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Summertime: 'Wee-weed' in Washington
by Mark Silva
It's never too late for a new phrase to find its way into the Washington lexicon, political parlance always in need of some refreshing.
But "wee-weed?''
We're waiting for the White House's official transcription of the words voiced by the president today for a clearer take on the spelling.
"Sometimes it seems like one loud voice can drown out all the sensible voices out there,'' President Barack Obama told supporters at a meeting of the Democratic Party-sponsored Organizing for America today Web-cast to a national network watching on the Internet, plus an audience listening to a telephone conference.
"There is something about August going into September where everybody in Washington gets all wee-weed up,'' Obama said, calling on his network of first campaign and now party supporters to mobilize against myths that critics of his health-care plan are spreading.
""Instead of being preoccupied with the polls and all the cable chatter... we're going to have to cut through a lot of nonsense out there, a lot of absurd claims that have been made about health care,'' said Obama, pointing to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showing that most people believe things that aren't true about the plansuch as the notion that it will "pull the plug on Grandma.'
'Come on!" the president said.
"Look, we know where these lies are coming from... If you just flick channels and then just stop on.... certain ones.... then you'll see, you know, you'll see who's propagating this stuff,'' the president said, elicitng laughter with his thinly veiled allusion.
"The truth is, there is no plan that has ever been considered (by Congress)... that covers illegal immigrants... Yet a huge percentage believe that's the case,'' Obama said. "There are no plans under health-reform to revoke the existing federal prohibition against using federal dollars for abortions... Nobody has proposed anything even remotely close to a federal takeover of health care.... The death-panel idea... this is sort of an interesting example of tracing how misinformation spreads.''
Yet it's not only myths that are making things difficult, he suggested -- it's also an obsession with polls and talk radio and a relatively few boisterous town-hall meetings.
"Unfortunately, Washington is obsessed with the snap poll... what's said on talk radio,'' said Obama, who had just come from a talk radio show where he promoted his plans.
"We cannot be intimidated by some of these scare tactics,'' the president said, calling on his supporters to press the case for health-care reform in their communities.
And not, presumably, to get "all wee-weed'' up.
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