Mere Rhetoric, June 25, 2009:

When a country embraces a national health policy... [what] happens is what always happens when a government embarks on grandiose utopian schemes... When those schemes begin to collapse... the government needs to continuously manufacture new scapegoats to explain away the failures... If it's not smokers it'll be drinkers. If not drinkers then the obese. Or red meat eaters. Or people who refuse to exercise. Any group that regularly comes in for nanny state tsk tsk'ing is fair game... If all else fails, there are always the "doctors, hospitals and the health insurers" that a recent lefty screed attacked for having the gall to "continue to reap profits."... they make lots of money, setting up a little bit of populist class warfare.

Washington Post, July 31, 2009:

Obama has framed the health-care debate in Washington as a campaign against insurance companies... he told an audience that the existing system "works well for the insurance industry, but it doesn't always work well for you." The message is no accident, as the president's chief pollster made clear in a rare public speech last month... extensive polling revealed to the White House what many there had guessed: People hate insurance companies. "Take the public plan, for example," Benenson said. "Initial reaction to it wasn't as positive as it is now. . . . But we figured out that people like the idea of competition versus the insurance company, and that's why you get a number like 72 percent supporting it."

This is an administration known for amping up populist resentment to the level of death threats before demanding the equivalent of protection money to stand between its victims and the pitchfork-wielding crowds it created. Can you believe that some conservatives were concerned that Obama is a class warrior?

Just for the record: yes Obama's economic predictions are almost willfully inaccurate and no that won't matter. In contemporary public deliberation you don't really need a good argument to create noise. You just need a colorable pretext that nutroots zombies and worshipful journalists can repeat with varying degrees of condescension.

This is a media environment where headlines are actively rewritten to insulate The One from public criticism. Taking talking points about "bending the cost curve" and reprinting them as news practically qualifies as honest.

References and previously after the jump...