These are the kind of knots you have to twist yourself in to defend the type of statements made over the weekend by Sen. Roy Blunt and Fox contributor, George Will, who were out there blaming the Affordable Care Act for making Americans lazy.
From Fox's America's Newsroom, host Martha MacCallum played footage of Rep. Trey Gowdy attacking Rep. Keith Ellison for his comments on ABC's This Week, where he defended the CBO report, saying that the reduction in the percentage of hours worked would be a good thing, because it will give Americans choices and because we work "way more than an average of industrialized countries around the world."
Of course this didn't sit well with MacCallum.
MACCALLUM: That's exactly right and I find the comparison to Europe one that many people might think is disturbing Kirsten, because, you know, the Europeans have their way of life, but what's uniquely American is that people tend to want to work more, work harder, make as much as they can for their families. Some people work two and three jobs to make ends meet and that is a value that has been considered for a long time to be something, you know, that is... that is... has merit. […]
The question is, if you could work less and get your health insurance, would you go ahead and do that, and it's being presented by Ellison and others as something that is a plus for American society... but I think it's really not in the end.
The right wing really does love bashing Europe, don't they? Fox-Dem Kirsten Powers wasn't willing to play along this time and even pointed out MacCallum's dishonest framing of the report, where she tried to claim it was going to cost us 2.5 million actual jobs as opposed to the equivalent number of hours in the labor pool.
And just to prove that she's completely tone deaf, MacCallum went on to play a portion of a commercial by Walmart (yes, Walmart), saying it's time for Americans to "get back to work" and calling work "a beautiful thing" to somehow prove her talking point. It doesn't appear that whoever produced this segment really thought that one through, to put it mildly.
So it looks like the right wing's new campaign messages are now, work until you drop dead, having more time to spend with your family is a bad thing, and working two or three jobs is an American value that "has merit." Good luck with that.
