Pirate's Cove

If the NY Times keeps up these kinds of stories about Senator Jim DeMint (R-SC), they will turn him into a star in the Republican Party: Fighting Health Care Overhaul, and Proud of It

Senator Jim DeMint, the South Carolina Republican who predicted that President Obama’s effort to overhaul the health care system would become his “Waterloo,” is doing his best to make that happen.

Taking questions from a friendly crowd of 500 people here the other day, Mr. DeMint did little to correct their misimpressions about health care legislation but rather reinforced their worst fears.

But, the NY Times spends absolutely no time attempting to tell us what those misimpressions are, nor rebutting them. I wonder why?

When one man said the major House bill would give the government electronic access to bank accounts, Mr. DeMint told him the bill was never about health care. “This is about more government control,” he declared. “If it was about health care, we could get it done in a couple of weeks.”

Can anyone argue he is wrong? If Obama and the Dems were actually interested, they would not be stuck on the public option and destroying private companies. They would not be demonizing the medical insurance industry, nor saying that doctors are cutting off limbs and performing tonsilectomies for extra profit. They would not be freaking out and calling for boycotts of Whole Foods when their CEO comes out with a rational alternative for health care reform. Instead, they would be looking at those alternatives, and others, and soliciting the opinions of the professionals.

Mr. DeMint, 57, is a first-term senator, a back-bencher with little influence in Washington’s corridors of power. But at home he is stoking anger over the health care issue as he advances his free-market philosophy, gains national attention and, perhaps, helps derail Mr. Obama’s agenda.

See? He means squat, but, he is a big meany. The NY Times has Spoken. All Hail The Manhattan Cocktail Circuit Crowd! But, he means so little that this was a Internet front page story, and appears on A12 in todays print version.

All of this has left Mr. DeMint free to fire up his conservative base, arguing for ideological purity at a time when other Republicans might compromise to try to rebuild their numbers.

Big meany. How dare he speak to people from the other aisle!

Mr. DeMint’s town-hall-style meetings, where he promotes his new book, “Saving Freedom: We Can Stop America’s Slide into Socialism,” tend to be more like cheerleading sessions than the angry confrontations faced by lawmakers elsewhere.

That might have something to do with the fact that DeMint is not pushing the insance ObamaCare (outsourced to Congress, of course) plans, and is against the massive spending and government control of individuals and private industry plans of the Democrats.

Thanks for introducing DeMint to the rest of the country, Grey Lady!