Health Care Scare

Marty Kaplan
HuffPost

We're about to find out whether Americans are as suspicious of the right's anti-health care reform propaganda as Iraqis are dismissive of America's lame hearts-and-minds campaign in Iraq.

"These commercials are boring, poor and annoying," Noor Sabah, an engineer in Fallujah, told the Washington Post's Ernesto Londono. Thanks to George W. Bush, over the past six years the U.S. has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a TV, radio, billboard, pamphlet and faux-newspaper media barrage in Iraq. But its "morning in Iraq" message is almost universally ridiculed by Iraqis.

Back at home, a lobby called Conservatives for Patients Rights (CPR) is spending tens of millions on a multimedia ad and infomercial campaign to kill Obama's plans to fix the health care mess. The public relations firm coordinating it is the same one that spread the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" lies about John Kerry, and the mastermind behind it, CPR chairman Richard Scott, ran the largest - and most crooked - health care company in the world.

(More here.)