Grass Is Not Always Greener On 'Both Sides'

It's your Sunday shows rundown!!

Today we mark a day we will always remember. No, not the tragic terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001: We’re talking about the day after Chuck Todd’s final show as host of NBC’s “Meet The Press”!

So let’s bid farewell to Chuck “Both Sides” Todd with this musical number from a movie with arguably two sides similar to today’s politics.

Now that’s over, let’s take a look at someone else trying to use “both sides” for political gain.

Nikki’s Acrobatics

CNN’s “State Of The Union” interviewed former South Carolina Governor, U.N. Ambassador and current Republican vice-presidential nominee Nikki Haley about a wide range of things. But it was the weird double standards that Haley kept trying to hold that pointed out both her inability to really articulate her positions and the strange ways Republicans try to sell their very unpopular old/new ideas.

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When asked by host Jake Tapper about Florida/Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville’s hostage taking of military promotions to use as political leverage, Haley seemed to outright fully condemn EVERYONE but Tuberville himself.

First, we had some victim blaming.

HALEY: There's a couple of things here, Jake. I mean, let's speak hard truths, right?

First of all, Department of Defense never should have done this. I disagree with it, and I will put an end to it as president. You have to go through Congress. We have —

TAPPER: You’re talking about the reimbursement policy for travel for abortion.

HALEY: Yes.

After (once again) going with the Taylor Swift Doctrine, Haley gets to the “real” person to blame for this: Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

HALEY: […] These — the military members and families, they sacrifice enough. They don't need to be a pawn in Congress. But look at the political games that continue to play. Chuck Schumer could still get this done if he went through and listed each member and had Congress vote on each member.

While we personally have some critique of how Majority Leader Schumer has handled this situation (appealing to Republicans’ shame or courage is foolish), doing this one-by-one approval of military promotions is absurd. When Tapper pointed out that doing this would set a bad precedent if from now on ANY senator can just do this and delay every military promotion, Haley again reverted to blaming military leadership while minimizing Tuberville’s actions.

HALEY: Well, if you're going to talk about tradition, shouldn’t Department of Defense do things the right way, so we're never in this mess to start with? […] Department of Defense started this. I’m not saying Senator Tuberville is right in doing this, because I don’t want to use them as pawns. But if you love our military, if you are so adamant about it, then go and make Congress, Republicans and Democrats, have to go through person by person.

Haley also demonstrated this inability to solve the real issues when she was asked about one of President Joe Biden’s biggest achievements he’s touted on the campaign trail: the $35 price cap on insulin for American seniors. When Haley was asked as “president” if she would keep or reverse this, Haley dodged giving Biden any credit while blaming him for the entire current healthcare system.

HALEY: I think what Biden did was a Band-Aid. Do we need to do something about health care? Absolutely. […] But the way we deal with it is, we need to start exposing the insurance companies, the hospitals, the doctors, the PBMs, the pharmaceutical companies, make them all transparent.

Why should anyone go to the hospital and have an insurance company in the hospital negotiate the cost for the patient, with the patient not having anything involved? Why are drugs so expensive? Why do pharmaceutical companies get to decide this with government, and not have patients at the table? Why don’t we have more competition and transparency in this?

When I am president, we will go through and expose all of that. If we just dealt with the insurance companies alone, we would cut health care in half. So, yes, it’s great when you can say we’re going to lower the cost of these drugs because people cannot afford them, but it's a Band-Aid. It’s not fixing the real problem. […]

That’s ludicrous. We need to break the system and refix it, not just keep putting Band-Aids over it, because it’s just leaving more and more Americans suffering and unavailable — unavailable to be able to afford their health care.

This is one of those rare moments when you think you could agree with Nikki Haley … IF you didn’t know what her and her party truly mean by statements like this. It ALMOST sounds like she’s very close to the answer. Why? Because what Haley is criticizing is the for-profit medical system we have and the only solution to this problem is to guarantee healthcare as a human right and have single payer/universal healthcare.

But Haley and her party have not only opposed this as “socialized medicine,” but she hints at her true meaning when she asks, “Why don’t we have more competition[...]?” in her statement above. See, much like education and Social Security, Republicans don’t want to fix it but privatize it and let corporations’ profit from it MORE.

To use Haley’s analogy, it would be like instead of using a “Band-Aid” we tried to fix things by making the wounds bigger.

Dr. Aldo Raines might not be a good medical role model.

It’s a carnival shell game ran by the Republican Party circus.

And certainly, you never put bets on the acrobatics from any circus with the name Haley, as any comic book fans can attest.

Have a week.