Remember the 1989 movie "Say Anything"? Though the flick had nothing to do with politics, its title succinctly describes how liberals respond when they're on the losing end of an argument.
I heard an example of this yesterday while listening to Ed Schultz's radio show with yet another guest host filling in for Schultz, who appears to have lost his appetite for work since MSNBC transferred "The Ed Show" to its weekend penal colony. (Audio clips after the jump)
Rogers got into an exchange with a caller over Obamacare and what resulted was comical (audio) --
CALLER: Are you talking about subsidizing Obamacare? Where is that money coming from? Is that not going to raise our taxes any more?
ROGERS: Well, I have no problem in raising our taxes to pay for health care. Our marginal tax rate in this country used to be 90 percent and under the Reagan administration somewhere along the way ...
Initial flag goes up -- JFK, not Reagan, was first to reduce marginal rates from their nosebleed 90 percent during the Eisenhower years. Rogers was just getting started --
CALLER: So we're going to raise our taxes and it's going to cost us more for everybody to be on coverage ...
ROGERS: It's going to actually cost you less. It will actually cost you less, Jason, because ...
CALLER: Whenever we look at my health insurance that I pay for my wife and child has raised (sic) 300 percent in the last three years.
Roger's morphage into elusive furry mammal begins here in earnest --
ROGERS: Uh, no doubt, so my question to you is twofold. Once, one, that's been going on forever. But two, you just hit the nail on the head when you said your insurance rates. Tell me why you think we need insurance companies in the mix and we just don't have Medicare for all. Medicare is very, very good. Everyone in it loves it.
A thing of beauty, isn't it? Rogers tells the caller that Obamacare will "cost you less" and repeats the claim for emphasis. When the caller says the cost of his health insurance has tripled in as many years, Rogers shrugs it off with "that's been going on forever," thereby jettisoning the claim he'd made all of a sentence earlier that Obamacare would bring lower costs.
From this deception, Rogers proceeds to further evasion by asserting that the actual problem with Obamacare is that it isn't something else -- namely, a single-payer system for all along the lines of Medicare. In other words, it's that pesky free market to blame for your rising insurance premiums and not endless government distortions of the health care marketplace, Obamacare foremost among them.
Lest anyone miss his loathing for the free market, Rogers makes it clear with this remark (audio) --
CALLER: I can't afford my own insurance.
ROGERS: Well, I mean, for me if all the insurance companies would go bankrupt, we'd be a long way moving into that system.
Always amazes me how liberals blithely consign entire industries to economic collapse. And if insurance is the problem, why not federal control of auto insurance, homeowner insurance, property insurance, dental insurance ...?
Of course, if this ever came to pass and insurance rates soared as they surely would, liberals would claim this was caused by those troublesome remaining pockets of the economy not yet controlled by patronage hacks and bureaucrats.
