Dunsmore: There are lies and then there are lies

[cali]

Editor’s note: This commentary by retired ABC News diplomatic correspondent Barrie Dunsmore first appeared in the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus and Rutland Herald Sunday edition. All his columns can be found on his website,

The Tea Party emerged as a tangible political force in the summer of 2009, aided and abetted by FOX News. The anger, which was its signature in town meetings around the country, was stoked by the likes of Sarah Palin, the erstwhile vice presidential candidate. She was the first to suggest that the universal health care plan being considered included a “death panel” of bureaucrats, who would make the life and death decisions about who was “worthy of medical care.” She went even further by suggesting that under the president’s plan that panel would decide if her son with Down syndrome should be euthanized. Immediately, the usual suspects — Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Michele Bachmann and FOX News anchors – took up the death panel chant, further inciting all those Tea-Partiers yelling and waving their fists at town meetings that August.

However, fear of death panels went mainstream when Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, joined the fray. Grassley had the credibility these other critics didn’t have, because he was on a six-person Senate Finance Committee panel formed to produce a bipartisan universal health care plan. So it was big news when at one of his own town meetings in Iowa, Grassley told the restive crowd, “You have every right to fear … we should not have a government plan to decide when to pull the plug on grandma.”

A few weeks ago I attended a small, private dinner in New York City for Olympia Snowe, the three-term moderate Republican senator from Maine who decided last year not to seek re-election because she could no longer tolerate the toxic partisanship of Washington. As it happens, Sen. Snowe had also been a member of that Senate Finance Committee gang of six of which Sen. Grassley had been the ranking Republican. In discussing the group’s attempts to reach a bipartisan deal, she spoke of the negative impact of what Grassley had said on this panel’s efforts. She said she had called him and told him there was nothing in the plans they were discussing that remotely came close to death panels or pulling the plug on grandma. To her astonishment his response was, “I know.”

Actually, about two weeks after Grassley had made his original charge, he appeared on CBS “Face the Nation.” In a long convoluted answer he essentially recanted what he had told his town meeting. But the damage had already been done. At the end of the summer of ’09 — in spite of numerous mainstream media reports quoting a wide range of academics and physicians debunking the death panel myth – 85 percent of Americans had heard about it, and a third of those believed it. At the end of 2009, Politifact designated the Death Panel Myth “The Lie Of The Year.”

I raise the contentious word lie, because in the past two weeks President Barack Obama has been accused of lying to the American people about the benefits of Obamacare. Mitt Romney whose casual relationship with the truth was a feature of his 2012 presidential campaign, called the president a liar on “Meet the Press.” There is hardly a Republican office-holder in the country who has not by now also done so. At issue, of course, is Obama’s frequently stated promise that if you liked your current medical insurance policy, you would be allowed to keep it, period. That turns out not to be true, at least, not exactly. Many people who buy their own health insurance on the individual market — less than 5 percent of those who have insurance — are evidently being informed by their insurers that their policies have been canceled. In many cases it’s because their coverage falls below the minimum standards set by the Affordable Care Act. They may be able to get better coverage, and even have their premiums subsidized. But because the ACA website is still not working properly they have no way of knowing what their options are.

I believe that presidents should not lie. However I also believe in proportionality. Lies that do great harm to many people – such as starting a war under false pretenses with enormous costs in human lives and national treasure, in my view represent a great sin than say, lies about one’s sex life. Republicans in Congress were quite happy to give President George W. Bush a total pass in the first instance — but forced an impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton in the second.

I believe that presidents should not lie. However I also believe in proportionality. Lies that do great harm to many people – such as starting a war under false pretenses with enormous costs in human lives and national treasure, in my view represent a great sin than say, lies about one’s sex life. Republicans in Congress were quite happy to give President George W. Bush a total pass in the first instance — but forced an impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton in the second.

Likewise, many of those who are crying crocodile tears for those whose health care policies have been canceled are the very people who are fighting beyond all reason to kill Obamacare. That would deprive 30 million-50 million Americans of any health insurance at all, and leave many millions more still subject to the capricious, profit-driven whims of the insurance companies about what is or is not covered.

That is the status quo to which the Obamacare haters want to return, and they have consistently lied – not to mention taken the country to the brink of economic disaster — to achieve that highly dubious goal.

