Rep. Ann Wagner (R-2) offers a case study of what is wrong with the pathetic Republican anti-Obamacare crusade. Wagner has had this request posted on her congressional Webpage for some time:

Have you had your health insurance plan cancelled as a result of ObamaCare? Have your premiums increased or even doubled? Have you had to switch doctors? Have you lost your job or had your hours cut?

You are not alone and the American people need to hear your story. Give Obamacare a face and share your story with me at ObamaCare.Wagner@mail.house.gov

.

Notice that Wagner makes it clear that she’s only interested in hearing from those who’ve got a beef with Obamacare – or think they have; she has no interest in learning what’s working or how any of her constituents may be benefiting from Obamacare. So much for unbiased fact-finding.

A few days ago I learned from a video embedded in  Rep. Wagner’s constituent email newsletter (which I have included over the fold) that her call for ammunition against Obamacare has been fruitful to some extent; she wants us to know that she  has heard “far too many heart-wrenching stories” about the ravages of Obamacare from the folks in her district.

If you bother to play the video, you’ll be struck by how few details she offers as she recounts a few sketchy anecdotes that meet the criteria she specified in her Website invitation. As is the norm for the GOP’s anti-Obamacare “real-life” stories, she doesn’t tell us what her informants’ old coverage offered as compared to the new policies they can get through the exchange, or if they’ve even gone to the exchange. Nor does she tell us if any of these folks are eligible for subsidies. Neither, apart from her angsty evocation of “far too many,” does she quantify the complaints she received, or tell us how that number compares with the  31,474 Missourians, seeking coverage for 62,964 individuals who have completed applications for healthcare through the federal Website. But hey! Who cares about folks getting healthcare coverage, many probably for the first time, when you can get a few folks to grouse about maybe having to change their coverage plan or their doctor?

There’s lots more about Obamacare implementation that Wagner doesn’t seem to want folks to know. For instance, she doesn’t drop a hint about state Republicans’ all-out efforts to hobble the process in Missouri in order to keep people from signing up. Nor does she have a single word to waste on Missourians who will be caught in the “Medicaid gap,” those whom Obamacare intended to cover by exending Medicaid coverage, an extension that Wagner’s fellow partisans in the state legislature refused to enact after the Supreme Court gave them an out. Individuals in the gap make too much for Missouri’s current Medicaid eligibility rules, but not enough to qualify for subsidies through the Obamacare healthcare exchange. Wagner evidently isn’t interested in the “heart-wrenching” stories these victims of what Kevin Drum has called “one of most sordid acts in recent American history” will have to tell.

And then finally there’s all the misleading or just flat out dishonest assertions that Wagner stuffs into her performance, most of it the usual drivel that has long been discounted – as in this Factcheck.org report on Obamacare myths or this Bill Moyers’ piece on the failures of Obamacare media coverage. Rep. Wagner – and the hysterical rightwing media – to the contrary, 80 million people aren’t going to lose their insurance – this number is just one more example of the type of “bait and switch” logic that the demonstrably dishonest conservative economist Avik Roy employed when he came up with a similar extravagant figure in Forbes earlier this year. Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill knows what she’s talking about when she observes that when it comes to Obamacare, Missourians “are being told that it’s something that it isn’t.”

But that what’s last ditch warfare is like – just before defeat, the losers will latch on to any weapon that comes to hand, even if they have to lob slime from the bottom of the trench. Fortunately, the muck Wagner and her GOP pals are tossing makes a poor weapon; eventually all this hyperventilating will have come to an end. The Website is improving, folks will get insurance, those who  have been terrified by GOP fear-mongering will emerge into the light of a new day, at least as far as health care goes. As Michael Tomasky argued yesterday, it’s looking more and more likely that HealthCare.gov is going to be a plus for Democrats in 2014 – and even further:

… in two more years’ time, and indeed less than that, many millions of Americans will see that what they thought was decent health insurance before the Affordable Care Act was like gaslight before electricity.

