Dear Dr. Bones,
In the ever-immortal words of
| If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be ‘cause I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. |
That jive may sound vaguely familiar to you, sir, and there are good reasons why it should.
Exactly how the Daughters of Virtue & Sons of Wisdom (L.L.C.) baked the above poison pretzel are given in a piece the Talking Points Memo comrades have, with admirable restraint and impartiality, titled "Misleading Romney Ad Makes A Frankenstein Monster Of Obama Quote." [1] The details of the TPM detwistification are not entirely satisfactory, but Paddy and Eye agree that to explain at a word-by-word level how one piece of prose was neo-travestied into another and do so in yet a third piece of prose is likely to end up with a product unreadable by anybody but professional students of rhetoric and agitprop.
Happy days.
--JHM
___
[1] That's by way of a funny as far as we are concerned, but Comrade Sarlin, the TPM scribbler, does indeed insist on sticking in a little deadpan fairembalance:
| Selective editing has been a recurring issue for the campaign. (...) Romney has also been a victim of the practice: few, if any, Democratic attacks on his “I like being able to fire people” line noted that it was about being able to choose a health care provider. |
Paddy and Eye do not read many "Democratic attacks," passing them over on the theory that we already know what we think and do not need to be reinforced by hearing a thousand other decent political grown-ups more or less agree. Whereas Republicanines and kiddie selfservatives say the darndest (and thus far more entertaining) things.
M. Coriolanus Pompo does not look very good, however, even given the benefit of every possible doubt about that exuberance. Very few patients this side of the nine-digit annual-income bracket can approach quacks and hospitals and medical-insurance salespersons as one who possesses full powers of hiring and firing.
Leaving Pompo aside, pretty well every whightist AEIdeologue who expects ‘competition’ to wreak wunners in this subsector forgets that patients often tend to be in poor health, and therefore not always at their best when it comes to comparison shopping for cancer spas and cardiac diagnosticians. Furthermore, many technically healthy persons also tend to start feeling a little sick and flustered when forced to think about quacks and quackery and sickness and d**th.
It is easy to see how such inattention could be exploited to improve the productivity of health-insurance Corporations in particular, but pretty silly (or deeply self-cynical) to pretend that competition has much to do with it. Most likely the bewildered valetudinarian or hypochondriac will gross overpay the first huckster who actually gets at her so as to be able to stop thinking dark thoughts. Only one in a million would cheerfully go on to see eleven more hucksters so as to make sure that Competition can do her thing properly.
When Catoholics and Hoovervillains and Heritagitarians assure their dupes an' marks that Competition an’ the Magic Market will work in medicine the same way they work in consumer electronics, one can be hard put not to think that their freelordships are simply lyin' through their pricey dental work. Probably this is not the case, but to explain why not would not fit in the e-margin.
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