On the Monday night edition of All In with Chris Hayes, host Chris Hayes sneered at Republican opposition to ObamaCare, deriding the "manically obsessed," "cruel" GOP. Going off on a fact-free soliloquy, Hayes hypothesized that the “worst caricature of a Republican” would be “maniacally obsessed with destroying Barack Obama, cruelly indifferent to the fates of the non-rich, [and a] cartoonish villain who wants to dash people’s hopes of finally getting affordable health insurance purely out of spite.” [Link to the audio here]
Most of Hayes’ remarks are inaccurate when referring to the majority of members of the Republican Party. For example, according to a Pew Research Center study, the highest percentage of Republican voters make between $30,000 and $50,000 per year, numbers that no one would consider “rich” in our country. This shows that Republicans must care about the “fates of the non-rich” or risk losing the largest segment of their voters.
After this crude characterization of Republicans, Hayes went on to criticize Senators McConnell (R-KY) and Cornyn (R-TX) for their attempts to keep professional sports leagues neutral on the health care issue. This request came in the wake of the revelation that the Obama administration is spending taxpayer money in an attempt to raise public support for ObamaCare. Currently, the majority of Americans, 52 percent, disapprove of law while only 44 percent back the changes.
Conveniently, Hayes neglected to mention that nearly $1 million of taxpayer state grant money in California is being spent to “train teens to promote Obamacare to family members,” according to a Heartland Institute report. The program, which is run by Covered California, a new company that will become a large healthcare provider in the state under the new law, will seek to educate school children about the merits of the new law so that they can convince their parents to support it. This push comes in a Los Angeles school district that does not graduate one in three of its high school students, a clear indication that this money could be better spent on the children’s actual educations.
A transcript of the All In monologue is below:
MSNBC
All In with Chris Hayes
July 1, 2013
8:20 p.m. Eastern
CHRIS HAYES: If you were to sketch the worst caricature of a Republican, you'd describe him as maniacally obsessed with destroying Barack Obama, cruelly indifferent to the fates of the non-rich, cartoonish villain who wants to dash people’s hopes of finally getting affordable health insurance purely out of spite. And yet here we are with Republicans in 21 states and 6 still up in the air looking to deny low-income residents federally funded health coverage. It's not just at the state level. In the Senate, Mitch McConnell and John Cornyn are sending letters to professional sports leagues like the NFL and NASCAR telling them not to cooperate with any promotion about upcoming health care implementation warning the leagues against taking sides on Obamacare. We are seeing an entire national party dedicated to a form of sabotage. The intent of which is to make sure that the ordinary working people have a hard time getting health insurance. That's it. I mean, think about how perverse that is. We're the Republican Party and we're here to break things. But they're not just playing politics. They are playing with people's lives.