Step over the fold if you want to watch the expensively dressed and groomed Rep. Ann Wagner, who will no doubt get gold-plated insurance through her wealthy husbands’ employer – she has declined the coverage offered to congress – emote about how middle class and poor folks are going to suffer because of Obamacare:

Republicans are mostly breathless with glee at the faux news “exposé” to the effect that the insurance policies of some folks in the individual health care market will be changed by their providers in such a way that they can no longer be offered under the provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Of course, this is not really news – it was known, debated and covered in the news when the issue first arose in 2010.

Nevertheless, our Republican friends are nearly convulsing with false concern.  What they’re saying:

Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-4) thinks the news offers “more proof that the President’s health care law is unworkable and hurts Americans. ”

Rep. Billy Long (R-7) thinks that this problem is so serious that he needs to offer legislation to delay the individual mandate because “portions of the president’s health care law are harming consumers nationwide.”

Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-3) has made ample use of the generic GOP boilerplate on the topic of roll-out glitches on his Website, adding that his constituents are suffering because of the President’s “empty” promises that are belied by the fact that “currently available plans  are cancelled.” He even offers a vague, unverifiable constituent horror story about the havoc wreaked by the cancelled policies – though he doesn’t answer lots of questions that spring to mind about the actual situation of his annecdotal constituents.

Rep. Ann Wagner (R-2) breathlessly tweeted that “White House finally admits, ‘It’s True’ some Americans won’t be able to keep their health care plan under Obamacare. #MoreBrokenPromises.” Finally? Sheesh! Too hard for her to remember what was going on three years ago? About an issue she putatively cares so much about she was willing to shut down the government down over it? She ought to be able to do better.

Senator Roy Blunt, for his part, is “committed to fighting for Missourians who are being crushed by ObamaCare,” which includes those who are having their  policies cancelled among other individuals in situations that have elicited his misplaced concern trolling.

So what’s the story? Here, via TPM, is a chart that puts these dire claims into a slightly different perspective:

To  summarize, 80% of the people who like their  current, employer-provided plan will see no change, just as the President promised; 3% will change policies but see little difference in cost or coverage; another 3% will probably have to pay more for better policies; while 14%  who were previously uninsured will get affordable insurance and access to healthcare. I don’t know about  you, but government can “crush” me like this any time it wants.

Slightly edited for clarity. Inadvertently garbled content restored in last paragraph.

Reps. Ann Wagner (R-2) and Jason Smith (R-8) want furloughed federal workers to know that they too share the pain of the government shutdown. The two Republican Missouri lawmakers, along with Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill, have joined the other congessmen and women – 138 as of last Friday – who decided that something had to be done about the bad smell that was rising from the Republican shutdown and contaminating all of Washington D.C. These legislators have all publicly stated that for the duration of the shutdown they will either defer their congressional salaries or donate them to charity.

It ought to mean a lot to those federal employees, many of whom live pay-check to pay-check and who now have to scrape by on nothing, that congressmen whose median net worth hovers at around a $1 million want to make a symbolic gesture in their direction. Wagner, for example, is actually one of the wealthiest members of the House.

The gesture on the part of the 73 Republicans participating in this exercise in optics might mean more if they were also willing to end the standoff that they started with their outrageous ultimatums. As it is, it stands as a classic example of too little, too late and no way to make amends.

If, to return to the example of Ann Wagner, she really cared about the mess she has helped her party create, she could lean on the House leadership to bring a clean budgetary continuing resolution (CR) to the floor – which could pass with the support of Democrats and those Republicans who have already signalled their disgust with their party’s antics. Or she could stand up and let her colleagues and the GOP leadership know that she would support a discharge petition and vote for the CR if Nancy Pelosi tries to use that tactic to bring it to the floor.

Instead, as today’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch notes, Wagner is “out front pressing Democrats to negotiate on the Affordable Care Act before she will agree to end the shutdown.”  And even worse, as a Post-Dispatch editorial observed last week, shutdown cheerleader Wagner may be motivated as much by perceived political exigency as from conviction. Astutely assigning blame for the current shutdown, the PD observed that:

Narrowly the blame here lies with the approximately three dozen Republicans from solidly safe districts who have confused right-wing messaging with leadership. They are joined by several dozen more GOP members, including Ann Wagner of Ballwin, who are more worried about primary challenges from the right than fulfilling their constitutional duties. They are putting personal political interests ahead of the public interest.

