Idiot Republicans Quoting Reagan On Health Care

Since Ronald Reagan speaks to Republicans from the grave, you'd think that now that he's in heaven surrounded by nothing but good, honest souls, he'd have come to terms with some of the dumbass stuff he said that turned out not to be true, and would now be sharing the wisdom with his legacy of looney-toons back on Earth.

Unless he's not in heaven. Hmmm.....

In this particular case, let's revisit his 1961 infomercial lambasting Medicare on behalf of corporate giant GE. Steve Benen points out some examples in this Washington Monthly article where he takes Jonah Goldberg to task for using the Gipper as an example.

Benen writes:

According to Reagan, Medicare would lead federal officials to dictate where physicians could practice medicine, and open the door to government control over where Americans were allowed to live. In fact, Reagan warned that if Medicare became law, there was a real possibility that the federal government would control where Americans go and what they do for a living.

Wow. Really? That's bizarre.

Jonathan Chait also weighs in:

You'd think conservatives would be embarrassed about this sort of talk. After all, can there be anybody who doesn't live in a militia compound who believes the passage of Medicare represented the death knell of that freedom in America? Does anybody think this business about the government dictating what city doctors live in has come true? Yet conservatives continue to trumpet it.

Why? Reagan's diatribe is "still fresh" because it's exactly the same sort of rhetoric conservatives employ against health care reform today. I imagine his readers are supposed to consider it "fresh" because they're supposed to substitute "Obamacare" in their head every time Reagan refers to Medicare. This allows them to sustain a mental condition wherein hysterical conservative predictions about the last social reform are forgotten in the specific, but remembered in the general and applied to the next social reform.

Everything old is new again. And it's obvious that in the absence of ideas, Republicans can always fall back on discredited rhetoric from the past.