War of Words

The Republican Party is trying to censor people who call the Republican plan to end Medicare a Republican plan to end Medicare.

Attention, people, this is important: The battle over whether it’s true that the Republican plan would “end Medicare” is about to play out in a critical way in New Hampshire.
The National Republican Congressional Committee, which oversees House races for the GOP, has written a sharply-worded letter demanding that a New Hampshire TV station yank an ad making that claim. Whether the ad gets taken down could help set a precedent for whether other stations will air Dem TV ads making this argument, which is expected to be a central message for Dems in the 2012 elections.

The TV station has thankfully declined:

The liberal Progressive Change Campaign Committee has won a round against the National Republican Congressional Committee -- with the liberal group turning back an effort to get an ad targeting Republican proposals on Medicare pulled from broadcast.

Replacing a program of direct government payments to senior's doctors with a voucher program to get seniors to buy their  own - more expensive - private health insurance unambiguously ends the current Medicare program and replaces it with something that is neither THE Medicare program or even A Medicare program.  That's a government market support program for the private insurance industry. An industry that coincidentally has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to the Republican Party and Republican candidates.

If a political party ever gets to dictate what is allowed to be said based on whether it conflicts with their own deceptive rhetoric that means giving them control over defining consensus reality itself.