Refusing to take an unneeded salary in order to defer criticism? A so-so gesture at best. Actually trying to do the best thing for one’s constituents and one’s country? Priceless – and, in today’s GOP, very, very rare.

I’ve been energized and frequently convinced by the what The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky writes about the GOP shutdown. Today, for instance, he argues that Boehner will eventually have to “buckle down” and let a clean CR pass the house, ending the shutdown. To back up this opinion, he points out a growing number of Republicans who are making conciliatory noises, as well as the general unease that many GOPers are evincing in the face of what they have wrought.

However, for that to happen – and Tomasky hints at as much – the GOP is going to have to be forced to acknowledge that they are not speaking for all or even most Americans, as they fatuously insist. Polls will help to bring them to their senses on this issue – and on Day One of the Shutdown of 2013, they’ve been disastrous for the GOP. The Quinnipiac Poll released today shows that 72% of Americans disapprove of the shutdown; respondents also apparently place the blame correctly, since GOP approval rates are plummeting while Democratic approval rates are rising somewhat (see also the CNN/ORC poll (pdf) released yesterday to glean some more bad news numbers for the GOP).

Another part of the effort to insure that the Democrats stand firm in the face of GOP efforts to smear them with the blame for the GOP’s misfire is for Americans who care about what is happening to flood their Democratic legislators with calls of support and Republican congress people with phone calls and emails making it clear that we hate what they are doing and we aren’t taken in when Republican troublemakers claim that the Democratic sheriffs are the source of the problem. Tomasky offers the best metaphor I’ve encountered yet for the Republican effort to deflect blame for their gratuitously stupid decision to escalate their Obamacare tantrum into all out war on the American people:

What the citizen won’t know-unless someone bothers to point it out to her, Democrats!-is that the Republicans are totally out of bounds in the first place; that this is like having a property-line dispute with your neighbor, and the local court has already ruled in your favor, and then your neighbor comes back a year later and says he’ll settle for half the disputed property and if you don’t agree, he’ll kill your dog. Actually, that’s a pretty good analogy. I hope someone in a position of power reads this.

I agree, as I’ve said, it’s a good analogy. I think it’s so good, in fact, that I’m going to call my Representative, Ann Wagner (R-4) and read it onto her phone answering service machine – which is all that I can get right now.  

In an earlier post I copied Ann Wagner’s email response to me after I wrote her asking that she respect the needs of her constituents and stand up to the faction of her party that wants to defund Obamacare or else. I was pretty amazed by her double-talk when she tried to pretend that she had “voted to keep the government open” by sending a DOA Continuing Resolution that defunds the ACA to the Senate.

What didn’t amaze me, though were her distorted claims abut the ACA. They’re familiar to anyone who has paid attention to Republican anti-Obamacare jabber. To her credit, though, Wagner did try to give a local example of what she deems the disastrous consequences of Obamacare:

As each day passes, more and more families are feeling the pain of Obamacare right here in the St. Louis region. Many of you might have heard a few days ago that BJC Healthcare can no longer afford to provide health insurance to its part-time employees. This is just another example of the coming economic disaster Obamacare poses when a large, highly respected healthcare company such as BJC Healthcare cannot afford healthcare for its own workers.

What Wagner does not tell us – although the St. Louis Post-Dispatch story she links to hints at it – is that BJC has been having plenty of problems other than Obamacare, problems which earlier resulted in 160 layoffs and are pretty likely to be behind their efforts to cut costs on employee health care:

Like other health care systems across the state and country, we are not immune to what is going on in the health care environment,” she said. “We’ve made cost-cutting measures to offset the impact of sequestration and to prepare for the impact of not expanding Medicaid.”

Aside from sequestration and the Medicaid expansion issue, BJC’s reductions are necessitated by a drop in elective medical services among health care consumers. Because they now face higher out of pocket payments for care, some consumers are putting off care for the time being, she said.

