The Democrats have decided to counter criticism of their health care ambitions by calling their critics liars. Now, one might think that when you call someone a liar, you have an obligation to say what they are lying about. But sometimes that can be a problem, because (1) they aren’t actually lying, and/or (2) you don’t want people to listen to them, so discussing their actual criticisms is counterproductive. In that case, you keep your allegations of lying non-specific. At least, that’s what you do if you have no decency.
Case in point: The Democratic National Committee is anticipating an ad campaign from health insurers opposing the Democratic health care schemes, and they don’t want anyone to listen to them. So they send out a mailer calling the insurers liars. Randy Barnett posts the letter and notes that its allegations are entirely nonspecific. They accuse the health insurance industry of lying, but don’t identify a single lie specifically, much less give a refutation of that lie.
Then mailer also links to a DNC video:
Let’s take this apart. Most of the video features one guy, Wendell Potter, from the Center for Media and Democracy (that’s a left-wing group, in case you couldn’t guess) telling CNN and MSNBC that the health insurance industry is a bunch of liars.
Unlike the mailer, the video does identify one specific claim: “Congress is proposing over one hundred billion in cuts to Medicare Advantage.” This is a peculiar kind of lie, in that it is absolutely true. (In fact, they could have said over $120 billion in cuts.) The rebuttal is no rebuttal at all: “THE TRUTH: The insurance lobby opposes reforming Medicare Advantage because they enjoy huge profits from the program. They’re just scaring seniors.”
They also take on the PriceWaterhouseCoopers report, sort of. Which is to say that they splash a “BOGUS” stamp on it, and rebut it with “THE TRUTH: The report is totally ‘bogus’.” Well then, if you can write “bogus” on it, I guess it must be bogus.
For the last fifteen seconds of the one-and-a-half minute video, they include vague sentence fragments from the AARP and an MSNBC talking head, and a single word (“deceptive”) from a Washington Post article. Obviously, the Post article is the one that we’re supposed to find credible, but a little bit of digging shows that the Post article is not an article at all, but a post on Ezra Klein’s blog. The substance of Klein’s criticism is that PriceWaterhouseCoopers once did a study for the tobacco industry, and its current study assumes that reform will not realize any savings.
So that’s it: one guy nonspecifically attacking the health insurance industry to credulous hosts on CNN and MSNBC, two non-rebuttal rebuttals, a couple of sentence fragments, and a single word from a Washington Post article that isn’t actually a Washington Post article and that hinges on the supposed dishonesty of assuming that the Democratic plan will not cut costs (an assumption with which 79% of the public agrees). It is on this basis that the Democratic National Committee accuses the health insurance industry of lying.
Lying is bad. Dishonestly accusing others of lying is despicable. Dishonestly accusing others of lying without even saying what they supposedly lied about; I’m not sure I even have a word for that.
Internet Scofflaw 