Some of you may have seen Scott Brown’s latest ad, in which he accuses Elizabeth Warren of “raiding Medicare.” This is based on the $716 billion, over ten years, saved as a result of the Obamacare act. Forget that Elizabeth Warren was not in the Senate when the ACA was passed. And forget that the “cuts” are simply reductions in overpayments to insurance companies and providers and reductions in the wildly inefficient “Medicare Advantage.” The GOP spends over forty years calling for more cost control in Medicare, and the minute they get some they scream “death panels” and “raiding Medicare.” Their hypocrisy knows no bounds.
But let’s not forget that this worked very well for them in 2010. And, even now, the Springfield Republican’s website purports to “fact check” this ad but essentially devolves into he said-she said with no actual conclusion expressed about the veracity of the claim. You see, they say, both sides have studies backing them up. It’s just that Brown’s study, the Pioneer Institute study, was done by his own former legislative director on Beacon Hill, Josh Archambault. MassLive may not be up to making a true-or-false call, but this one has been debunked by Politifact, giving a “Pants on Fire” to two New Jersey Republican Congressmen who made a similar claim in August.
MassLive does label “misleading” a mailer from the Mass. GOP accusing Warren of pretending to oppose Wall Street, but really lining up to give them bailout money via TARP. She said we couldn’t let our financial system go off a cliff, but TARP should have been done differently. The Mass. GOP is engaging in another cynical bet that undecided voters won’t get policy nuance. Scott says he would never have bailed out the financial sector, but that’s easy to say when one was not in the U.S. Congress as the Dow and the economy at large were in free-fall.
Sigh. More lies to dispel on the trail. Scott Brown truly does sound like a standard-issue Rove-Romney-Ryan Republican these days, doesn’t he?