Let’s see. If the Republican-dominated Missouri legislature had only expanded Medaid, BJC would have  been better off. If GOP politicians in Washington hadn’t forced the sequestration cuts down our throats, BJC wouldn’t be better off still. And finally, if our free-market insurance delivery system – the one that the GOP is fighting tooth-and-nail to defend – wasn’t unable to control costs without resorting to higher out-of-pocket costs for patients who then defer care, things would be all ducky for BJC. But let’s, Ann Wagner, blame it all on Obamacare; it makes a much simpler and, for Republicans, a much more conveneint story.

Nor am I the only person who thinks the GOP jobs and Obamacare narrative is a bit empty when it comes to actual content. Kaiser Health News reports that some employers are using Obamacare as an excuse for cost-cutting measures that were underway long before the law. Others may actually be considering cutting part-timers hours back in order to weasel out of the ACA employer mandate as some claim BJC is doing, but as business advisor Juliana Reno observed on the PBS newshour earlier this evening:

If you, as an employer, try to crunch down hours below 30, you are going to lose some employees. The second problem is, it’s not going to cost you in terms of penalties, but it’s going to cost you a lot more in terms of recruiting and training and administrative stuff, because now you have to hire more employees to have the same amount of man hours worked.

As a consequence, economists don’t expect to see large numbers of employers who might be tempted to try this ploy – also bearng in mind that this part of the employer mandate affects only a small number of business to start with. Actually, if anti-Obamacare fanatics in congress would give the repeal-the-law refrain a rest and get down to some real work, glitches of this sort, insofar as they are a real problem, could be easily remedied.

But a note of caution: don’t expect the facts of the situation to keep GOPers like Rep. Wagner from desperately grasping at all potential anti-Obamacare straws. They’re starting to get frantic as Obamacare is set to become real – no longer the bogeyman in the next room, but soon to be a fairy godmother wavng a right-to-healthcare wand over the uninsured.

I wrote earlier about how Roy Blunt was making subtle signs that he didn’t really want to be associated with his party’s drive to shut down the government over Obamacare. Not so Rep. Ann Wagner (R-2) who seems determined to go full tilt toward the crazy. Her stance is perhaps a bit surprising to those of us who detected a bit of GOP relief in the belief that they had fielded an almost sane replacement for erstwhile Rep. Todd Akin; Wagner impressed many as a smooth operator who could put a more respectable face on a party that is rapidly rebranding itself as home sweet home for rightwing kooks. Evidently, though, Wagner, even more than Blunt, sees her interests best served as red meat for the base.

Below the fold I reproduce the text of an email I received from Wagner in response to comments I sent her on shutting down the government in order to fight off the dread (to GOPers) Obamacare. The money portion of her effort to justfy her vote largely echoes press releases on her Web page and presents one of the most flagrant examples of political double-talk that I have ever seen:

With the deadline approaching to prevent a government shutdown  – the American people want Congress to do two things:  keep the government open and stop ObamaCare from destroying our economy, lowering the quality of our care and putting the Federal Government between you and your doctor.  That is why I voted last Friday to keep the government open, while protecting the people of the 2nd District from the devastating consequences of ObamaCare.  Now it is up to Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee to answer the calls of the American people, and lead the fight in the Senate to defund ObamaCare and keep the government running.

Did you get that “I voted last Friday to keep the government open … “. Isn’t that like tellng frantic parents after you’ve kidnapped their children for a ransom too costly for them to pay, that you only took the kiddies to give the parents a chance to save them by paying up – ergo, you’re the one acting to keep the children well and safe. This is what I mean about trying to have your cake and eating it too – which we all know nobody can really manage to do.

And did you also get the note of seeming hero-worship Wagner directed toward toward Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee – the Senate hostage executioners who, according to Wagner’s reasoning, are also doing their best to keep the government operating by demanding a pound of bloody Obama flesh? Shouldn’t respectable, pearl-clutching “tradtionalist” Republicans shy away from nutjob demogogues?

Nothing, though, is actualy what it seems. Wagner’s shout-out to the chief Senate agitators on the topic may just be short-hand for “I did my part to impress the yahoos – now it’s your turn to bear the nasty load,” an indirect salvo in a “fight between House and the Senate — neither of whom want to be left holding the bag when this effort to defund Obamacare fails.” They all – and this where Wagner’s particularly cloying brand of cynicism manifests itself – want the savage Tea Partiers at home to think they did their best.

