Today, we're fairly certain what the right-wing screamers on the radio and their bubble-headed bleach-blonde cohorts on the fake news channel will be bleating about. After all, the cries from the right that "Obama is a socialist" (this time, because he's proposing a tax on millionaires and billionaires) or that he's a bad, bad man (the rumors from the latest semi-fictional tell-all) are nothing that propagandists haven't already said a billion times already.
With that in mind we're going to take a detour today to talk about a hypothetical question that Paul came up with, after listening to NPR and having a discussion over the weekend with our good friend, theatre director and professional cartoonist, Bob Hall.
The question, begged by the comments at the most recent Republican debate, was this: If Michele Bachmann had been President in the 1950s, would she have fought against the government mandated polio vaccinations, and relegated thousands of children to being free from those awful polio shots, so that they could spend their lives in an iron lung or otherwise have been permanently disabled?
It's not entirely hyperbole, or a fantasy discussion.
In case you missed it last week, Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Rep. Bachmann had a royal fight in the GOP debate over Perry's 2007 executive order requiring that sixth-grade girls in Texas get vaccinated against HPV - the Human Papilloma Virus. All too conveniently, the manufacturer of the vaccine, Gardasil, happens to be Merck Pharmaceuticals, a substantial contributor to Perry's previous political campaigns.
Of all the candidates attacking Perry, Bachmann seemed the most livid about Perry's actions - but we're not quite sure why. In all the time Bachmann has been in politics, both at the state and federal level, she's never once made crusading AGAINST vaccinations a major part of her legislative resume (which is incredibly thin).
Furthermore, Ms. Bachmann's ridiculous claim - a claim that Bachmann says she was only passing on from one of her supporters - that vaccinations cause retardation, is an outright lie.
Perry's claims that he was trying to fight cancer and "protect life" ring hollow - which, coming from a Governor who has overseen more than 234 executions hardly seems sincere. The key question seems to be one of what right the government has to implement programs that improve public health.
While there are currently no federal laws mandating vaccination, all 50 states have them - and the constitutional right of the government to mandate vaccination has been upheld by the Supreme Court on multiple occasions, many years before the 1950s.
Even IF the world had been turned upside down, and Ms. Bachmann somehow had become the President of the United States during the era when Dr. Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine, her protestations would have crashed and broken against reality: both vaccinations and health care mandates work, if created and implemented properly. Legally and ethically, the U.S. and state governments not only can mandate certain actions regarding public health, but they have a responsibility to do so.
We tend to think the millions of Americans who've received the polio vaccine in the last fifty years, along with the millions of young Americans who've recently gained or kept health insurance, thanks to the Affordable Care Act - Obamacare to its detractors - would also tend to agree that mandates and health care are pretty good policy at times.
