Bill Maher: New Rule: Just because a country elects a smart president doesn't make it a smart country. And before I go about demonstrating how, let me just say that ignorance has life and death consequences. Take the health care debate we're presently having: members of Congress have recessed now so they can go home and "listen to their constituents." An urge they should resist because their constituents don't know anything. At a recent town-hall meeting in South Carolina, a man stood up and told his Congressman to "keep your government hands off my Medicare," which is kind of like which is kind of like driving cross country to protest highways.

Yep. Most of these protesters are crazy and irrational.

I'm curious how many times a person has said 'keep your government hands off my Medicare'. I'm sure it's been said, but how many people have said this and believed it? I only imagine it's been repeated tens of thousands of times more than it was ever said. It's funny, but how rampant is the belief that Medicare isn't government sponsered?

I googled the phrase:

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Admittedly, some of the results very likely are repeats of the original shouter outer who said it.

As to what he and his ilk actually believe, well, they believe whatever they are told by FOX, Rush, Beck, et all.

amfh:

I googled the phrase:

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Admittedly, some of the results very likely are repeats of the original shouter outer who said it.

As to what he and his ilk actually believe, well, they believe whatever they are told by FOX, Rush, Beck, et all.

It's a tactic that's well worn out in politics, find something stupid someone said and repeat it over and over and over and over. Something like Gore invented the internet as an example. Have a bit of truth in it and make 'a mountain out of a mole hill'.

A distortion, or one might even go so far as to say "lie".

In the case of Al Gore, he never said he invented the internet. He said: During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth, environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.

And Newt confirmed it:

here’s what Republican Newt Ginrich said about that:

(I)n all fairness, Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet, and the truth is—and I worked with him starting in 1978 when I got [to Congress], we were both part of a ‘futures group’—the fact is, in the Clinton administration, the world we had talked about in the ’80s began to actually happen.

in 1988, The Guardian, a British paper, reported this:

American computing scientists are campaigning for the creation of a ’superhighway’ which would revolutionise data transmission. Legislation has already been laid before Congress by Senator Albert Gore of Tennessee, calling for government funds to help establish the new network, which scientists say they can have working within five years, at a cost of Dollars 400 million.

Years later, when Gore was vice president, computer scientist Vinton Cerf, widely known as the Father of the Internet, had this to say:

I think it is very fair to say that the Internet would not be where it is in the United States without the strong support given to it and related research areas by the vice president.

Finally:

Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf, seconded by Dave Farber, Sep 28 2000
"Bob and I believe that the vice president deserves significant credit for his early recognition of the importance of what has become the Internet."

Now, the difference in your example and the ignorant Fox shouter is that the Shouter DID actually say what he said. No one is lying about it, nor are they distorting his exact words...as many did in the Gore/Internet case.