The Republican Party has been exposed, their contempt for the American People can be seen by all

[ck4829]

Earlier this week, a memo written by right-wing message guru Frank Luntz was leaked instructing the Republican Party on how to frame the health care debate in order to defeat progressive reform. Since his pivotal role in helping craft Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America, Luntz has had an impressive record of cloaking regressive and conservative policies with carefully poll-tested language. For instance, Luntz is credited with persuading Republicans to use the intentionally misleading term “death tax” to describe the estate tax.

Luntz’s health care memo urges Republicans to denounce progressive reforms as ideas based upon a “committee of Washington bureaucrats.” The memo then calls for Republicans to strongly emphasize the “protection of the personalized doctor-patient relationship” because this approach allows Americans to believe that the GOP is doing something to “protect and improve something good“.

(If only health care was about the doctor-patient relationship, today for far too many people, it has become the doctor-patient-insurance company relationship, an abusive relationship which many Americans can't afford to have for much longer.)

Luntz’s strategy is to “obstruct health reform by ignoring what Obama is actually offering.” In all fairness, Luntz is very candid about his strategy of misdirection. Since Republicans currently have absolutely no plan for reforming health care, Luntz says to avoid projecting a policy plan and instead focus on language that “captures not just what Americans want to see but exactly what they want to hear.”

(You hear that, there is NO plan, no alternative. Republicans only want to preserve the status quo in the battle for health care reform, the status quo which would be the profits-over-patients system of health care.)

http://thinkprogress.org/2009/05/07/gop-health-frankluntz/

[AndyA]

1. The Dems should strike back with their own carefully crafted language.

When referring to the "personalized doctor-patient relationship" they should remind people that such a relationship only exists for the wealthy. For everyone else, it is indeed the "doctor-patient-insurance company relationship" or there is no "docter-patient relationship" at all due to no health care.

Dems need to remind everyone that it is ultimately the insurance company that determines the level of care today, based on their need to make a profit. So, our health care has little to do with the quality of care, or compassion, but it is all due to bottom line profit and loss. And after what we've seen on Wall Street, that's a dirty, dirty concept to Americans today. Everyone now realizes that abuse runs rampant in these big corporations.

[unpossibles]

2. how telling is it that the GOP has a guru for how to sell their bullshit

but don't bother hiring a guru to tell them how to have better policies?

And also, that their followers will fall for this next line of bullshit yet again, without even questioning whether it's a new direction or just a rebranding?

The New GOP: coming up with a new way to sell old bullshit. I guess it's hard to do anything else, when their heads are so far up their own butts (and Rush Limbaugh's) they can't see anything but the same old crap.

[dixiegrrrrl]

3. Happy to rec this. Needs to be mailed to all our Repub and DINO "friends"/family.

God bless 'em.
I have friends from a long long time ago go, in another "skin", who really are sweet and not critical thinkers.
Yet complain about the job losses, economy, now, in puzzled e-mails.
( Hitting *forward* key )

[bushmeister0]

4. protection of the personalized doctor-patient relationship

Sounds like the same BS our managers at Borders used to pull out any time the subject of unions came up. A union would be a "third party" who get in between the employee/manager relationship, which, naturally, is a totally co-equal "partnership."

Same old double-talk.

[butterfly77]

5. KICK!