Lie of the Year 2010: "Government Takeover". On that, more at the bottom of the post. But first things first: Let's talk about the sack o' shit first.
If you are very good at a job that requires you to be ready to lie at the drop of a hat, are you a brilliant professional of an unethical sack of shit? I pick the latter option.
The sack of shit that I refer to is Frank Luntz, an unethical douche of a pollster and opinion maker who has helped Repuglycans come up with some of the most doublespeak-ish expression in our recent political lives, as I showed in a post entitled One of America's Most Dangerous People Is Back. When I say "unethical douche", I am expressing an opinion only as far as the word douche goes. On the adjective unethical, I am backed by the opinion of The Executive Council of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, who found that Luntz had "violated the Association's Code of Professional Ethics and Practices." And that was a formal violation of ethics, not to count all the deceitful and leading phrases that Luntz engineered over the years, of which you can find a few examples in my post referenced above.
Luntz, who always appears as a reasonable individual, a mask that hides the true intellectual mercenary sleazeball he is, also engineered what Politifact, an independent fact-checking organization, chose as the Lie of the Year for 2010: the phrase "government takeover" aimed at scaring people away from supporting health care reform.
It is my unshakable conviction that people like Luntz are both instrumental and complicit in the preventable deaths of thousands of Americans who will die for lack of adequate health services, services that in fact should be a pillar of any civilized country. But not in the United States of America. Where is hell when you need it?
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