Fox’s Tom Shillue seems to find it amusing that 15 million Americans might lose health insurance under the GOP’s so-called “skinny repeal” of Obamacare. “I’m going to call it ‘The Lifestyle Lift,’” he joked, to uproarious laughter from his conservative The Five cohosts.
Before the I-got-mine-screw-you cohosts got around to yukking it up over 15 million more uninsured Americans, cohost Jesse Watters menacingly read off the names of the seven Republican senators who voted against the most recent Obamacare repeal proposal.
“I just want to make sure the audience knows who these people were,” Watters said.
Yeah, just looking out for the folks, I’m sure. Just like that time Watters selflessly ambushed and harassed an elementary school official to save America from a non-denominational gift room.
Cohost Dana Perino was the lone Republican sympathetic to the GOP defectors. Although she called it “disconcerting” to conservatives who want Obamacare to just be repealed and to move on, “what they’re doing is reacting to their constituents,” Perino said.
In other words, doing their jobs and embracing democracy.
It was telling that not one other conservative on the panel seemed to approve. Watters grudgingly acknowledged that the seven no-voters came from “very independent-minded states” that are “not really hard-core Republican states.”
Cohost Lisa Boothe complained that senators who previously voted for repeal now “suddenly don’t have the courage.” She said pointedly, “I would be pretty darn angry" if she were a constituent. Boothe conveniently overlooked the fact that Obamacare has grown more popular and that Americans overwhelmingly oppose the Republican proposals.
Juan Williams, the lone Democrat on this “fair and balanced” panel, laid some truth on his colleagues:
WILLIAMS: The key point is that they have not come up with something that’s better than Obamacare, something that ensures more people, that lessens premiums and they’re coming down now to this ‘skinny repeal’ idea which is, "Do away with the individual mandate, do away with the corporate mandate for companies with more than 50 employees, do away with the tax on medical devices." So what happens? Oh, according to the CBO, you lose 15 million people – 15! – lose their insurance, premiums up 20%! Is that better for America?
“No one wants high premiums,” Watters said resentfully.
But substitute cohost Tom Shillue actually sounded glib over the prospect of people losing health insurance (and maybe their lives):
SHILLUE: Yeah, you lose the 15 million – most of those people, they lose it because they drop it. They don’t want it! You lose that mandate, that’s where you lose the millions of people. So I want the skinny. I’m going to call it the “lifestyle lift.”
As disgusting as that was, even worse was how loudly and heartily his fellow conservatives laughed along at his “joke.”
Watch this hideous display below, from the July 26, 2017 The Five.
The long arc of history shows that equality, compassion and scientific advancement always prevail in the end. There are hiccups and temporary reverses along the way (of which Fox News, Rupert Murdoch and the evil Kochs are prime examples) but they will eventually be trampled in the march of progress.