Collectivists accuse opponents of what they themselves perpetrate

Back during the Cold War I was often struck by how many times the Evil Empire would accuse the U.S. and the West of doing things that were in fact SOP for the communists themselves, such as rigging elections, quashing dissent, manipulating statistics, etc. Actually these things are characteristic of government itself, but in the open societies of the west attempts to perptetrate them rarely escape public exposure and retribution, while in police states they are business as usual. 

So now we have the spectacle of the President, Democrats, the left and their tools in the mainstream media accusing the right of whomping up bought-and-paid-for opposition to a government run health care system. Here’s “hack columnist” Bill Press (Reason Hit & Run’s characterization) on the current opposition to ObamaCare:

Taking a page right out of a Nazi playbook, organizers bus in professional protestors and arm them with instructions on how to take over meetings, shut down discussion, shout over any pro-health care reform speakers, and then post video of the resulting chaos on YouTube. It’s mob rule, pure and simple. Taking a page right out of a Nazi playbook, organizers bus in professional protestors and arm them with instructions on how to take over meetings, shut down discussion, shout over any pro-health care reform speakers, and then post video of the resulting chaos on YouTube. It’s mob rule, pure and simple.

Gosh, all that sounds so much like every right-of-center speaker on a college campus in the past 25 years getting shouted down for daring to voice dissent on minority preferences, global warming, socialism, etc. How many times have we seen “bussed in” protestors on the Capitol lawn in Lansing when the issue was pay or benefit cuts for government workers, accepting a $200 million charter school grant for Detroit, placing a anti-minority preferences ballot initiative that had received 500,000 petition signatures on the ballot, reducing state higher education appropriations, and many more?

Just as the governments in the open societies of the west could (rarely) get away with secretly using police state political tactics in the either the Cold War or present era, so the right is completely incapable of mounting “astroturf” and “hire-a-mob” tactics in this health care debate without the story quickly being exposed on page one of the Washington Post and NYT. People intuitively know that claims to the contrary are laughable, which might explain why the President and his allies are getting a black eye for suggesting it.

Tags: health care, politics