As we approach the final vote on health insurance reform, the industry opponents and their wholly-owned Rethuglican Party apparatchiks are upping the ante on outright lies. Yesterday we noted the poorly-attended tea bagging "demonstration" yesterday at the Capitol, with the nonsensical signs, nutty accusations of treason, and demands for impeachment. Many of the speakers dwelled on the "deem and pass" majority vote process that Speaker Pelosi will use in order to defeat relentless Rethuglican obstructionism on behalf of their industry patrons. And who best to spread the manure over the mushrooms than Rethug loon Michele "I See Commies" Bachmann?
Claiming that former Rethug Speaker Dennis Hastert "never would have gotten away" with "deem and pass," Think Progress notes that the crazy Congresswoman was 180 degrees wrong:
"Bachmann’s outrage is ridiculous. As AEI congressional scholar Norman Ornstein pointed out yesterday, former Rep. Dennis Hastert (R-IL) did get 'away with this' when he was Speaker. 'In the last Congress that Republicans controlled, from 2005 to 2006, Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier used the self-executing rule more than 35 times, and was no stranger to the concept of deem and pass,' wrote Ornstein."Will passage of the health insurance reform bill stop the crazies and the industry shills from continuing to lie? They can't: it's in their DNA.
