1115.org

Yesterday, in the House of Representatives, Republican John Shadegg, who disgraces the great state of Arizona, delivered this carefully considered criticism of healthcare reform efforts:

You know, it occurs to me, and I’ll go through these other scandals very quickly, but what we’re really getting here is we’re not just getting single-payer care. We’re getting full on Russian gulag, Soviet-style gulag health care [...] It appeared in last Friday’s Wall Street Journal. You can Google it. You can pick up the phone and call Kim Strassel. You can ask her about Soviet-style gulag health care in America, where powerful politicians protect their constituents.

Good stuff. And it made me really angry at the media, and the blogs I read. Angry that no one had bothered to report this before. That, if it hadn’t been for Rep. Shadegg, I wouldn’t even have known that I’m about to have Soviet-style gulag health care inflicted upon me.

So, while I didn’t pick up the phone and call Kim Strassel (it being somewhat late at night) I did take up the representative’s invitation. I googled it. Strangely enough, the words Russian gulag or Soviet gulag in conjunction with health care produced no hits other than Shadegg’s remarks.

But I knew what this meant, of course. It wasn’t just a media conspiracy to suppress “the Soviet-style gulag” criticism; google was in on it too. And so I persevered.

I did finally turn up an article by Kim Strassel on health care which was posted online at the WSJ website last Thursday night, and appeared in last Friday’s paper.

I was disappointed to see that the title was “States of Personal Privilege“. Very strange, I thought to myself. She didn’t even put the word “gulag” in the title? But, I said to myself, let’s just read the article.

You’ll no doubt be surprised to learn that the words “Russia”, “Russian”, “Soviet” and “gulag” appear a grand total of zero times. Yes, Kim Strassel writes about powerful politicians protecting their constituents from some of the undesirable consequences of the Baucus bill (so Shadegg’s reading comprehension clearly isn’t zero). But there’s absolutely nothing in the article that even seriously demented Republican minds can misconstrue as being in any way related to either Soviet gulags or Soviet style healthcare. Not one single thing.

So John Shadegg clearly believes that when you want to criticize or attack something, you should just make up whatever you like, as long as it sounds really, really bad. And right there, you can see what inspired the title of this post. It’s a tribute to Shadeggism, is what it is.