Posted on 10/23/2013 3:12:26 AM PDT by cunning_fish
Imagining how the US media would cover a domestic political event if it had happened in a foreign country is a very entertaining thought experiment. Doing so helps shed light on a number of biases and blind spots we’d rather ignore. It’s very easy, after all, to look at other countries and poke fun at their missteps and mistakes. It’s a lot more difficult to look in the mirror and admit error.
I fully understand that I’m following in the footsteps of numerous other writers when it comes to this particular style of article. However the disastrous and mistake-filled rollout of the Obama administration’s signature health initiative really got me thinking: how would our media have treated such a total failure of planning and accountability if it had happened in a less friendly country? How would we have covered a similar event if it occurred in Russia?
With the stipulation that the following contains fairly healthy portions of satire and dark humor, I think that US media coverage of the failure of “Putincare” would read something like the following:
Healthcare reform in chaos, Putin remains optimistic Moscow, Russia October 22, 2013
A healthcare reform that was one of the key components of the Putin administration’s modernization drive remained in chaos on Tuesday as citizens were unable to register for their new legally-mandated benefits. With the deadline for sign-up growing closer by the day, average Russians complained openly of confusing and contradictory rules, an online platform that lacked even rudimentary functionality, and a pervasive lack of accountability that recalled some of the worst days of the country’s communist past.
“It’s humiliating” said Ilya Aranovich 27, a web designer living in Moscow. “Everyone is always talking about ‘modernization,’ and ‘technology.’ We spent billions on the space program and on new
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
The way Obamacare is playing out is like the cyber equivalent of Josef Stalin’s Baltic/White Sea Canal debacle. That canal costs hundreds of thousands of lives in slave labor while delivering a canal that was too shallow for most ships.
“What we really need to around here is to shoot a few more intellectuals” —Nikita Kruschev
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