Gina Loudon: Don't Worry About Healthcare Cause There's Pie In the Sky When You Die

St. Louis tea party leader Gina Loudon had a post up on Big Journalism responding to a recent evisceration of Sarah Palin in Vanity Fair by Michael Joseph Gross. While most of Loudon's points were irrelevant to the central claims of the article, it's true that much of Gross's article is based on anonymous sources. It seems pretty clear that the way people react to the article will be based mostly on their preexisting political beliefs, or on how much they trust the author and/or publication to do good work (although I should note that Gross does provide pretty damning new information about Palin's frivolous shopping habits with campaign money and it seems like a lot of the claims, such as his suggestion that she doesn't really hunt, could be easily disproved by the Palins if untrue).

But what I want to focus on is this quote from Loudon in her post:

I do agree with you on one thing, Mr. Gross. You said that “Her talk of leading with ‘a servant’s heart’ is a dog-whistle for the born-again. Her dig at health-care reform as an expression of Democratic ambitions to “build a Utopia in the United States is practically a trumpet call (because the Kingdom of God is not of this earth), and perfection can be achieved only in the life to come.

Got that? While Gina Loudon and her husband John rake in the cash as Republican consultants, she wants to remind you to keep your head down, pray a lot, and don't worry about silly, unrealistic things like making sure your family has access to health care. After all, only the most naive idealists could possibly think that the United States, with the largest economy in the world, could provide its residents with affordable health care the way many other countries do. Yep, Gina reminds us all to "Work and pray, live on hay, cause there's pie in the sky when you die:"


(note to readers: I don't see this song as an attack on Christianity, but rather as an attack on a certain cynical way of using religion to keep people down)