"I think what's happening with the veterans is a gift from God to show us what happens when you take layers and layers of bureaucracy and place them between the patients and the health care provider," said conservative pundit and former neurosurgeon Ben Carson Saturday on Fox News.
Those words were spoken from the tea party's "intelligent" hero, Dr. Ben Carson. Granted, he is a smart guy; and I'm not just saying that in comparison to his fellow tea partiers, (which is quite a low bar). He is actually pretty smart. He can obviously put a coherent sentence together and probably wouldn't misspell "tyranny", "moron" or "socialism" on a sign.
Saying that, he certainly can't expect the media to just excuse this statement as an intellectual deficiency like they would with Bachmann, Palin, or Gohmert. Those mental midgets can always count on their stupid statements to be forgotten because of who they are.
Dr. Carson can't claim he was "misquoted" either. The words are right there in front of you.
And he certainly can't claim, as that article from Townhall desperately tried, that he was just inarticulate in his phrasing. For all the things you can say about Dr. Ben Carson, you can't say that he's inarticulate.
No, this is EXACTLY what he meant to say and EXACTLY what he did say.
Just like when he compared gays to child/animal rapists, he knew EXACTLY what he was saying and EXACTLY what he was doing: pandering to the haters that make up the base. You need to do that as initiation before running for office.
And now he sees Veterans languishing, suffering, even dying, (mostly from the GOP's wars of choice, BTW), and he almost danced a jig. This is because conservatives get something much more important than the Veterans' lives they treat with such callousness: a talking point.
With ACA being more entrenched and with more and more people supporting it, the GOP knows that the next step is to put us in line with the rest of civilization and go full-on single-payer. The VA fiasco, to them, truly is a "gift from God" because now they get to say: "You see, THIS is what happens with single payer."
Never mind that every industrialized nation on the planet has some form of single payer--and runs circles around us in both cost and quality of treatment.
Never mind that an independent survey last year found the customer satisfaction rating for VHA patients among the best in the nation and equal to or better than ratings for private sector hospitals.
And never mind that the VA fiasco is largely the GOP's fault to begin with. The majority of Veterans with injuries are due to the wars the GOP always wanted, and had no trouble spending trillions to fight them. But when the men and women stopped fighting, suddenly we can't afford to spend a few lousy bucks to take care of them. As early as last February every GOP senator save two voted against employment, education, and healthcare benefits for Veterans citing the "high" cost.
They don't care. Dr. Carson, when speaking of the fiasco, just said out loud what every teabagger already thinks. This is great news. We get to score political points against Obama AND use this as a talking point against single-payer! Thank you, God, for answering our prayers to spiting the Democrats! Maybe one day I'll get around to praying for the Veterans who lost life and limb!
They can't help it. The GOP is positively gleeful when it comes to inflicting further suffering on the already miserable: be it starving children, the unemployed, or wounded Veterans. Krugman called it a 'pathological meanspiritedness'.
How else can you explain the cavalier attitude of so many GOP governors, including mine, that caused them to turn down billions at no cost to help their own citizens? People literally have died over this. In Florida, its a rate of six per day. Our own statehouse leader even admitted that Medicaid saved his family, but refuses to even allow a vote on giving that same opportunity to his constituents.
After all, if nobody is dying from lack of medical care, then how can we repeal Obamacare? If we can't repeal Obamacare, then how can we win?
If you don't care about the people, then OF COURSE you are going to be ecstatic about the suffering. (And also have the unmitigated gall to call yourself a "pro-life" Christian.)
For a conservative, talking points trump life, every time. In some instances, like this one, they can barely contain their glee.
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