper said that a person was a thing and not a person that it was true. They especially believe in papers colored green. They are the worshipers of paper.

On the other side is us. You, me and the people in here believe that people are more important than colored papers. Even the people some of us have on ignore believe in a fundamentally different way of looking at our system and that people are more important and not should be thrown away. Not thrown away in prisons, in schools run like prisons, in unnecessary wars. We should not throw away our earth for paper and mechanical pods that transport us.

In the middle are the vast majority of people who basically like our point of view but have a fear that we are going to screw up their papers and take away their transport pods and not let them watch Ellen bowl with celebrities. But they don't really like the worshipers of paper.

The cruel irony of DU is the realization that this small group of people, who are in here are fanatically driven to give up time to come in and stare at a screen and pound on a keyboard, is bitterly divided. The reality is that in comparison with the vast wasteland of apathy, consumer addiction and robots to the system that we live in, we are the same tribe. Compared to the paper worshipers we are virtual twins and yet the bitterness between some of us has taken on a life of its own, like a virus.

ENDING FOR CLINTON SUPPORTERS

If your a Clinton supporter and Hillary Clinton motivates you to fight for a society that will stand up to the paper worshipers and knows how to convince the middle to join with us then please continue to help her and fight for her. You don't need anyone telling you when to quit and those that are doing so should know better. It is a fact that this is her campaign and she is her own general she is making the decisions on message, strategy and use of resources. Those that oppose her cannot be faulted for the decisions she makes.

In this case however, the message was truthful and the details unimportant. I admire her for continuing to speak in her way on these issues. I hope that people in DU will be judicious enough to agree that in this case the criticism of Senator Clinton was completely unfair. She heard a story she assumed to be truthful and used it to speak a larger and more important truth. Good for her and good for you for supporting her.


The End





A POSTSCRIPT ON SENATOR OBAMA (Optional for Clinton Supporters)

It is unfortunate that in this case past patterns have undermined Senator Clinton's message here. It doesn't help any of us. What I find more and more compelling about Senator Obama is that he intends to fight trivialization. When faced with the controversy of Reverend Wright he stood his ground and fought back on the trivialities. If you disagreed with him you had to disagree with him on broader themes. He intends to engage the country mobilize the masses and use the media as a tool. He intends to community organize the entire country. He is engineering a new methodology and he is not backing down. He goes to the core of the issue and trivializes those who would trivialize us.
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blogslut Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Apr-08-08 12:28 AM
Response to Original message
1. Sigh
The story of the young mother is just a wee bit too personal for me. I can't and won't comment on it other than what I've just said.

But you're right. The media would rather pick apart petty details than concentrate on the true horrors going on. People are hurting. Soldiers are dying. Iraq is virtually destroyed and the vultures are picking the bones of the millions dead.

But, no. The MSM would rather cover bowling and waste resources on whether or not a candidate's human interest story is true.

It is sickening.
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grantcart Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Apr-08-08 12:31 AM
Response to Reply #1
3. but there are a lot of people in here and there are millions involved in this
campaign. More people have contributed in this campaign than in all of the other campaigns in history. People are standing in line for hours there is a palpable hunger. People want more.
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blogslut Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Apr-08-08 12:38 AM
Response to Reply #3
9. You'll get no argument from me
I give my state as an example. If we can keep this momentum going, come November, Texas will turn blue.

The massive amounts of Democrats voting is the most under-reported story of the year.

In a way, I'm kind of glad big media is ignoring that fact. I'll be waiting to see the faces of all those drop-jawed blowhards when we flood the polls.
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napoleon_in_rags Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Apr-08-08 12:32 AM
Response to Reply #1
5. Its sickening to see it so much here as well.
I mean, there are valid critiques of Hillary in her support of IWR and NAFTA and such, because these had sweeping effects on people's lives. But the shit about her having the wrong facial expression at the place MLK was shot, this, bookbaggate and snipergate (as well as the silly critiques of Obama like the "sweetie" comment) are just as bad as any nonsense the MSM is picking apart.
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napoleon_in_rags Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Apr-08-08 12:29 AM
Response to Original message
2. I've been disappointed that people on the left seem to be running with the...
...attacks over the story of the lady being false. The implication is that Hillary is lying about how bad the health care system is, that it really works fine. Its a republican hit against healthcare reform as well as Hillary.
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grantcart Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Apr-08-08 12:32 AM
Response to Reply #2
4. welcome to DU
there has been a very intense debate in here for the last three months and some of us have lost a little perspective.
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napoleon_in_rags Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Apr-08-08 12:34 AM
Response to Reply #4
7. Thank you.
There seem to be ample positives here to make up for that. :)
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pocoloco Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Apr-08-08 12:34 AM
Response to Original message
6. 7 soldiers died in Iraq yesterday and 3 today
More blood on her hands, Any truth in the NIE papers??
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grantcart Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Apr-08-08 12:40 AM
Response to Reply #6
10. hooray for our side
who is our side?
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WillYourVoteBCounted Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Apr-08-08 12:36 AM
Response to Original message
8. sadly, when a candidate loses creditability, they hurt the message
the real message should be that if you live in the US, you have the right to health care.

