Griper Blade: Blaming the Treatment for the Disease

Bass-ackward reasoning 101: Imagine a patient with kidney disease. This patient has be treated with dialysis regularly or the blood toxins normally filtered out by the kidneys will eventually kill him. It's not cheap, but it's necessary. Everyone knows that the solution to this problem is a kidney transplant. But a group of quacks -- without any real research at all -- insist that the problem isn't the failing kidneys, the problem is the dialysis. Stop giving the patient the treatment and they'll recover.

I bring this up to draw a parallel. After Mitt Romney said he wasn't "concerned about the very poor," head wingnut and US Senator Jim DeMint suggested a better way of putting it -- the dialysis is the problem, not the disease.

Roll Call:

DeMint said that portion of Romney’s comments also need to be reframed. While Democrats have been using Romney’s comments to argue he is callous toward the poor, conservatives have expressed concern that the former governor might be OK with having Americans who are dependent on government-subsidized social programs.

“He needs to address it,” DeMint told Roll Call. “Because I know he does care about the poor. But I think he was trying to make a case that they’re taken care of. But, in fact, I would say I’m worried about the poor because many are trapped in dependency, they need a good job; they don’t need to be on social welfare programs. I think he needs to turn that around because — the middle class is key, and we have to focus on that. And, really, the problem with the middle class is not successful people, it’s politicians — but the key to making our country successful it to get everyone on that economic ladder...[CLICK TO READ FULL POST]