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Wednesday, August 12, 2009

JACK ZALESKI: FARGO FORUM’S CHIEF PROPOGANDIST?

The Fargo Forum editorial writer Jack Zaleski comes out this morning (August 12, 2009) as a possible shill for Obama’s Care (ObamaScare). He must have gotten the talking points from Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, Harry Reid and Barack Hussein Obama concerning the new strategy to continue shoving “health care reform” down the throats of Americans. The emerging new strategy appears to be not to talk about what is actually in H.R. 3200, but to pick one single aspect of the health care debate and attack the validity of all of those opposing this gigantic grab for your liberty, then claim that the opposition comes from some disreputable faction, next claim that not only are those in opposition stupid, mistaken, and liars, and ignore the duplicity of the promoters of this “change”, last, ignore the massive duplicity of the proponants. This is typical Jack Zaleski work. Here is how the technique is executed in The Forum today:

Zaleski: “The low quality of the debate has muddled the truth. Maybe that’s the purpose of intellectual superstars such as former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.”

Sarah Palin is stupid. Zaleski tees off with left’s wholly unsubstantiated assertion that a woman who ran the state of Alaska by taking on and defeating the entrenched corruption within her own state’s party and won against the money and power of the establishment is mentally deficient! As Palin was extremely popular in Alaska as Governor, does Zaleski believe that the majority of Alaskans are mentally deficient as well?

Zaleski: “The darling of the increasingly marginalized right wing of the Republican Party said the health care bill that emerged from the U.S. House includes a provision that, in effect, is euthanasia for granny and gramps. Not true, and had Palin and her ilk read the section she would know it’s not true. More disturbing, if they read the provision and are misrepresenting the bill, they are little more than liars and fear mongers.”

All objective indications are that the conservative wing of the Republican Party is in ascendency. According to the July 6, 2009 poll, Gallup found that those likely voters that consider themselves “conservative” is at 40% and growing, and in fact has increased 3% since 2008, and nearly 4 of 10 say that they have become more conservative. Somehow Jack Zaleski knows otherwise, claiming “increasingly marginalized right wing”. So what is his source for such a claim? Fact, ignorance, rhetoric or dishonesty?

Try to find anyplace where Sarah Palin has said anything like “in effect, is euthanasia for granny and gramps.” Apparently Jack Zaleski does not know that Palin made twitter comments that can easily be found (Jack: it is called Google), where what she actually said was quoted from the Sydney Morning Herald:

“The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society’, whether they are worthy of health care,” the former Republican vice-presidential candidate wrote.

“Such a system is downright evil,” Palin wrote on her page, which has nearly 700,000 supporters. She encouraged her supporters to be engaged in the debate.

Jack Zaleski can not produce any evidence that Palin ever claimed “euthanasia for granny and gramps”. So is his claim fact, ignorance, rhetoric or dishonesty?

Jack Zaleski then goes on to use the distinctly pejorative term “Palin and her ilk” (Webster on “ilk”: to indicate disapproval when applied to people) to infer dishonesty and that had they read the bill that they would know better. Well, on pages 424-430 of H.R. 3200 is the exact language concerning end of life “consultation”.  Do not take mine, nor Jack Zaleski’s word. Read these six pages and ask yourself what exactly does this say? How often do you see the words shall and will? Is this a suggestion or a command? Why is this in a law? Did Jack Zaleski read the bill? Does Jack Zaleski know in what manner the bill has legal force? If he is claiming that “Palin and her ilk” have not read the bill and he has not, though he claims to know what the bill says, who then, is lying? What if Jack Zaleski “read the provision and are misrepresenting the bill, they are little more than liars and fear mongers.”? Who is fear mongering?

Jack Zaleski is apparently unaware or neglects to mention that mistrust of H.R. 3200 is well founded based on FACTS! It turns out that one of the top health care advisors to President Obama is White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s brother, Dr. Ezekial Emanuel, a bioethisist who has a paper trail (Jack, try Google). Representative Newt Gingrich explains Dr. Emanuel’s viewpoint in practice as it is done in England and quotes from Dr. Emanuel’s writings in the article “Trust the Government”:

The system advocated by Dr. Emanuel would allocate health care based on the government’s perception of the societal worth of the patients.  Accordingly, the very young and the very old would receive less care since the former have received less societal investment and the latter have less left to contribute. “Forstall[ing] the Concern that Disproportionate Amounts of Resources Will be Directed to Young People with Poor Prognosis”

“The Complete Lives System” would also consider the prognosis of the individual.

