When I worked at the newspaper, we had a heated rivalry with the Dallas Morning News. That didn't mean we didn't have lots of friends, lovers, spouses and other family who worked there. We did. And we all traded information about how the powers that be were trying to put the screws to us all.
In the 1980s, companies were hysterical about drug usage and trying to put a stop to it. I'm not in favor of recreational drug use, but the thought of being required to pee in a cup on a random basis just so I could answer the telephone was more than I could stomach. Particularly when we knew the druggies, and they weren't the clerks ripping the wire copy off the printers for you.
Always the leader in innovation, the folks at the DMN came up with an incredibly stupid campaign to get employees to snitch on their coworkers. If you turned in your buddy for having a doobie on the docks, the company would give you a free flashlight. This campaign quickly became known as the "F*** your friend for a flashlight" campaign and died a blessedly speedy death.*
I couldn't help but remember this when I read about the pathetic yet sinister attempt by the White House to enlist willing sycophants to snitch on anyone accurately informing others about what Obamacare contains.
The video begins: “Hi. I’m Linda Douglass. I’m the communications director for the White House Office of Health Reform, and one of my jobs is to keep track of all the disinformation that’s out there about health-insurance reform. And there are a lot of very deceiving headlines out there right now, such as this one — take a look at this one. This one says, ‘Uncovered Video: Obama Explains How His Health Care Plan Will Eliminate PRIVATE Insurance.’
“Well, nothing can be farther from the truth. You know the people who always try to SCARE people whenever you try to bring them health-insurance reform are at it again. And they’re taking sentences and phrases out of context, and they’re cobbling them together to leave a VERY false impression. The truth is that the president has been talking to the American people a LOT about health-insurance reform and what is at stake for them.
“So what happens is that because he’s talking to the American people so much, there are people out there with a computer and a lot of free time, and they take a phrase here and there — they simply cherry-pick and put it together, and make it sound like he’s saying something that he didn’t really say.”
The problem, of course, is that Obama did say that he wants to eliminate private insurance. There's nothing false or misleading in this video:
But that is the problem for the White House, which is why they are implementing the snitch program in the first place. And they aren't even giving away free flashlights for f***ing your friends over.
Thank goodness Democrats have a backup plan for when this one fails: blame Republicans.
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