ADDENDUM: Here’s Ed Kilgore on the type of shutdown double-talk I reference above on the part of Ann Wagner:

What’s really bizarre is the effort (by Cruz at least) to pretend that Obama and/or congressional Democrats are responsible for risking a government shutdown or a debt default because they are (so far) refusing to make major concessions to the party that does not control the White House or the Senate. This cynical gambit needs to be mocked relentlessly. If Republicans evade total responsibility for the chaos currently gripping Washington, it will be a historic injustice. They lost the 2012 elections, and consequently their activists want to pitch a hissy fit and kick over as much furniture as possible. I wish someone could design a video game where they could work out their frustrations and recommit themselves to the imagined America of the distant past without ruining the neighborhood.

Wagner’s email missive – the survey link at the very bottom works if you want to let Wagner know what you think abou shutting down the  government:

Keeping the Government Open

Dear xxxxxx,

Do you remember when Nancy Pelosi said you had to pass ObamaCare to find out what’s in it?  Well – it didn’t take the American people long to find out what’s in ObamaCare: more taxes, fewer choices, skyrocketing premiums and unaffordable care.  

One of the main reasons I ran to be your Representative is because I believe ObamaCare needs to be repealed and replaced with free-market based solutions that expand access without destroying our economy and lowering the quality of our care.

As each day passes, more and more families are feeling the pain of Obamacare right here in the St. Louis region. Many of you might have heard a few days ago that BJC Healthcare can no longer afford to provide health insurance to its part-time employees. This is just another example of the coming economic disaster Obamacare poses when a large, highly respected healthcare company such as BJC Healthcare cannot afford healthcare for its own workers.

With the deadline approaching to prevent a government shutdown  – the American people want Congress to do two things:  keep the government open and stop ObamaCare from destroying our economy, lowering the quality of our care and putting the Federal Government between you and your doctor.  That is why I voted last Friday to keep the government open, while protecting the people of the 2nd District from the devastating consequences of ObamaCare.  Now it is up to Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee to answer the calls of the American people, and lead the fight in the Senate to defund ObamaCare and keep the government running. Bear in mind that Cruz is either so unhinged or so determined to emerge as the Teajadist leader that he has excited the contempt of most of his Senate GOP colleagues:

As always – it is truly an honor to serve the people of the 2nd District, and I look forward to speaking with you again soon.

Sincerely,

Ann Wagner

Member of Congress

P.S. Take My Survey

Do you think we should shut down the government if the Senate fails to defund ObamaCare?

Yes

No

All the bloviating earlier this summer from Republicans about the putative IRS “scandal” seems to have been, as is usual with GOP scandal claims, lots of sound and fury about absolutely nothing. Steve Benen draws our attention to this video which was released by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee to make just that point:

Benen adds:

… . This week, instead of doing real work, House GOP leaders are eager to hold “message” votes related to the IRS story, but as the video makes clear, there is no IRS story. Republicans raised specific questions, which have been answered. They raised specific allegations, which have been discredited.

Unfortunately, nobody got the word out to Missouri Rep. Ann Wagner (R-2) who has signed up to waste legislative time with one more of those message votes. Her task will be, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, to exploit whatever anti-IRS traction the constant scandal drumbeat may have created in order to create a new Obamacare attack meme:

Wagner intends to take to the House floor this week to promote legislation with the stated goal of preventing the IRS from enforcing the new health care law.

The newspaper account opens with Wagner’s breathless announcement that she got some 1,187 responses to a query about whether or not her constituents trusted government. She claims many of them were critical of the IRS, NSA and the Justice Department. Some she stated, even cited persecution by the IRS. (As an aside, as a resident of the 2nd district and a constituent, why wasn’t I queried on this topic? I don’t remember anything apart from a survey with blatantly biased multiple choice questions.)