Not a right to health insurance, but to health care.

Hillary has told so many major lies and some big fibs, and appears so contrived and deliberate
a nd manipulative, that she has discredited herself.

Along the way, she hurt the message.

She may have good policies, but her ability to get them put into reality is the problem.

Each time she opens her mouth, many will wonder if she is
a. making it up (Tuzla style) or
b. telling something that might not have been fact checked.

The media should be doing a story about the conditions the deceased mother and child
faced, but that isn't happening now.
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bhikkhu Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Apr-08-08 12:49 AM
Response to Reply #8
11. You raise a point - when the media loses credibility, what happens?
Nothing. People seem to watch anyway, nobody cares and its on to the next entertaining pseudo-story. As Grantcart says, we get the media we deserve.

For the record, I pulled the plug in disgust (canceled the cable, actually) in the run up to the second gulf war, and feel like a more intelligent and informed person for it.
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Recursion Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Apr-08-08 06:34 AM
Response to Reply #11
26. Or, bloggers, comedy central, and youtube eat their lunch (nt)
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SaveOurDemocracy Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Apr-08-08 01:07 AM
Response to Original message
12. Thank you grantcart. Issues matter,

:kick:
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boppers Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Apr-08-08 01:21 AM
Response to Original message
13. "I DON'T CARE ABOUT FACTS!"
"Spin matters more to me.

I don't want the truth getting in the way, distracting me from reality.

Poll ratings are more important.

I don't want to know that not only am I lying about the problem, I'm also lying about the solution.

I need super-delegates."

Uhm, well, considering Hillary's solution would have been to tax or otherwise punish uninsured people, it seems her solution would have been to leave a (fictitious) uninsured mother dying anyways.
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grantcart Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Apr-08-08 01:45 AM
Response to Reply #13
16. well of course I think that hyperbole has gone very far here.
Senator Clinton wants universal care.
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MercutioATC Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Apr-08-08 01:28 AM
Response to Original message
14. Nobody's arguing that the media's focus is whacked. However, the facts remain.
Clinton used a story to illustrate the plight of the uninsured. That's a good thing to focus on.

The problem is that the woman in the story WAS insured.

While the argument is still valid, Clinton told another inaccurate tale.


I don't think she made this mistake intentionally. This isn't a "sniper fire" thing. However, she failed to do due diligence and vet the story before she used it...much as she failed to vet the "Obama/Canada/NAFTA" story before she used it. Even giving her every benefit of the doubt, it speaks to her credibility.

To claim that lack of health insurance is a real problem is commendable.

To suggest that Clinton "told the truth" in this case is simply incorrect...even if she did it unintentionally.
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grantcart Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Apr-08-08 01:43 AM
Response to Reply #14
15. I never said that she 'told the truth'
I did say that she speaks Truth, meaning that she was speaking to the greater truth of the situation.

The larger point however is that all of the details are irrelevent. There are a few thousand of us that really care about these issues and we are carving each other up over it. The Obama side has won. We no longer need to score points. It is time for us to start concentrating on a broader more inclusive view that will be more advantageous for us in the General Election. We should now start to emphasize our commonalities and not be so proccupied with the what seperates us and the Clinton die hards. Those that are resistant at this late stage are not going to be persuaded by anything we write. So we can create a more condusive atmosphere and wait. We can still argue but it seems prudent to find opportunities to defend Senator Clinton against unreasonable attacks.

A prominent Clinton supporter has just posted an extensive story about Obama's grandmother. Some of us are trying to lay the ground work for the stage that will soon be upon us.

