After Railing against the Individual Mandate for Years, Top Teabagger Jim DeMint Quits Senate to Lead Organization That Invented the Individual Mandate

In 2009, not long after Pres. Obama and the Democrats opted to forgo the single-payer option for health-insurance reform and go instead with the conservatives’ option of mandating that individuals must buy insurance from insurance corporations, the right wing abruptly disavowed their own plan, even going so far as to label it “socialism” and demonize it by referring to it as Obamacare.

Few pols and propagandists were more persistent in pushing the false narrative that Obamacare and its individual mandate were jack-booted socialism than the top teabagger in the Senate, Jim DeMint of South Carolina. Now, in one of those ironic turns in politics that you couldn’t possibly make up, DeMint has announced he is resigning from the Senate to run the same right-wing “thimk” tank that invented the individual mandate back in 1993, the Heritage Foundation.

One propagandist who may have outdone DeMint was Rush Limbbaugh, whose show was underwritten by Heritage. The foundation cooperated with Limbaugh’s purely political attacks on the mandate by attempting to disappear their role as its inventors. Their denials were inconvenienced, however, by the fact that when he was governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney used the Heritage plan as the basis for his “severely conservative” insurance reform program known as Romneycare.

Don’t expect DeMint’s hypocrisy over the Heritage mandate to become part of the mainstream media narrative about this story. Under the Beltway rules of journalism, DeMint’s obfuscation of the connection between Obamacare and Heritage would be classified as “old news,” and the connection between Heritage and the mandate is officially “old news.”

Oh, and early reports say that Heritage will pay this disingenuous hypocrite, whose net worth now is $65,000, a salary of $1.1 million.

Connect:

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.