I know I'm throwing out a lot of video today, but this one is particularly good.
It's another on-the-street interview with anti-health care protesters in D.C., conducted by New Left Media (which actually is two undergrad journalism students, who produce good stuff).
On the one hand, it's about what you would expect. These people really hate health care reform. What privisions do they dislike? Uh…. they don't really know, actually.
I particularly enjoy how they claim that everybody else (other than them) are KoolAid drinkers who blindly follow their leaders like sheep. Yet, what do they watch? Who do they seek out for their (mis)information? Where do they get their sound bites from? Fox News, natch. Enjoy…..
RELATED: A Republican speechwriter under Reagan and Bush conducts a survey of Tea Party protesters at a rally and concludes "For an antitax group, they don't know much about taxes." For example:
The first question that was asked concerned the size of government. Tea Partyers were asked how much the federal government gets in taxes as a percentage of the gross domestic product. According to Congressional Budget Office data, acceptable answers would be 6.4%, which is the percentage for federal income taxes; 12.7%, which would be for both income taxes and Social Security payroll taxes; or 14.8%, which would represent all federal taxes as a share of GDP in 2009.
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Tuesday's Tea Party crowd, however, thought that federal taxes were almost three times as high as they actually are. The average response was 42% of GDP and the median 40%. The highest figure recorded in all of American history was half those figures: 20.9% at the peak of World War II in 1944.
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The survey also reveals some misperceptions about the status quo on healthcare and energy in the United States. The average Tea Partier placed the United States’ global rank in life expectancy at 11th, when in fact the CIA ranks the United States 49th.
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In terms of energy policy, Tea Partiers estimated that the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR) holds about 70 years worth of oil, based on America’s present rates of consumption. Conventional estimates suggest that ANWR holds about a year’s supply of oil, based on the CIA’s estimate of oil consumption.
I'm guessing that most of these people don't know much of anything that's true they're just consumed with inchoate rage that the "bad guys" are in power and therefore they must be doing all the bad things everyone tells them they are doing.
The modern conservative movement propaganda holds that government is the problem not the solution. The corollary is that is you have a problem, government must be the cause. You are short of money? It must be because of taxes. People don't have health care? It must be because the government is running it. Crime? Big government. Lack of jobs? Government.
This isn't about issues, it's about a delusional worldview formed by people who listen to a bunch of hucksters who have successfully looted the country while persuading about half the people that the government was doing the looting and giving it in the form of "handouts" to people who didn't deserve it. It's a great scam and a lot of people have made a lot of money promoting it.
It's a shame that these same people are getting screwed six ways to Sunday, but I'm getting less and less sympathetic as I see them throwing dollar bills into the faces of disabled citizens and telling them go somewhere else looking for a handout. These aren't just misguided souls. They are cruel jerks.
[Emphasis mine]