Here’s the third of three Reason.tv videos for this Thursday. This one’s on health care.
Reason notes that the “Obama Administration goes on the offensive against Matt Drudge and other critics for spreading ‘disinformation’ and ‘lies’ ” about health care.
What’s telling is that Linda Douglass, communications director of the Administration’s health care effort, really doesn’t understand the over-reach of her request that citizens report to government on news accounts and criticism that seems ‘fishy.’
It’s in the private marketplace of ideas that these matters should be debated, and criticized, and challenged.
Her request: report to the administration on private critics of the administration’s efforts, is beyond government’s role in a free society. If an administration wants to publish memoranda in support of its efforts, so be it; asking citizens for names of critics, however, is intrusive and chilling of free expression.
Candidly, it’s the kind of over-reach one would expect in a small town, not from the federal government. A small town like, say, a banner inland city of the Midwest….
We can be grateful, surely, that no collection of assorted local officials and private ‘confidential informants’ (in Whitewater both terms synonymous with ‘pompous, small-town nothing’) would ever try to gather information on lawful, private-citizen critics.
Here’s the accompanying description of the video from Reason.tv:
In an effort to push back against criticism of its health care reform plans, the Obama administration is sending one of the many former journalists in its employ onto the digital airwaves of YouTube to attack Matt Drudge and other critics for spreading “disinformation” and “lies.”
Since “we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House,” health reform Communications Director Linda Douglass says, “we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov.”
Reason.tv’s Dan Hayes is nothing if not patriotic, and with a good nose for fish, so he took his camera in the dead of night and went hunting for perpetrators.
The results, as shown in this two-and-a-half-minute video, should scare every American who cares about truth and health care.