Quoting Dr. Emanuel:  “A young person with a poor prognosis has had few life-years but lacks the potential to live a complete life.  Considering prognosis forestalls the concern that disproportionately large amounts of resources will be directed to young people with poor prognosis.”

When fully implemented, Dr. Emanuel’s system, in his words, “produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated.”

“Chances that are attenuated” is a nice way of saying the young and the old are considered less worthy of health care and, under this system, will get less.

Once Government Becomes the Provider of Health Care, Personal Decisions Become Public Decisions

The point is not that a health care rationing system like the one favored by Dr. Emmanuel will be implemented in the United States tomorrow.

The point is that, as in the British system, once government becomes the single payer or even the main payer of health care, what were once intensely personal decisions become public decisions.  And as costs rise, government will look for ways to contain them.

The inevitable result of this pressure to control costs will be rationing, whether it occurs during this administration or the next.  At some point, the government will be forced to deny care to those who don’t meet the latest “quality-adjusted life years” cost-benefit analysis.

So the decision on what treatment to pursue that once would have been made by you and your doctor is now made for you by a bureaucrat using a formula—a formula to literally determine if your life is worth saving.

Also telling is that Jack Zaleski neglects to mention that it was members of the SEIU union who beat-up an opponent of health care reform in St. Louis, Missouri. It was SEIU members who where let in the side doors to stack audiences at several Democrat controlled “Town Hall” events and then manned the doors to threaten and deny access to those who came to oppose what is being proposed in H.R. 3200.

Perhaps most telling is Jack Zaleski’s selective indignation. Many, many Americans simply trust the Democrats and Obama less and less because they have almost continuously lies. Forbes magazine in the article, “Obama’s Top Five Health Care Lies” article of July 1, 2009:

Lie One: No one will be compelled to buy coverage.

Lie Two: No new taxes on employer benefits.

Lie Three: Government can control rising health care costs better than the private sector.

Lie Four: A public plan won’t be a Trojan horse for a single-payer monopoly.

Lie Five: Patients don’t have to fear rationing.

Then there are the serial prevarications of President Obama beginning with the August 12, 2009 article “Top 10 bald-faced lies from Obama’s staged health care “town hall”’ article from Examiner.com:

10) “The irony is that actually one of the chief sponsors of this bill originally was a Republican—then House member, now senator, named Johnny Isakson from Georgia—who very sensibly thought this is something that would expand people’s options.” Isakson came out immediately after this and emphatically condemned this outrageously false claim.

9) “AARP would not be endorsing a bill if it was undermining Medicare, okay?” The AARP quickly corrected this misinformation: “Indications that we have endorsed any of the major health care reform bills currently under consideration in Congress are inaccurate.”

8) “You will not be waiting in any lines.” All the evidence says otherwise.

7) “46 million Americans don’t have health insurance coverage today.” This is an obscenely dishonest “calculation.”

6) “I’m not promoting a single-payer plan.” Obama admitted that such a plan is exactly his goal here. And here is a non-partisan study confirming that ObamaCare will indeed destroy free market health care, leaving us with no other options but government-run care.

5) “Under the reform we’re proposing, if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.” The Congressional Budget Office estimated that 10 million workers would be forced out of their employer-based coverage and into government health care by this bill.

4) “So the intention…was to give people more information so that they could handle issues of end-of-life care when they’re ready, on their own terms. It wasn’t forcing anybody to do anything…And somehow it’s gotten spun into this idea of ‘death panels.’”

House Republicans, patient advocates, and conservative publications have repeatedly highlighted the specific parts of the bill that would in fact force seniors into counseling sessions that pressure them to stop burdening the system.

Obama’s own Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, has openly admitted that Obama’s “vague promises of savings from cutting waste, enhancing prevention and wellness, installing electronic medical records and improving quality are merely ‘lipstick’ cost control, more for show and public relations than for true change.” The real savings come from rationing care. ObamaCare will have panels modeled after Britain’s system, which cuts costs by denying care to the sick and elderly.

