Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [9]
And what’s interesting is that under the whole death panel scenario, you know, you’ll be an 87-year-old who’s paid his taxes all his life, but they’re not going to give you the procedure because they think it’s more in the country’s interest to give it to a 38-year-old illegal immigrant who shouldn’t even be here in the first place.30
The idea that illegal immigrants would receive health care benefits at the expense of American citizens so captured some conservatives’ imaginations that when President Obama declared in a speech to a joint session of Congress that the Democratic plan would not insure illegal immigrants, Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) interrupted him, shouting, “You lie!”
Who else wants a piece of Grandma’s health care? The homosexuals, of course. A petition to “Stop Obama’s Socialist Health Care Takeover” warns:
Your tax-dollars will pay for preferential hiring of homosexual hospital administrators, who distribute $50,000 grants to gender-confused activists for unneeded elective surgery to mutilate their own genitals (and force Christian doctors to perform it).31
Imagine, America’s seniors may soon start dying because their health care benefits have been rationed to illegal transsexual immigrants on welfare.
The redistribution of benefits is only the most obvious way in which the health care bill is said to discriminate against white people. The bill also includes a stealth tax on tanning salons. “This is a race-based tax,” declaimed right-wing radio host Jim Quinn, “and it took this administration with a racial chip on its shoulder to come up with a tax that only taxes white people.”32
In addition to persecution fantasies, the health care debate has also been burdened by an unhealthy dose of the slippery slope component of O’Reilly’s formula. For instance, on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, the former director of Faith Based Initiatives in the Bush administration, Jim Towey, denounced a Veterans Administration end-of-life guide he called a “death book,” stating, “This is a slippery slope that kind of makes people . . . feel like they’re a burden and that they should do the decent thing and die.”33 Glenn Beck as usual took the argument a step further. On one program he described how economic conditions led Nazi Germany to implement a eugenics program that sterilized and executed hundreds of thousands of handicapped people. The same, he darkly suggested, could happen here if economic conditions worsened. He even wept on air at the thought of what could happen to his daughter with cerebral palsy.34 The implication: Obama’s health care policy will cause us to slide down the slippery slope of devaluing human life, and then an economic crisis will lead us to begin murdering the disabled.
The Regular Schmo
Where O’Reilly the “T-Warrior” is angles and scowls and ego, Beck the “regular schmo” is doughy and goofy and self-deprecating. His head is constantly in motion, nodding and shaking like a bobblehead in an earthquake. He crinkles his forehead, stares quizzically into space, sticks out his tongue in concentration, and occasionally breaks into tears. His voice travels from grave undertone to shrill dismay to angry shout and becomes nasal and pinched when he parodies his ideological adversaries. He employs props to underscore his points—cutting a watermelon in half to criticize an environmental bill (“green on the outside, and inside it’s deep, communist red”)35 or dowsing a guest with liquid from a gas can and then lighting a match (“President Obama, why don’t you just set us on fire?”).36
It’s an entertaining shtick, but the physical comedy belies paranoid illusions far darker than O’Reilly’s Christmas fantasy. Beck applies the secret plot element of O’Reilly’s formula with a level of zeal and dedication unmatched on cable television. He places the masterminds of the plot in the White House, alleging that Obama has filled the executive branch with radical “czars” who are not accountable to voters: “A shadow government