Lou Dobbs Tours Single-Payer Systems Abroad and Realizes, Holy Crap They're Good

That is, Dobbs can read all sorts of fair and balanced words from a script, but he is willfully deaf to their meaning. Anything that doesn't fit his worldview, he doesn't hear, it doesn't compute, and he goes blank.

As he did last week when he interviewed Obama's former doctor, David Scheiner. The fact that Scheiner had criticized the president's healthcare plan was enough to land him on Lou Dobbs Tonight; but the fact that Scheiner had criticized Obama from the left for ignoring single-payer plans simply couldn't find an empty berth to tie up to in Dobbs's brain. Dr. Scheiner passionately, and at length, explains to Dobbs that it is private insurance companies that are standing between doctors and their patients, not the goverment. "The government never gets in the way," Scheiner says. "In Medicare, 40 years of Medicare, they've never interfered with me giving care."

"Medicare is--I'm sorry, which is interfering?" replies a suddenly glowering Dobbs, who apparently wasn't listening at all. Yet even after Scheiner carefully explains yet again, Dobbs kept on: "But the argument is, as you know, Doctor, that with government-run healthcare that there would be great intrusion by the government..."

Now that's what I call dobbering! More willful than mere doddering, Lou's habit of hearing only what he wants to hear, while clinging to factoids that have been proven wrong and getting offended when others question these falsehoods, deserves an eponymous word all its own.