Respect your elders - we vote

One of the things that annoys me the most about living in the most crimson county in a red state is the presumption by the inmates that you couldn't possibly be anything else but one of them.  The lack of inhibition allowing them to launch into some vicious right-wing verbal assault, packed like a fat kid's lunchbox with unhealthy swill gives me no end of grief, but of course there are times when it backfires on them.

Republican Governor Rick Scott had one of those precious moments the other day, naturally assuming that a group of retired folks in nearby Boca Raton would, like a juke box, play his song when he pushed the right buttons. Wrong. The expression on his face tells it all.

Scott, who is filling my TV screen every evening with scurrilous lies and sleazy half truths about his Democratic opponent, blaming him for the recession, but worse, blaming him for not hating Obama and everything he's done enough -- Scott who oversaw what was at the time the largest medicare fraud in history, expected the doddering old folks to respond Republican-style to his questions about just how much they hated Medicare and The Affordable Care Act.

What he found was a satisfied group with few complaints, says the Sun Sentinel.  Some actually praised "Obamacare."  One woman, some years younger than I responded that if young people don't have insurance the rest of us will have to pay their bills and if there really were cuts necessary under the ACA to provide equal care for others, as Scott claims it would, ( he lies) then people like her weren't going to fight to keep every last benefit because "it isn't the United States of senior citizens."

Another older fellow said if there really were cuts to Medicare, he hadn't seen them and that's of course because the cuts aren't to the beneficiaries but to service providers.  Perhaps people with some time to read noticed that the "cuts" were actually Medicare cost-savings passed by a Republican Congress.


Other people confirmed that they had seen no cuts, that they were satisfied.  Others affirmed that contrary to Scott's claims no doctors were quitting.  We get used to the image of everybody over 65 as feeble, barely rational and uninformed.  That's as wrong as Scott's (did I mention that he ripped off Medicare for billions?) similar presumption that they aren't only drooling morons but Republican stooges.  Is that redundant?

Did Scott's condescension and presumptions irritate his audience as much as his corruption and apparent dishonesty?  Who knows?  Stealing so much money from Medicare that he can become a governor through paid TV lies about Medicare, makes me glad I wasn't there at the Volen Center in Boca Raton to comment.  I'm old enough, of course, but sorry to bust the stereotype, I'm more likely found in other venues like gun ranges, waterfront dives and Biker bars where we've seen too damned many liars and con men like Rick Scott and remember him all too well to be fooled again.