Fresh as a 48-year-old daisy
The GOP turns its lonely eyes to the long-dead Gipper yet again, as legacy hack Jonah Goldberg at NRO demonstrates here:
The piece Goldberg calls “still fresh today” was a 10-minute anti-Medicare propaganda bit released on an “album” (prehistoric sound file recorded on vinyl to you dewy young thangs) in 1961. The piece was sponsored by the American Medical Association and dubbed “Operation Coffee Cup.” It was aimed at the wives of AMA members, female physicians being rarer than hen’s teeth in those days.
The AMA bigwigs hoped to harness Reagan’s suave delivery and aw-shucks patriotism to bowl over clutches of doctors’ wives at coffee-klatch listening parties, raising an army of alarmed women in pillbox hats, pearls and Chanel suits who would sally forth to crush the socialist horror of…Medicare. Says Reagan at the conclusion of the piece:
Write those letters now and call your friends and them to write. If you don’t, this program I promise you, will pass just as surely as the sun will come up tomorrow and behind it will come other government programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country until one day as Normal Thomas said we will wake to find that we have socialism, and if you don’t do this and I don’t do this, one of these days we are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.
It didn’t work out for them. But the utter failure of Operation Coffee Cup and spectacular success of its opponents, who delivered health care coverage to millions and built a network of security for generations of retirees, will not deter Reagan’s successors from using the same moldy old tactic to oppose the extension of health care for all. May they meet with similar results.
[Cross-posted at Betty Cracker]
Posted by Betty Cracker on 07/19/09 at 08:01 AM • Permalink
Categories: Politics • Bedwetters • Nutters • YouTubidity •
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