The great health care reform word count scandal of 2009!
October 30, 2009 6:11 pm ET by Terry Krepel
There is a scandal brewing on the right-wing media, and sides are being chosen.
Grover Norquist and Americans for Tax Reform claims that the word "shall" appears in the health care reform bill 3,424 times. But the Weekly Standard and Rep. Mike Pence insist that "shall" appears 3,425 times.
Why, the national shame of having a health care reform bill that contains a whole bunch of pages has nothing on this. If conservatives can't agree on how many times the word "shall" appears in the bill, what can they agree on?
Which side will you be on? Who in the right-wing media will get to the bottom of this burgeoning scandal? Let loose the blogs of war!
(Or, you know, maybe somebody just missed something when they copied-and-pasted the bill into Microsoft Word in order to run the "word count" function on "shall.")
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Who in the right-wing media will get to the bottom of this burgeoning scandal?
But don't you mean far right-wing media, Terry?
I'm sure our right-wing media won't bother to do any work at all, beyond stenography.
We've got Freedom from Choice!
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Shall is an "order". Conservatives hate being told they have to do something, for the most part. Now, they don't mind telling others how to behave, or scolding people who don't behave, but they hate being told to behave themselves!
Never mind that this is the way that laws are crafted here in the good ole USA, and this bill is no different from any other bill.
But most people don't know that, and so they are trying to scare people, make them fearful of big government making them do something they don't want to do. Change, you gotta fear it.