The establishment “news” media have a standard procedure when congressional Democrats or the President have been so incredibly dishonest that it cannot be ignored—they write stories claiming BOTH sides of the aisle have been fudging.
A classic example is this morning’s Politico piece titled, “Both sides push health-debate myths.” The article admits that Obama has been lying on reform, but falsely claims that perfectly factual GOP assertions are equally disingenuous:
To hear President Barack Obama tell it these days, the Oval Office has been wide open to Republicans on health care reform for the past year.
And Republicans claim Democrats locked them out of the talks from the get-go, writing hyperpartisan bills that catered to their base.
Neither is true.
In reality, of course, there is no parity between these two claims. The first is a transparent lie that the President has been telling since he took office and the second is a copiously documented and irrefutable fact.
Regarding the latter, the author of the Politico piece (Carrie Budoff Brown) attempts to support her claim that Republicans were included by transcribing preposterous DNC talking points such as the following:
The way many Senate Democrats saw it, Republicans had more influence last summer in writing the Finance Committee bill than they did.
Brown apparently failed to notice that most of the serious bill-writing was done by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi in closed-door sessions to which no Republicans were invited. She continues with this howler:
If anyone was sidelined at this stage of the health care reform debate, it was progressives, whose impatience with the bipartisan process often boiled over when Baucus met with Democratic Finance Committee members during tense private sessions.
Progressive “impatience” had nothing to do with an imaginary ”bipartisan process.” It was about Baucus’ refusal to include socialistic provisions that would have killed the bill before it got out of committee.
The rest of the Politico piece is devoted to similar nonsense. Brown continues parroting her DNC talking points and wraps up with a hilarious straw man exercise that she presents as myth-busting.
Ironically, a major contributor to the failure of Obamacare has been just this kind of dishonest journalism. Not only do the voters not trust the President or Congress on health care, they don’t trust the “news” media.
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