Question Asked and Answered

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“How Long Until Democrats Demonize Leukemia Patient Julie Boonstra for Excoriating #ObamaCare?“, Donald Douglas asked at his American Power blog on Wednesday:

How long until the monstrous left goes after this woman, who is literally fighting to survive after the ObamaCare monstrosity eviscerated her existing healthcare coverage? Never forget: There’s no depths to which leftists won’t sink to demonize and destroy those who would dare resist their evil agenda.

To answer Douglas’s query, the time period that elapsed was pretty much instantaneous, as we now know.

Yesterday, Christopher Bedford noted at the Daily Caller that “The Washington Post is pretty worried about the people Obamacare hurts (and it’s not why you’d think).” Bedford writes that Greg Sargent, one of the more transparently partisan of all the president’s cheerleaders at the Post, is upset someone like Boonstra is appearing in an anti-Obamacare ad. How dare the right co-opt a leftwing strategy dating back decades:

Gun control isn’t about the Constitution, liberty or freedom from fear — it’s about the child victims of a madman.

Abortion isn’t about the over-one million lives that are fatally rejected each year — it’s about women dying in back alleys.

Food stamps? Conservatives want Joe to starve. Regulation? Conservatives want Steve to get killed in a factory accident. Hell, we heard Republicans want people to die simply to spite Obama.

Interestingly enough, when complaining about AFP, Mr. Sargent failed to link back to some of his earlier work, like “Another Romney layoff victim, this one a conservative, speaks out,” and “Mitt Romney’s new antagonists: His layoff victims.”

Read: Connecting a Republican to the sad victim stories he is indirectly involved in is fair; connecting Democrats to the sad victim stories their law directly caused is not.

The most ironic twist, of course, is that the left leaned heavily on victim stories to pass Obamacare in 2010. And to justify it since. Because victimhood is the strategy of the left — one the right often finds unseemly.

(Remember the CNN debate when Wolf Blitzer asked Ron Paul if “society should just let [an uninsured man] die?”)

But the left uses the victimhood tactic so readily because it really can work. And what has Mr. Sargent worried is not the true stories of hardship and suffering, but just how effective those stories can be. (BEDFORD: The (real) life of Julie)

It’s fitting that AFP — one of many conservative organizations that warned all of this would happen, and tried to stop Obamacare from being passed — is using the tactics the left used to pass the law against the law.

And it’s also fitting that Democratic politicians who passed Obamacare four years ago now have to hear from the constituents they hurt.

Though obviously, they’d prefer it if they didn’t have to at all, which is why, as the Washington Examiner notes, “Michigan Democrat Rep. Gary Peters threatens TV station licenses over Obamacare ad,” specifically, the above ad featuring Boonstra:

While Julie Boonstra of Dexter, Mich., struggles to survive leukemia, she now also has to cope with being called a liar by the Democrat who wants to be her next senator.

And the campaign of Rep. Gary Peters is also going after television stations airing ads in which her story is featured, threatening their licenses.

The ad by Americans for Prosperity features Boonstra talking about how her insurance was canceled under Obamacare and saying that Peters’ decision to vote for the law “jeopardized my health.” The ads are airing in Michigan as Peters seeks the Democratic nomination to replace Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., who is not seeking re-election.

It’s not at all surprising, as Paul Mirengoff wrote yesterday at Power Line, that the “reckoning” would soon be arriving for the political opponents of Mr. Obama and his fellow lefists. But Peters’ decision is a particularly ill-thought out one, since by threatening his local TV station, and by implication, threatening Boonstra, he’s bringing national attention to his punitive, bullying worldview. Not to mention, causing numerous Websites to embed the above video.

But then, as John Nolte noted this past summer, that’s what modern “liberalism” has regressed into, using national media to punish the powerless.

As Fred Siegel noted in his new book, The Revolt Against the Masses, the credo of 1920s-era “liberals” was to “Rid society of the dictatorship of the middle class.” Almost a century later, the mop-up operation continues.