The “Solid Idea” that Torinus Failed to Mention

The newspaper columns written by John Torinus should come with full and proper disclosures. If they did, the only people that would lend them credibility would be the usual suspects among the corporate elite and their useful idiots on the right wing fringe. We've seen examples in the past of him failing to mention important pieces of information to his readers and his latest column is certainly no exception.

The Torinus column in Sunday's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel tried to convince us that the Astroturf group, Americans for Prosperity, held a legitimate and "substantive" forum on health care last week. These events were nothing more than a corporately funded defense of big insurance and our dysfunctional status quo. But don't hold your breath for the corporate columnist (with an agenda) to fill you in on such minor details. He would rather pretend that it was purely a "substantive" discussion rather than a right wing self congratulatory love fest. Maybe someone should be congratulated, because so far their misinformation campaign appears to be a success.

In his Sunday column Torinus lists bullet points of what he describes as the "substance" given at these AFP (Republican) rallies. As he is trying to sell the idea that the rally was one of "substance", he conveniently fails to mention one of the more absurd (and worn out) lies that have been told by the key note speaker John Stossel. Even though it has been completely debunked many times over, Stossel has used AFP rallies to push the paranoid idea of "death panels" . Why didn't Torinus list that as one of his "solid idea" bullet points from the rally? Maybe it is because such comments would have cast doubt on his entire spin of the event and would have negated his entire premise. Hey, maybe telling the full truth would have eliminated the need for Sunday's Torinus column in the first place! Now that is what I would call a solid idea!