3) “We’re not talking about cutting Medicare benefits.” Obama admitted that this was how his health care scam would be funded. He has proposed $313 billion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid to pay for this.

2) “This is not about putting government in charge of your health insurance.” Yeah, how could passing a needless, blatantly unconstitutional law to address a non-existent crisis with endless government rules and regulations on every aspect of health care possibly be misconstrued as “putting government in charge?”

1) “I won’t sign a bill that adds to the deficit or the national debt.” According to the Congressional Budget Office, the current legislation being promoted and defended by Barack “No Pork in This Bill” Obama will cost an absolute fortune and increase, rather than decrease, health care costs…making this claim completely absurd.





And last but not least Obama’s real intent for Americans:



June 30, 2003, speaking to an AFL-CIO Civil, Women’s, and Human Rights Conference, Obama said:

“I happen to be a proponent of single payer universal health care plans. . . A single payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House.”




March 24, 2007, SEIU Health Care Forum Obama says:

“I don’t think we’re going to be able to eliminate employer coverage immediately. There’s going to be potnentially some transition process. I can envision a decade out or 15 years out or 20 years out.”




August 19, 2008 from Wall Street Journal article, Obama is quoted”

“If I were designing a system from scratch, I would probably go ahead with a single-payer system.”




June 15, 2009, speaking to the American Medical Association:

“The public option is not your enemy, it is your friend.”




August 11, 2009, Portsmouth, New Hampshire Obama said:

“I have not said that I was a single-payer supporter, because, frankly, we historically have had a employer-based system in this country, with private insurers, and for us to transition to a system like that, I believe would be too disruptive.”




This is just a short summary of the lies that are coming from President Obama. He lies with impunity because he knows that he can count on his propagandists (Jack Z?) to ignore his lies and run interference by claiming that the opponents of the government take over of health care is anything else but what it is. The evidence seems unequivocal. Jack Zaleski: Go on the internet to Google. Type in “democrat health care lies”, or “Obama health care lies”. The evidence is much more succinct and linear than the construction of Jack Zaleski that Sarah Palin and her “ilk” are lying.

Jack Zaleski ends his article with:

“Surely there is more than enough in the several health care reform bills to criticize, to reject, to help scuttle. No one should embrace reform simply because it is called reform. But honest, informative and productive debate about a subject vital to every American family cannot proceed when allegedly responsible political leaders and their lap-dog mouthpieces peddle lies.”

It is my didactic technique to pose questions and allow readers to come to their own conclusions. Rarely, am I ever moved to make specific statements about the work of other authors engaged in the arena of public debate. I will depart from that methodology to make this statement:

Jack Zaleski is either ignorant of the facts, technically unable to investigate the validity of his assertions, is a propagandist, and/or is a liar.

Based on the evidence at least one or more of these claims by me must be true. Do we have the tragic case of a liar claiming the dishonesty of others?

One thing that Jack Zaleski was correct about was that we cannot proceed when “lap-dog mouthpieces peddle lies”. Jack, which is worse, your bark or your bite?

Click here to email your elected representatives.

Comments

Avatar for Brutus

HR 3200 states on page 430 “‘‘(B) The level of treatment indicated under subparagraph (A)(ii) may range from an indication for full treatment to an indication to limit some or all or specified interventions.” If “an indication to limit some or all or specified interventions” based on UNAPPEALABLE government official’s determination of what is warranted is not tampering with a person’s right LIFE, LIBERTY, & THE PURSUIT of HAPPINESS then I do not know what it is. Is this provision unconstitutional? What would our Founding Father’s thin of this? And WHY should this even be a role of government anyhow? Isn’t the role of government to do for the people that which they cannot do for themselves? If it is, then I think life or death decisions are something all of us or our loved ones are capable of doing for ourselves. Zaleski is beyond just an average Ass (and by Ass I of course mean Ass as in Donkey; Donkey as in Democrat).

Brutus on August 12, 2009 at 10:27 pm
Avatar for tom

Seems Jack has a touch of dementia, I suggest a session of Barack Obama"s end of life consultation.

tom on August 12, 2009 at 11:53 pm
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