David Brooks is an example of a rational conservative. He made these remarks while appearing on Meet The Press. Read the complete transcript or excerpt below:
MR. DAVID BROOKS: I hadn't seen the Rush Limbaugh thing. That is insane. What he's saying is insane. But I guess I would say the, the first thing is it has been a conventional wisdom among the smartest people in Washington that this is such a tough issue you got to do it on a bipartisan basis. And the Obama administration, for better or worse, decided not to do that. There was a thing called the Wyden-Bennett bill that really could have launched a bipartisan, so leaders of both parties could have gone out to these town meetings. They didn't do it, they chose more or less a Democratic plan and now all hell is breaking loose. And we are now--and it's not just the crazies, among whom we just saw some. But if you take overall poll ratings for health care, they are--people are--the American public is now as skeptical as they were when Clinton care collapsed. So there--it's not just the crazies, there's a real public concern about real issues, aside from the stuff that Rush Limbaugh says.
He also calls Sarah Palin's comments crazy:
MR. GREGORY: David, Sarah, Sarah Palin on Facebook, to the point of the opposition, this is what she writes: "The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's `death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide...whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil." There is the rhetoric; there's also the question of what's true and what's false in what people are arguing about this notion of a death panel.
MR. BROOKS: Yeah. Again, that's crazy. If--the, the, the crazies are attacking the plan because it'll cut off granny, and that--that's simply not true. That simply is not going to happen. The real reason for public skepticism is that Obama very eloquently and very truthfully said, "We've got to bring down healthcare costs." Everybody's healthcare costs are rising. It's eaten into your wages, it's eaten into the budget, it's eaten into everything. And the problem with the House plan is that instead of bending the cost curve down, it would increase the cost curve so inflation would be 8 percent a year when it's all implemented, and that's just disaster. So what the Obama administration has got to do, and I agree with Jon about this, is make this Obama-like; which is to say, "We're going to produce a plan." And from I hear, by the end of this month they will have a plan. And they are going to say, "This is what we stand for." And you can't sell anything without a plan. But it's got to be a plan that actually cuts costs so you can have a rational discussion instead of the scare stories about cutting off grandma.