There is in fact a more critical point of comparison in the post and it seems to have been to subtle. Senator Clinton has decided to yield to the trivialization and is dropping the use of the story and moving on. Senator Obama, when faced with a similar situation when the media was trivializing s more significant point took them head on. In turn he trivialized the media. It conused Fox so much that they ended up in a couple of on screen fights. While I was defending Senator Clinton from what I saw as a completely unfair criticism I also intended to gently show that Senator Obama seemed to want to confront and overwhelm the forces that want to trivialize political issues. Obviously I failed to achieve this more nuanced objective.
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SemiCharmedQuark Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Apr-08-08 01:49 AM
Response to Reply #15
18. I think she was making a good point.
Edited on Tue Apr-08-08 01:50 AM by SemiCharmedQuark
Actually, what disturbed me more than anything else about this story, was what her family said in the young woman's defense. They said something like they disliked the fact that the young woman was being portrayed as a "welfare queen" or "deadbeat" who didn't have insurance. This implies that only deadbeats lack insurance.


Sidenote: I do appreciate your posts. Keep up the good work.
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grantcart Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Apr-08-08 01:55 AM
Response to Reply #18
21. again in Hillary's case she never knew or attempted to identify the
person or the family
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SemiCharmedQuark Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Apr-08-08 01:57 AM
Response to Reply #21
22. Yeah. As I said, it was a good point.
And personally having struggled with issues due to no insurance, I am well aware that the idea is not far fetched.
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TLM Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Apr-08-08 01:47 AM
Response to Original message
17. Nothing but spin....


The fact that the healthcare system sucks, doesn't make anything Hiallry said true. That's like saying that the fact people get murdered, means the story that Hillary murdered vince foster was true in a symbolic sense.

Bullshit spin because you know how bad this kind of crap makes her look.

Be it about sniper or pregnant women being turned out in the street and left to die because she had no insurance... BS is BS.


Clinton's only defense, and it is legit, is that she did not know the story was false and is only guilty of repeating an inaccurate story, not fabricating it herself, like in the sniper situation. At worst Clinton was showing poor judgment in not bothering to check the story out first, but that's all.

The woman was insured, and wasn't denied care anywhere.

Her infant did not die from lack of coverage or as a result of being denied care, nor did the mother.

This is a tragic situation that hillary supporters had no problem with Hillary using for her own political gain... but when people notice the story is inaccurate and call her on it, suddenly the subject is off limits?


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grantcart Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Apr-08-08 01:50 AM
Response to Reply #17
19. where did anyone say that is off limits?
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johnnydrama Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Apr-08-08 01:55 AM
Response to Original message
20. the power of Sicko
is that all the people in the movie had health INSURANCE. Not health care, but health insurance.

Her telling a story about somebody who didn't have health insurance, who actually did, messes up her whole point.

She (and Obama to be fair), don't want to get rid of health insurance, and give people universal health care, they want to make the health insurance industry bigger.

So we'll have more people with illnesses turned down, because some corporate bean counter decides not it's too expensive for the company, and they'll take their chances.
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grantcart Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Apr-08-08 02:02 AM
Response to Reply #20
23. your correct
I believe that going to a universal single payer system is judged to be too big a step for our system and that they are going in a first step of universal health insurance and then more control and eventually single payer not for profit.

I know that others will disagree but I think that the reason that other industrialized countries have the single payer not for profit system is entirely due to the parlimentarian system which gives the majority legislative coalition virtual dictatorial powers for a while to run the executive system. It enables them the power, for a time, to make sweeping systemic overhauls.

Our division of power and checks and balances makes it impossible, IMHO, to achieve anything that sweeping.

The more subliminal point I was trying to, and obviously failed to, make was that when faced with somewhat similar challenges Senator Clinton decided to stop using the story and move on and Senator Obama returned to the controversy and rather than package it and 'move on' he took on the media and in turn made them look small and trivial.
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JoFerret Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Apr-08-08 06:01 AM
Response to Original message
24. Fantastic pic
Tthe real issues are DU or the media but the messed up country we live in.
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struck_dumb Donating Member (87 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Apr-08-08 06:29 AM
Response to Original message
25. I disagree specifically

"If you disagreed with him you had to disagree with him on broader themes. He intends to engage the country mobilize the masses and use the media as a tool. He intends to community organize the entire country. He is engineering a new methodology and he is not backing down. He goes to the core of the issue and trivializes those who would trivialize us"

So, It's politics as usual for Barry, because according to you he wants to do what every other politician says they want to to. As regards disagreeing with him on broader themes, this voter disagrees with him very specifically on the Wright issue. I don't reckon MLK would have recognised Wright's rantings as Christian sermons either. I don't reckon Jesse Jackson does either.
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Political Heretic Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Apr-08-08 06:38 AM
Response to Original message
27. Hospital thing - trivial, accident. Bosnia thing - lie. Columbia - lie. First War Critic - lie
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