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Tumbl/CounterTumbl: Peter Feld and John Carney Debate Health Care

Peter Feld and John Carney — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 18:45:46 +0000

Yesterday, bloggers Peter Feld and John Carney had a heated back-and-forth about health care on their various Tumblrs. Among other points, they debated death panels, the relevance of police tasering to the discussion, and just how good the U.S. Postal Service is.

It all started out with this short post by Carney:

johncarney:

Trying to defend Obamacare, Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein said he saw no evidence that the government was prone to madness.

Watch this video about cops tazering a teenager with a broken back 19 times if you also think you haven’t seen evidence of government madness.

I know “death panels” are a scare tactic. But when it’s not hard to believe in death panels when you see this sort of thing.

Here’s what Peter Feld (above, left) had to say. To see Carney’s rebuttal, click here.

This takes the cake, but it’s indicative of the distracting, misleading, intentionally irrelevant campaign that health care opponents on the right have been waging. Here’s how it works: Take something completely unrelated to health care, that puts government in a bad light, and say, hey! you hate waiting at the DMV, don’t you? Or the Post Office? Well then, you sure don’t want the government anywhere near your health care! Look at the cops torture that poor kid — well, you sure as heck don’t want these people in charge of your medical treatment!

When I was on Fox News with two Republicans last week, they tried to taunt me with “what has the government ever done well?” That’s not hard to answer. NASA put a man on the moon. FEMA does a pretty good job when it’s not being run by George Bush. The government built the interstate highway system. We have public universities (that means, run by the government!) at the top of the rankings, like UC Berkeley where I studied, or Michigan, or SUNY. As for the Post Office, where’s the complaint? Put a 44 cent stamp on a piece of paper and a few days later it will be delivered across the country. And as Bush-lovers have bragged, the government prevented another terror attack on US soil after 9/11.

Closer to health-care relevance, the government inspects the food supply and keeps us from being poisoned. And the National Institutes of Health is at the forefront of medical research, the Food and Drug Administration safeguards the approval of new medication, and the Centers For Disease Control are masters at coping with pandemics. And there are great government-run hospitals. Even the DMV — and I’ve been caught up in their system once or twice — generally hands me a number and takes care of me as quickly as any other line I have to wait on. I could go on.

A video of a kid being tasered (removed for your non-viewing pleasure) might be an argument against police having tasers. In fact, maybe we shouldn’t let the government anywhere near our law enforcement! Maybe we shouldn’t let the Feds send Americans abroad with guns and weapons, either. Or operate prisons. Well, a few of the people showing up to yell at their congressmen might actually make one or two of those arguments, too. (The same ones who show up to see the President with loaded guns, maybe). Either way, that clip has zero relevance to this issue. You do not need to see a kid being tasered by cops to take part in the health care debate.

And amazingly, John Carney is still trying to convince us that there are death panels in the health care bill. There are not! There was a totally sensible provision, suggested by Republican Senator Johnny Isakson, to have insurance reimburse doctors for couseling patients and their families about end-of-life decisions and living wills. Thanks to the nimnuts at the Town Hall meetings, it has been removed. Thank you, conservative right.

Peter Feld is a writer and content strategist, a former Democratic political consultant and ex-market research director at Conde Nast Publications. He taught political polling and strategy in NYU’s graduate Political Campaign Management program, and holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from UC Berkeley. He has written for Ad Age, the New York Post, Gawker, Radar, Portfolio.com and Cookie. This post originally appeared at Six Degrees of Peter Feld.

John Carney’s rebuttal

compiled by Robert Quigley.

Walter Cronkite Meant Nothing To Me

John Carney — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 16:29:05 +0000

It’s not often that somebody dying makes me feel young. But the death of Walter Cronkite has inspired me with an overwhelming feeling of youthfulness.

You see, I really know next to nothing about Walter Cronkite. He means nothing at all to me. Hearing that he’s dead was like a looking at a well-painted apartment wall. You get the feeling that a good job might have been done but that’s the limit of the emotional or intellectual reaction.

So why does this make me feel young? Well, let’s face it. Cronkite was important to the kind of people whose memories of our public life is full of Kennedy and King assassinations, the hippies fighting cops at Democratic convention in 1968, the ’60s culture wars, Watergate, Gerald Ford, Vietnam, the oil crises, Elvis’s death and Lennon’s murder, Three Mile Island, and Jimmy Carter’s 1979 summer meltdown.

I care about that stuff the way a guy storming the beach at Normandy cared about the Spanish American war. It’s more well-painted walls.