To put Wagner’s numbers into perspective, 394,448 people voted in the 2nd district in 2012, which should put the kibosh on the idea that those scant 1,000 responses represent a groundswell. And off course, not all of the folks who responded were complaining about the IRS – folks who are worried by NSA surveillance might feel differently than the professional anti-tax clique in the district, folks like broadcaster Larry Connors who just couldn’t wait to get out there with his phony persecution claims. This evidence seems like slim pickings for justifying one more in the long line of “message votes”  that, as the Post-Dispatch notes, “generate news releases but have no chance of reaching the president’s desk given opposition in the Democratic-run Senate.”

In the same article, the Post-Dispatch also observes that “an NBC-Wall Street Journal survey last month found that 42 percent of Americans have ‘very little’ or no confidence in the federal government, as high as any time in 20 years.” The same poll, however, found “disapproval of Congress hitting an all-time high.” Perhaps that could account for the vote of no-confidence in the federal government rather than all out fear of the bureaucracy? Bear in mind that while the President showed very slightly lower approval ratings and slightly higher disapproval ratings – 45% – a record 83% registered their disapproval of congress.

This is the same congress that has since 2010, thanks to the GOP dominated House and the unprecedented use of the filibuster in the Senate, managed to obstruct almost all meaningful efforts to govern, while indulging itself in constant ideological show-boating. You think maybe that strategy may be beginning to turn off everybody outside the minority that makes up the GOP’s most fervid, red-meat base?

Somebody who knows his way around, perhaps Senator Roy Blunt, ought to take Wagner aside and give her the word. Blunt, after all, in his haste to step back from a threatened government shutdown over defunding Obamacare, has demonstrated that he knows when too much is really too much. Maybe he could  let Wagner know that it’s fine and good to go all out to make a name for yourself as a party aparatchik – but that wisdom is the better part of valor when it looks like there may be bigtime blowback from spouting misinformation to justify refusing to govern in an adult manner.

Conservatives have been bursting a vein over President Obama’s totally unsurprising statement that negotiations might be more fruitful once U.S. pols are no longer engaging in the ritualized puffing and strutting of their electoral mating dances. As a matter of fact, some of those on the right who are especially easy to inflame have dubbed his rather mild nod in the direction of realism, “unilateral disarmament.” Never mind that nobody can show the slightest bit of evidence that the President has any intentions of stripping the U.S. and only the U.S. of our entire nuclear arsenal (or of any type of arsenal) – which is what would be required if we were to disarm unilaterally.

The point that I really want to make, however, is that those on the right do seem to recognize that unilateral disarmament is foolhardy. So why do so many of them think (or pretend to think) that when politicians refuse to endorse what amounts to unilateral disarmament in the electoral sphere, it is “hypocrisy.” I allude to the GOP response to the VoteVets ad that is running in support of Claire McCaskill:

For years, Claire McCaskill has feigned outrage over political spending by outside interest groups that she accuses of trying to “buy your government”-but now that she is benefiting from an outside interest group funded by radical environmentalists, she is strangely silent,” the state GOP said in a statement.

To make matters worse for McCaskill, the nonpartisan OpenSecrets.org has investigated VoteVets and unmasked the interest groups behind it. As it turns out, VoteVets has raked in millions of dollars from radical environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection.

Let’s sort it out: McCaskill has been hammered and will, no doubt continue to be hammered with dishonest third party ads, most recently from Crossroads GPS. The GOP can rely on enough third party moolah from their corporate and financier pals to gold-plate Everest if they didn’t prefer that it be used for carefully calibrated attack ads instead.  All of which brings home the fact that it’s definitely not a level playing field.   Walking unarmed out onto this far from level battle playing field is surely the political equivalent of unilateral disarmament – which the GOP clearly considers criminally stupid, even if they don’t exactly know what it entails.

McCaskill has to play the hand she’s dealt and that means taking help where she can get it. But at least, she knows that we need to reform the rules that govern the playing field and her condemnation of the bad faith that forces her hand, is far from hypocrisy, even if she still retains a clear concept of what current realities demand. On the other hand, GOP pols really, really seem to want to perpetuate the money laden status quo. Otherwise, they’d join their Democratic colleagues’ efforts to do something about the efforts of a few rich men to purchase our government.