In fact, the framework for Obamacare is the creation of the Conservative Heritage Foundation, supported by mainstream Republicans as a counter to then President Clinton’s health care proposal. It only became “socialized medicine” when that “Kenyan-born,” “Muslim,” “Communist,” “usurper” forced it on this country. Yes. There are lies and then there are lies.

http://vtdigger.org/2013/11/10/dunsmore-lies-lies/

I have permission to post the entire article

[malaise]

1. Excellent read especially this

Likewise, many of those who are crying crocodile tears for those whose health care policies have been canceled are the very people who are fighting beyond all reason to kill Obamacare. That would deprive 30 million-50 million Americans of any health insurance at all, and leave many millions more still subject to the capricious, profit-driven whims of the insurance companies about what is or is not covered.

That is the status quo to which the Obamacare haters want to return, and they have consistently lied – not to mention taken the country to the brink of economic disaster — to achieve that highly dubious goal.




K & R

[cali]

4. agreed. It's a good piece. We're lucky Barry retired up here

and writes, on occasion, or vtdigger.

fro wiki:

Barrie Dunsmore is a journalist who covered foreign affairs for ABC News for 30 years. From 1965 to 1995, Dunsmore reported from Washington and more than one hundred countries on virtually every major international event: from wars, to summits, to the policies of seven U.S. presidents from Johnson to Clinton. From the height of the Cold War until its end, Dunsmore was regularly present when American presidents and Soviet leaders met. He was with Israeli troops when they captured the Suez Canal from Egypt in 1967 and when General Ariel Sharon put the city of Suez under siege in 1973. He was on Henry Kissinger's Middle East Shuttles in the aftermath of the 1973 war and was with President Jimmy Carter in the Middle East six years later when he finally cemented the historic Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty. Dunsmore covered the fall of South Vietnam in1975, conducted the first American television interview with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and was with three former presidents (Nixon, Ford and Carter) who attended Sadat's funeral. He watched SCUD missiles fall on Saudi Arabia during the 1991 Gulf War. He had a worldwide scoop on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and he did the first American television report on the destruction of the Amazon Rainforest in 1987.

As ABC's senior foreign correspondent from 1984–91, Dunsmore focused on events in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union as the Iron Curtain began to disintegrate. Throughout 1989, he witnessed dramatic moments in the collapse of communism and reported live for ABC News Nightline from the Berlin Wall the night it began to fall.

After retirement in 1995, Dunsmore became a Fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He received the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University's Edward Weintal Prize in 1995. He now lives in Charlotte, Vermont, and writes a Sunday column for the Rutland Herald.

Barrie Dunsmore is the author of "There and Back, Commentary by a Former Foreign Correspondent" published in 2011 by Wind Ridge Publishing, Inc.

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said of Dunsmore's book, "This compilation of essays dating from the weeks when he accompanied me on the Midest shuttles in the early 1970's, to his commentaries on the Arab Spring will mark Dunsmore firmly as one of the significant journalists of our era."

Currently, Dunsmore lives in Charlotte, Vermont and writes a Sunday column for the Rutland Herald.[1]

<snip>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrie_Dunsmore

[malaise]

7. Well he sure puts Lara Logan

to shame

That said any endorsement from Kissinger is troubling.

[mdbl]

2. What do you expect from the party of hypocrisy

Republicans have no shame and the news media has become completely complicit in lending credibility to those who deserve none, like Chuck Grassley and Sarah Palin, two of the biggest morans ever to disgrace their public offices. If any news outlets had credibility, they would never quote the handful of right wing news sites or channels except to debunk their lies or exaggerations. That would truly be a public service.

[liberal N proud]

3. The baggers and pukes are using those accusations as if he was the only one who ever told a lie.

[zbdent]

5. and they're playing to the people who, despite all the evidence and all but notarized

statements saying "Obama's birth certificate is real and shows he was born in Hawaii", ...

they won't acknowledge, let alone accept, reality.

[Botany]

9. Yup!

Or that 2 different Hawaiian papers published his birth announcement or
that the country they say he is from wasn't a country in 1961.

Independence
- from the United Kingdom 12 December 1963
- Republic declared 12 December 1964 (from wiki)

[hue]

6. It just goes to show the extent of their mass hatred towards an African America President.

[The Wizard]

8. Not to mention

many of those appearing at town hall meetings in August 09 were paid $20, given a script and a free bus ride to the event, all funded by the nefarious Koch brothers. Who can forget the sign "Keep your government hands off my Medicare."
Republicans have made exploiting fear and ignorance an art form that would make Goebbels blush.