You can’t disagree with the left anymore without some sort of ulterior motive ascribed to you. After all, if you were a good person, you would think like them.
It’s obvious to Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher, who appeared on Thursday's The 11th Hour with Brian Williams, why Senate Republicans want to repeal Affordable Care Act: it’s because President Obama is black. While ObamaCare drove up premiums nationwide, decimated insurance exchanges and brought the United States one step closer to single-payer, Republicans- and by extension, the people who voted for them- just don’t like the fact that we had an “African-American President.”
For Republicans, Belcher claimed that “this isn’t about health care.” After Belcher uttered that, the audience sat on the edge of their seat, waiting for the ill-motive he was going to ascribe to his political opponents. Why isn’t it about health care? Is it just an excuse for Republicans to exercise their masochistic desire to kill old women and the poor? Or because they hate the disabled?
Rather than the low-brow approach of saying your opponent wants to kill poor people, Belcher took the high road, instead claiming Republicans so despise the concept of an African-American President that they’d do anything to take any “legacy of him off the face of the planet." Not because he was a radical progressive, but because of the melanin level in his skin.
It’s obviously legitimate to disagree or viciously disapprove of the Senate health bill, but one would hope in the wake of the escalated climate of political violence we could stop claiming our opponents are motivated by hatred.
Read the full transcript below:
11:52 PM ET
BRIAN WILLIAMS: And Cornell, as they say, the whole world is watching. At least the entire cotry, everyone engaged on this subject.
CORNELL BELCHER: Well, I wish the whole world were watching and I wish more of the voters were engaged in this. I wish there were more hearings about this. But look, this is a terrible bill. And when you look at-- you know, don't take my word for it, take what Republican Senator Collins said, this is going to have an adverse impact on the most vulnerable, this is going to have an adverse impact on rural health care, right. But this also is politics. This is about politics, right. This, Brian, this is isn't about better healthcare, this is about the irrational continuum of politics that has happened since we elected the first African-American President. They tried to delegitimize him for eight years, they tried to block everything he tried to do for eight years. Now they're trying to wipe everything they may look like a legacy of him off the face of the planet. This is about politics. This is not about better healthcare.
