Liberal Talk Radio

[I break momentarily from my self-imposed exile in "Work" to comment on the following story. Read the whole Krugman piece -- it's excellent.]

Rudi’s been pandering to the right, calling Hillary’s health care proposal “socialized medicine”, and bandying about dubious statistics to support his false claims.

… Mr. Giuliani’s supposed killer statistic about the defects of “socialized medicine” is entirely false. In fact, there’s very little evidence that Americans get better health care than the British, which is amazing given the fact that Britain spends only 41 percent as much on health care per person as we do.

Anyway, comparisons with Britain have absolutely nothing to do with what the Democrats are proposing. In Britain, doctors are government employees; despite what Mr. Giuliani is suggesting, none of the Democratic candidates have proposed to make American doctors work for the government.

As a fact-check in The Washington Post put it: “The Clinton health care plan” — which is very similar to the Edwards and Obama plans — “has more in common with the Massachusetts plan signed into law by Gov. Mitt Romney than the British National Health system.” Of course, this hasn’t stopped Mr. Romney from making similar smears.

Leaving aside for a sec my ongoing criticism that there’s nothing wrong with socialized medicine prima facie, the point Krugman’s actually making here is that it’s MORALLY reprehensible for a political candidate to lie or otherwise promulgate falsehoods in an effort to win an election.

After all, don’t we expect out leaders to actually lead?  I mean, would you work for someone who constantly lied to you?  So why vote for someone who lies, then?

Unless and until the average American fully embraces the fact that there are qualitative differences in data sources, we’re going to be stuck listening to candidates talk out of their dupas.