It’s the Party that stood behind Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. The same crew that chummed the water for the birthers. The ding dongs that trafficked in death panel rumors. The RNCC is asking Comcast to pull a television commercial because it doesn’t support the GOP version of the truth.
Here’s the link. I couldn’t figure out how to embed it. If you all can embed it, I’d appreciate it.
They say the definition of chutzpah is killing your parents and then begging for mercy on the grounds that you’re an orphan; in this case, the murder was only figurative–a budget resolution (some call it the Ryan Plan) that would end Medicare (but keep it’s name for old time’s sake). The commercial has got the RNCC is begging for mercy.
The National Republican Congressional Committee, which oversees House races for the GOP, has written a sharply-worded letter demanding that a New Hampshire TV station yank an ad making that claim. Whether the ad gets taken down could help set a precedent for whether other stations will air Dem TV ads making this argument, which is expected to be a central message for Dems in the 2012 elections.
The NRCC letter was provided to me by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which is airing the ad on WMUR against GOP Rep. Charlie Bass. The letter — which calls on Comcast Boston to take down the ad and is unusually detailed and emphatic — reflects how badly Republicans want a halt to these Dem attacks. Here’s the letter’s core argument:
The Budget Resolution as approved by the U.S. House of Representatives does NOT end Medicare. In fact, the Budget Resolution makes no changes at all to Medicare for current or near retirees, as none of the Medicare-related provisions in the Budget Resolution would even take effect until 2022. This fact makes the Advertisement especially misleading, as the woman featured in the Advertisement is a current Medicare beneficiary, and would not have her Medicare benefits ended, or even changed in any way, under the Budget Resolution…
Additionally, the Budget Resolution ensures that Americans aged 54 and younger will still have Medicare when they retire by implementing a new, sustainable model of Medicare. This new version of Medicare would actually REQUIRE insurance companies to GUARANTEE coverage for seniors
The RNCC’s imploratory letter also mentions Politifact, which, though useful, offers an oversimplified, binary literalist verision of the truth. Here’s from the Politifact post:
Both Republicans and Democrats would no doubt agree that Ryan’s plan for Medicare is a dramatic change of course. But we don’t agree with the ad’s contention that the proposal ends Medicare. Additionally, images in the ad imply that current seniors will have to go back to work to pay for changes to the program. That’s not true either. It’s actually those 54 and younger who will need extra money. With its scenes of seniors going back to work, it seems intended to frighten those who are currently enrolled in Medicare. Finally, the Republicans’ vote was symbolic and didn’t actually change the program. When you add up all those distortions, we find the ad highly misleading.
There’s no room for context or implication for Politifact. It’s all Joe Friday and “Just the facts, ma’am.” And as Sargent notes, plenty of folks have pointed out the fact that the Ryan Plan does effectively end Medicare in all but name (a subtlety lost on Politifact):
“The plan would replace our current system, in which the government pays major health costs, with a voucher system, in which seniors would, in effect, be handed a coupon and told to go find private coverage,” Paul Krugman wrote recently. Similar cases have been made by Steve Benen , Josh Marshall, and Atrios, among others.
“There’s nothing even slightly misleading about calling this an effort to end Medicare,” Matthew Yglesias wrote recently, adding that it’s “important for all progressives on the Internet to draw a line in the sand under this one.”
I agree with Yglesias, but by Republican standards, this is advertisement has extraordinarily high truth value.
Is it really lost on the GOP that most of us who are nowhere near 65 yet have every expectation of getting there eventually? Of course there are those of us for whom the idea of Medicare reform includes removing the minimum age entirely, but I digress.
With any luck, here is the embedded clip. The trick is to copy the “embed html”, then remove the “object” tag and leave behind the “embed” tag.
The party writing letters to media, demanding the censorship of the other side. Sounds like the letters Hugo Chavez and Vladimir Putin tend to write.