As you all know by now, the Both Sides Do It lie has been the legacy media's default setting for so long, and is now, for millions of Americans, so automatic that it has become what psychiatrist and author Robert Jay Lifton called a “thought-terminating cliché". Or what Orwell termed "crimestop": the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought.
When the conversation veers anywhere near holding Republicans solely responsible for the evil that they do, these crimestop conditioned citizens have been trained to immediately chuck a "Both Sides Do It" flashbang into the mix and then scurry away to safety.
Even when the stakes are life-and-death, and even when the irrefutable proof of who is right and who is wrong is literally at every citizen's fingertips, for far too many Americans the thought of allocating blame where it belongs is so terrifying that these stubbornly sleepy citizens would rather dream reassuringly about "politicians in Washington" or "both sides of the aisle" than wake to find that the Republican party is a mob of violent bigots and imbeciles, fueled by lurid, home-grown fascist propaganda masquerading as news, and ruled by monsters and demagogues.
And even at the cost of our democracy, the legacy media would rather go right on feeding them the narcotic lie that keeps them docile and somnolent than risk the wrath of the MAGA mob and the loss of revenue that would surely accompany telling the masses the simple, ugly truth.
Which brings us to this excerpt from a November 14, 2025 Vox article entitled "Meet the newly uninsured -- Millions of Americans will soon go without insurance. We spoke with some of them."
It's the story of "Steve", a retiree. who had insurance through his wife's job. But then the company shut down her division, so she decided to retire, and off they went to the exchange to shop for new coverage.
The story itself is appalling, and is being felt, with minor variations, by millions of American families including ours.
But when you hit that last sentence, remember that "Steve" is saying this in the Fall of 2025, living in the rubble of a full decade of felonies, conspiracy mongering, corruption, lying, bigotry, treason, insurrection, fascism and assorted other catastrophes that a Trump-led Republican party has left in its wake.
Up until last year, his family of three was covered by his wife’s insurance, provided by the large corporation for which she worked. It was $500 a month with a low deductible. But then, the company shut down her division, she decided to retire, and the couple and their son enrolled in the same plan on the state’s ACA marketplaces.
They couldn’t get such a great deal, but they found something usable: about $1,000 per month — pricey, but they were able to keep all of their doctors, who were in network. Their deductible was about $4,600.
But next year, their current plan would cost $2,700 every month to keep, and their deductible would be higher — up to $5,300. They could consider dropping their college-aged son off the plan, but he would struggle to afford health insurance on his own, and it would only save his parents $300 a month.
Steven says he feels trapped. Given their age, he and his wife don’t feel they can afford to go without insurance. But they’re now going to have to pull money out of their retirement accounts to cover the cost of their health plan.
“We cannot wing it and not have health insurance,” Steven said. “I’m spending a lot of money that I really do not have on health care.”
He’s done the math. If he kept his same plan, paid all of the premiums, and paid the maximum out-of-pocket costs, he could spend $50,000 on health care out of pocket — even with a health insurance plan.
“It kinda seems like the two political parties want to be right and not care about people,” he told me.
2 comments:
"Steve" is Tom Friedman's cab driver and routinely winds up at the Applebee's salad bar next to DF Brooks.
Steve isn’t looking to be cured because that would involve spending time and paying attention.
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