MSNBC’s Joy Reid apparently believes that the memory of the American public is so horrendous, that she actually attempted to rewrite the history of the passing of ObamaCare on Wednesday’s All In in an attempt to smear the GOP. “Republicans have been saying for SO LONG that they're going to repeal and replace, repeal and replace,” she exclaimed to Democratic strategist Jess McIntosh, “It's just like a catch phrase but they never had a risk of having to do it because they always had Barack Obama to save them from themselves.”
“Now that they have to do it, do you think they will actually go forward,” Reid joked. To which McIntosh replied with a laugh, “You know I don't. I think Republicans really like to govern by catch phrase because they don't like to govern.”
Reid allowed her friend to paint the Democratic Party as the hero who rode in to save the day because, “We cared about fixing that problem because Democrats believe that government can fix certain problems that need to be fixed.” But neither of them would dare mention the new problem of customers still unable to afford to pay the skyrocketing premiums. She went on to claim that Republicans practice, “catch phrase obstructionism and that's how they brand their party.”
The MSNBC host then wondered if congressional Republicans would go through the, “excruciating public horrible process of trying to reconfigure the entire American health care system in public?” If Obama and congressional Democrats really constructed the law for the public to witness they wouldn’t have had backroom negotiations over “sweetheart deals.” That’s not to mention the infamous “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what’s in it” line from then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
It’s rather telling that she described crafting a bill with public accountability as “excruciating” and “horrible.”
“No! I mean, it didn't help Democrats politically and especially when Democrats had to do it while Republicans were standing there yelling ‘death panels’ and ‘you're going to push grandma off a cliff,’” McIntosh recalled. But her memory seems to be a bit fuzzy there because that was Democrats who produced a video showing Congressman Paul Ryan’s Medicare privatization plan would “push grandma off a cliff.” Only later did the GOP make a spoof of the video with Obama pushing grandma.
In what seemed like a replay MSNBC’s greatest hits, Reid turned her sights on the Tea Party, wondering if liberals could copy it. “[Republicans] were able to create this thing called the Tea Party that started out calling homeowners deadbeats if they couldn't pay their mortgages,” she lied, “But it suddenly became this really well-funded faux grass-roots kind of thing which just went after health care every minute, every minute.”
“I don't think that we can replicate the Republican strategy because we are bound by principle,” McIntosh quipped, “I don't think that we can have a Democratic Tea Party.”
Both of their own memories seem to have faded in that regard because the fact of the matter is, Democrats did have their own version of the Tea Party and it was called Occupy Wall Street. Occupy was a movement of radical leftists who squatted on public and private property across the country and was known for assaulting people and violent riots. That’s probably a good enough reason to want to rewrite history.