Fox Nation Plays Race Card In Health Care Debate
Reported by Ellen - July 28, 2009 -
Yesterday, I joked in my post about Fox News using the Gates controversy to ramp up racial attacks against Obama that Fox might one day suggest that Obama's health care would kill white people. It looks like Fox has already made that claim. At their "fair and balanced" website purportedly devoted to "tolerance," and "civil discourse," Fox Nation is suggesting that Obama's health care bill is a back door bill for slavery reparations. And yep, they suggest that white people will die as a result.
The short Fox Nation post states: "Still believe in post-racial politics? Read the health care bill. It's affirmative action on steroids, deciding everything from who becomes a doctor to who gets treatment on the basis of skin color.President Obama is on the record as being officially opposed to reparations for slavery. But as with other issues, you have to sift through his eloquent rhetoric and go beyond the teleprompter to get at what he really means."
So what is the basis for such a hypothesis? If you click through to the article, an unsigned Op Ed in Investor's Business Daily, it's based on the flimsiest of foundations, Obama's statement to a group of minority journalists pressing him about reparations (which he opposes): "If we have a program, for example, of universal health care, that will disproportionally affect people of color, because they are disproportionally uninsured," the article quotes Obama as saying.
The author then goes on to speculate, "This may be a goal of Obama's health care plan: the redress of health care disparities on the basis of race and the punishment of those believed to be responsible, such as greedy doctors who perform unnecessary tests and procedures and greedy insurance and drug companies lusting for profits." And then again maybe it isn't. The author offers no evidence that the bill will have racial preferences besides his or her inflammatory speculations. Those got ratcheted up even further in the final paragraph: "The racial grievance industry under health care reform could be calling the shots in the emergency room, the operating room, the medical room, even medical school. As Terence Jeffrey, editor at large of Human Events puts it, not only our wealth, but also our health will be redistributed."
UPDATE: Glenn Beck made a similar claim on his radio show last week.
