As I blogged about a couple of days ago, the Republican party sees the health care health insurance debate as “Obama’s Waterloo.” They intend to break him. As part of that campaign they have been circulating the following flyer which they title, “House Democrats’ Health Plan.” The purpose is to try and communicate that the Democrats’ plan is a hot mess that will be the end of the world. Scary things like “IRS” are prominently highlighted. It is by no means the Republicans alone that put out unhelpful propaganda like this, but this example is a particularly disgusting commentary on how far our political discourse has sunk:

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My eagle-eyed friend Ankur, a physician, spotted that the icon of the doctor in the bottom right corner looks like a desi woman. She does to me too (but it makes no difference even if she is Hispanic for the following point). Now take a look at the yellow box with the arrow feeding in to the doctor. It reads “Cultural and Linguistic Competence Training.” This training is important because it allows doctors to better serve under-served minorities. However, the implication here is flipped. The woman is a minority so a mere glance would imply that the Democrats’ health care plan would use taxpayer dollars to teach language skills to foreign doctors. Or cultural skills maybe? The entire poster is a menu of scare tactics but this one is particularly ill-conceived. I wonder if AAPI has any opinion about this.