NY Times Got Played

Un.be.lievable!

John Cole: The NY Times Does Not Recognize Cause and Effect Relationships

In a piece titled “Calm, but Moved to Be Heard on Health Care” at the NY Times, we learn the following:

He skipped the antiwar protests of his college years, took a job as a regional salesman of paper and chemical products, and built for himself a quiet life of family and church (and hunting and fishing) in his rural hometown in southwest Georgia.

But on Thursday, Mr. Collier drove more than an hour down Route 19 to attend a health care forum in Albany, Ga., being held by his congressman, Representative Sanford D. Bishop Jr., a Democrat serving his ninth term.

To his wife’s astonishment, as the session drew into its third hour, Mr. Collier rose to take the microphone and firmly, but courteously, urged Mr. Bishop to oppose the health care legislation being written in Washington.

He told Mr. Bishop that his wife of 36 years had survived breast cancer through early detection and treatment, and that he feared that her care would be rationed if the disease returned.

I wonder why they think that? Where could they have gotten those ideas? Oh:

The Colliers are committed conservatives who have voted Republican in presidential elections since 1980. They receive much of their information from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh’s radio program and Matt Drudge’s Web site.

What a bizarre coincidence. You know what would be awesome? If there was this thing called a newspaper, maybe even an allegedly liberal one, like, say, the NY Times, who when describing people like the Colliers and their irrational fears in long stories, would take a paragraph, just a paragraph, to point out that their fears are completely unfounded and that no bill has any rationing plans. That would be, you know, awesome.

And what is even sadder is that the rest of the article points out why they should be strong, strong advocates of reform. Instead, they are opposing the only other game in town because of the power of the mighty Wurlitzer and the misinformation campaign from the right.

Time to break out the foam fingers, again. USA! USA! USA!

*** Update ***

Also, this. When did Rupert Murdoch buy the Times?

Joe Klein adds:

Now, the story was a bit of a phony. The fellow in question admitted to receiving most of his news from Fox, Rush and Drudge--which means that he never experiences actual news, at all. But still, you wonder where he got such a bizarre notion about Obama's health care intentions--especially since any plan that passes will dramatically improve breast cancer treatment for a great many women, especially those currently without insurance, since it emphasizes preventive care.

Well, the answer came this afternoon in a despicable fund-raising letter that a friend passed along. Here's how it begins:

More American women are going to die of breast cancer if you and I surrender to President Obama's nationalized healthcare onslaught.

It's as simple as that.

You see, over the past 30 years our nation's doctors and self-responsible citizens actually drove the mortality rate from breast cancer down 25%.

That's at least 300,000 more women who are alive today because America's healthcare system works better than government-run systems. And that's at least 300,000 women who, facing cancer in the future, are likely to suffer under nationalized healthcare.

Why? Because nationalized healthcare does not let doctors and their patients decide what's best. Because nationalized healthcare means fewer treatment options.

And because, at the end of the day, you and I are much more likely to do all it takes to keep ourselves alive than some faceless government bureaucrat.

And so on. Needless to say, there is no plan to nationalize or socialize health care. This letter, therefore, is a disgraceful scam, intended to scare the living hell out of already frightened and militantly uninformed people--Fox News viewers who think the sky is falling because a Muslim-Socialist-furriner is in the White House. I'd like to see the leaders of the Republican Party disown this poisonous swill. But they won't--because the real leaders of the Republican Party (Fox, Rush and Drudge) are spreading it.