Evil and Stupid Misconceptions, Right

William McGurn's piece in WSJ shows the grasping quality of the defenders of the health care bill. Unwilling to discuss details of the bill, they attack the unbelievers with accusations of evil, stupidity and misconceiving. First he deals with Harry Reid's latest "evil" remark:

We saw it again in 2002, when George W. Bush characterized North Korea, Iran and Saddam Hussein's Iraq as an "axis of evil." Tom Daschle, a Democrat and then Senate majority leader, warned that "we've got to be very careful with rhetoric of that kind"; former President Jimmy Carter called it "overly simplistic and counterproductive"; and comedian Will Ferrell parodied it on Saturday Night Live. Soon the phrase became acceptable only in the ironic sense—as in the Chris Fair cookbook titled "Cuisines of the Axis of Evil and Other Irritating States: A Dinner Party Approach to International Relations."

With all this history, you would think Harry Reid (D., Nev.) had ample warning. Nevertheless, the Senate majority leader invoked the e-word himself last week at an energy conference in Las Vegas, where he accused those protesting President Barack Obama's health-care proposals of being "evil mongers." So proud was he of this contribution to the American political lexicon that he repeated it to a reporter the next day and noted the phrase was "an original."

And then . . . nothing. No thundering rebuke from the New York Times. No outburst from Mr. Carter. In fact, it's hard not to notice that the good and gracious people who instinctively recoil at words like "evil" or "un-American" (the preferred term of Mr. Reid's counterpart in the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi) have all been silent.

Yeah, well, Reid is a Democrat, so he has immunity. Next, he examines how Obama goes after the stupidity of a straw-woman he carries around to townhall meetings:

It's a point of view Mr. Obama inadvertently encourages when he indulges in, say, the trope about Medicare that has become a staple of his town halls. The president tells the crowd he's received a letter from a woman upset with his plans for health care. "She said, 'I don't want government-run health care. I don't want you meddling in the private market place. And keep your hands off my Medicare.'"

Get it? The applause tells us the audience does: How dumb can this woman be?

Gibbs hits it from the misconception angle:

It's much the same with White House spokesman Robert Gibbs. In his press briefings, Mr. Gibbs seems to suggest that all hard questions about health care are based on "misconceptions." Really?

Is the Congressional Budget Office's finding that the House plan would significantly raise health-care costs a "misconception"? Was it a "misconception" that the now-abandoned section covering end-of-life issues had an in-built conflict of interest between lowering costs and providing care for the elderly? And is it a "misconception" that Mr. Obama's ultimate goal is a single-payer system, when Americans can watch him on earlier videos saying as much?

Read the whole thing, it's funny yet revealing. He points out that everyone in DC is asking "what went wrong with the administration's sales pitch" without suspecting that it might be substance. He's right; they're trying to sell Americans a shit sandwich for a trillion dollars. If we don't want to buy it, they'll try to ram it down our throats.