FOX’s Glenn Beck and Laura Ingraham Fight Healthcare Reform by Mocking the Sick

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by Jeffrey Joseph

After the healthcare summit, President Obama hoped to have ascertained all the common ground liberals and conservatives have on the healthcare reform the nation so desperately needs in order to push legislation forward. Unfortunately, one basic assumption bipartisan progress would require, that both sides have compassion for the uninsured, simply does not hold. Now the movement to stop healthcare reform has taken a new low -- denigrating the afflicted.

Bill O'Reilly and Laura Ingraham, who even O'Reilly considers an "ideologue," talked about the summit on O'Reilly's show Thursday evening, but Ingraham made it clear that she had no sympathetic sentiments and preferred to be snide about the whole event. Referring to the stories Democrats presented of real sufferers of the lack of healthcare reform, Ingraham wrote off Louise Slaughter's constituent by saying she had "won the Olympics of sob stories by saying...[she] had to wear her sister's dentures, okay, it got so bad with the healthcare system." To prove she could, in fact, take her dislike for the disenfranchised a step further, Ingraham continued to say, "You had Harry Reid on the cleft palate with his [constituents] . . . I mean, the whole thing was ridiculous."

While Ingraham prominently features a cross on her chest during most of her television appearances, nothing about her attack on the story of someone with a cleft palate as "ridiculous" sounds remotely Christian. Nor does Ingraham's attempt to make light of an elderly woman in any way resemble a call to aid the literal or metaphorical "orphans and widows" of the world, a movement defined Biblically as "religion clean and undefiled."

Instead, Ingraham's derision came across as a crass attempt at humor used to avoid the substance of the issue, something her conservative colleagues like Glenn Beck and his radio sidekicks continued. Beck himself ridiculed the condition of Slaughter's constituent by saying, "I am wearing George Washington's dentures right now. I'm wearing his teeth right now. Over my teeth." Beck's sidekicks took the attacks a step further, derisively imitating the voice of a two-year-old presumably writing in to President Obama to tell him, "I have no healthcare, Mr. Pwesident, and I have no feet and no tonsils because doctors took 'em out." It seems only a member of Beck's show could find humor in a small child missing body parts. Somehow, he appeared entertained. 

Regardless of how many times FOX tries to portray healthcare reform as against the will of the nation, its contributors and their associates prove just how out of touch they are with the people who need help. People around the country deserve better than to be ridiculed by FOX personalities for their suffering and to have some kind of help in the form of healthcare reform. To get there, viewers deserve a compassionate presentation of the news rather than the facetiousness of Ingraham and Beck -- and to choose to Turn Off FOX.

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Originally posted at Turn Off FOX.

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