Oh – I almost forgot – the claims about VoteVets?  How purile can you get. VoteVets consort with environmentalists? You gotta admit – they’re a classier bunch than either the Kochs or Carl Rove who’re among the sugar daddies behind the groups spending big bucks to knock McCaskill out of the ring.  

Want a preview of how the GOP is going to try to shrug off things that by all rights shouldn’t play very well next fall – things that have been almost uniformly endorsed by the GOP – like Ryancare, or even more destructive Medicare “reform” proposals put forward by the GOP presidential contenders? Then pay attention to the most recent anti-Claire McCaskill attack ad.   Crossroads Grassroots Policy Strategies, Carl Rove’s group, is the responsible party and, according to the Kansas City Star:

The new ad claims that the Missouri Democrat, who is running for re-election this year, “voted to cut Medicare spending half a trillion dollars by supporting ObamaCare…”

This has been a ubiquitous Republican attack line and popular talking point used against any number of Democrats who voted for the health care law. GOP White House hopeful Mitt Romney has leveled it at President Obama, as well

The claim has been debunked numerous times, but Republicans and their allies continue to use it, despite the clear distortions. Independent political watchdogs have grown weary over how many times they have had to keep explaining the fiction.

Clever, hunh? Just accuse the other guy of doing what you did. You may not convince everybody – some folks actually know how to dig deeper and care enough to do it – but it does serve to sow confusion and weaken what ought to be the other guy’s knock-out punch.

The challenge is going to be getting the news out that the Republicans have actually gone after Medicare with a poleax. Maybe, like Politifact, you might want to quibble about what it means to “end Mediare as we know it,” but there’s no way to argue that Ryancare wouldn’t change the program to the point that it would be rendered ineffective, drastically worsening senior’s health care access in the process. You wanna go back to the bad old days (and some of us can tell you just how bad those days were – even before health care advances helped spike costs), vote Republican next fall.

And Claire McCaskill’s vote for the Affordable Care Act which is the basis for the claims in the ad? To quote the Star:

The nonpartisan, political research website said that the Affordable Care Act, which Congress passed in 2010, “does reduce Medicare spending by $500 billion over the next 10 years. But here’s the catch: Those dollars aren’t taken out of the current budget, they are not actual cuts, and nowhere does the bill actually eliminate any current benefits.”

…

Moreover, the $500 billion in savings comes from health care providers, not Medicare beneficiaries, according to The Fact Checker, a regular microscope on political rhetoric in The Washington Post.

But I can guarantee you that we’re going to hear the line about cutting Medicare used not just about Claire McCaskill, but President Obama, or any good Democrat that you want to put forward. Take, for another example, Greg Sargent’s comments on Mitt Romney’s almost identical dissembling on the topic:

… The debate over Medicare – and Romney’s embrace of the Paul Ryan plan – is about to dominate the conversation. Romney is moving to get ahead of the story by accusing Obama of being the one who would “end Medicare as we know it.”

Good Gravy! Where are lightening bolts from heaven when we need them. I say this because I can also guarantee you that I’ll hear the line repeated a dozen sundry times by the innocent fools who take this stuff to heart and vote accordingly. We gotta get on the ball and squash this line right now – but how, now that Citizens United has released the floods of corporate money that can be used to buy ads like the one targeting McCaskill and run them from now til doomsday?

UPDATE:  Crossroads isn’t the only group taking the low road when it comes to McCasill’s support for the ACA. 60 Plus, described as a “conservative senior’s lobby,” is also launching an ad campaign against McCaskill and four other Democratic senators focusing on the the ACA’s provision for a cost-control board:

President Obama’s health care law cuts $500 billion from Medicare to pay for a new government program,” the ad says. “And it creates a board of 15 unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats. It’s like a Medicare IRS with the power to cut Medicare even more.

The ad plays off a new GOP talking point that attempts to revive earlier bogus  claims that the ACA would ration care:

Republicans have taken to calling the IPAB a “rationing board,” but the law prohibits the board from reducing seniors’ benefits or increasing their co-pays. Rather, it recommends cuts to provider payments if federal health spending grows at a faster than targeted rate, unless Congress comes up with its own savings

Once again – how do you deal with liars when they’ve got lots and lots of cash?