Now, I don’t speak ill of the dead. But I’ll make an exception: I’m pretty sure that if I did care about Cronkite, I wouldn’t like him very much. No good contrarian can like anyone known as “The Most Trusted Man In America.” Also, I have no admiration for the anchor-as-guide to the world version of television news, and I’m glad it’s a dying form. If, as someone on the television said today, we never see anyone like him again, I’d say that this state of affairs couldn’t have come too soon.

Reading a bit here and there about him has made me suspect I’d dislike him even more than that. From what I can tell in Peter Feld’s write up, he seems to have disdained the lives actually lived by most of his countrymen. I guess it’s not surprising to discover an aversion to the lives of ordinary people in someone who spent his life performing a job that put his face in the living rooms of millions of strangers.

I’m sure his family and friends will miss him, and if I knew any of them I’d be sorry for their loss. And maybe I’d tell them to say thanks to Walter for me. Like I said, it’s rare that the death of a public figure makes me suddenly feel young.

John Carney is Managing Editor of Clusterstock. This piece was originally published at Rise If You Must, his personal website.

Cronkite, Calm Center As All Hell Broke Loose

Peter Feld — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 20:38:07 +0000

For anyone whose political identity was formed during the poison years bracketed by Walter Cronkite’s tenure as CBS evening anchor, the avuncular newsman was like the kindly, reassuring narrator of a political horror story.

If, as CBS News president Sean McManus mourns, Cronkite’s status “will never be duplicated again,” it’s not only due to the modern fragmentation of the news audience — it’s also because, ideally, the country will never again go through such an extended trainwreck. The events reported by Cronkite during his 19 years as anchor — a shorter tenure than his successor Dan Rather’s, or Tom Brokaw’s at NBC, but so much more influential — are America’s lasting scar tissue.

Cronkite’s era began in the months before JFK’s death, and ended in the wake of the Iranian hostage crisis and Ronald Reagan’s ascension. He oversaw two Kennedy assassinations and Martin Luther King’s, the Democratic convention riots of 1968, the decay and destruction of America’s inner cities, the ’60s culture wars, Watergate, Gerald Ford’s bumbling followup to Richard Nixon, US defeat in Vietnam, the oil crises of ’73 and ’79, Elvis’s death and Lennon’s murder, Three Mile Island, and Jimmy Carter’s 1979 summer meltdown. Worldwide, he reported two mideast wars, rising tension with the Soviets in the late ’70s, the massacre of the 1972 Israeli Olympic team, the fall of the Shah, and major terror attacks in the UK and Italy.

As a child and teenager, these events made me anxious, depressed — and angry that nothing could be done to stop the string of disaster. Cronkite had declared Vietnam a failed war in early 1968, yet it raged for five more years — widened by Richard Nixon, who had won office promising to end it. I was devastated on election night in 1972, when Cronkite reported Nixon’s 49-state obliteration of George McGovern’s antiwar crusade, to which I’d devoted all my after-school hours that fall.

But I remember being slightly consoled by Cronkite’s unstated but implicit disapproval of the rout, leavened as always with the life-goes-on detachment he earned though years of dependable nightly appearances. (Cronkite and Johnny Carson were our pillars of stability during those years.) It was no surprise to later learn that McGovern’s advisors had briefly proposed picking Cronkite for vice president, and more than a small disappointment to consider how his selection might have changed the outcome.

His famous Vietnam broadcast aside, Cronkite didn’t take positions — he set boundaries. Throughout Watergate, his CBS news team was — even more than the Washington Post, since it reached a far wider audience — a de facto referee signaling us that some abuses of power were unacceptable and really did merit the unprecedented termination of a presidency. Cronkite’s voice was the center of gravity that made impeachment less unthinkable. The national trauma of deposing a leader was mitigated by knowing that while Nixon would be gone, we would still have Walter Cronkite, every night at 7.

During the Clinton era, the catch-phrase “national conversation” came into vogue. But no president has ever been able to facilitate a true national conversation the way Cronkite did during those years of upheaval, whether the subject was Vietnam, race, or poverty.

In 2002, I saw him speak on a political panel hosted at NYU, where he railed against the impending Iraq invasion. I was thrilled and a little surprised by his intensity on the subject. In his closing remarks, he urged the room full of Gen-Y’ers — most of whom not yet born while he held the anchor’s chair — to contact their representatives. This was a scholarly conference, he said, so he wouldn’t tell them what they should say. “But, if you’ve heard my earlier remarks, you might be able to guess what I think you should tell them,” he chuckled. How much less would Bush and Cheney have been able to get away with if we’d still had Cronkite — or anyone like him — as our center of gravity.