re: #112 Belafon

re: #86 JordanRules

Gotta love this. Trump statement about universal health care:

Nigel Farage, the Trump-supporting British politician, had appeared on the show to execute a two-pronged attack on the National Health Service and immigration:

“Well the big problem we’ve got is a population crisis caused by government policy on immigration,” Farage said. […]

“The National Health Service has turned into the International Health Service and we’re providing a lot of healthcare for people coming into Britain from all over the world. We do need some absolutely fundamental reforms. This system we have was set up in 1948. Surprisingly for a state-run thing for most of the first fifty years the public had great faith in it. Right now it’s pretty much at breaking point.”

Farage was attempting a sophisticated dual move, using the NHS to show that Britain can’t afford immigrants and using the underfunding of the NHS to argue that the system is doomed rather than in need of support. And there’s reason to believe Farage was a little too complex, because faced with this take, Trump went after universal health care rather than after immigration, despite Trump’s general hatred of immigrants and the fact that the U.S. does not have a national health service to attack.

The other problem here, of course, is that the thousands of people marching in the U.K. over health care are angry about underfunding of the NHS by the conservative government, not about it being “really bad and non-personal medical care.” They like it! They want more of it! And they’re not blaming immigrants. Not that you’d know that from watching Fox & Friends, let alone reading Trump’s half-digested version of Fox & Friends “truth.”

Two things at the same time? Too complex for Trump.

Also: I noticed Nigel chose Fox (presumably seen only over here) to spout this crap: I guess he knows that if he said stuff like this back home, a (very crowded) raft of people - people who know what they’re talking about - would be ripping him to shreds over it.

Hey! A benefit for international trade in the Trump era! “Biased forum for spreading right-wing lies” now a major American export product!!