As I first reported on Verum Serum last year, in 2004-2005 Malik Shabazz and the New Black Panther Party were purveyors of some of the most vile, subversive, racist “music” you will ever hear anywhere. Including this atrocity from the leader himself, the man President Obama inexplicably shared a stage and marched with in Selma, Malik “Zulu” Shabazz:

Amerikkka’s Most Hated

Sample lyrics:

Black Power crackers
Black Power niggers
Negroes, political prostitutes, bitches and hoes

What kind of teaching I’m following?
The kind of teaching that got my picture in the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance
_
You pigs beat a nigger down in Inglewood
But we fucked up your Pentagon filled with crackers and peckerwoods
_
The Al Qaeda comparative true to life now
Cracker, I’m a terrorist
Bin Laden might look alike
I ain’t losing no sleep at night
_
In Cincinnati, we got to burn that shit
And snatch crackers out of cars
Too many young black brothers locked behind bars
For killing one of us
So why not bust on the true terrorists
The American cracker devil police officer

At what point does offensive speech move beyond First Amendment protection into illegal incitement?

If this isn’t blowing past that boundary then I don’t know what is. And this is just one example of the type of garbage this organization was spewing only 2 short years before Mr. Shabazz marched alongside our current President. (Click over to my original post at Verum Serum last year to hear “Kill Whitey”…and you can also see an archived image of the NBPP web site from this timeframe.)

I am frankly in shock that Obama and his handlers would have such poor judgement in participating in an an event with these vermin present. Malik Shabazz is not just a mildly controversial figure…this is a guy who was openly associating himself with Al Qaeda in song, bragging that they had “f*cked up your Pentagon”. Heck, where was the Secret Service? They should have never let this guy anywhere near a presidential candidate.

Questions need to be answered on this, I don’t care how long ago it was. Even this early in his campaign Obama had an entourage of adoring media following his every move.  Where was the Third Estate on this?

In response to the tumult over what appears to be a small feature of the effort, more than one critic has wondered aloud why Democrats don’t just give up on the public option – which is opposed by every Republican – in order to reach a more bipartisan outcome. What exactly is so important about the public option anyway? And why do Democrats in particular seem so wedded to the idea?

There is a simple answer to these questions, but it’s an answer you’ve likely not heard from any institution in the mainstream media. The truth is that the public plan is a carefully devised scheme, a sneaky strategy, to deceive American voters. It’s a political marketing ploy designed to move the nation to a single-payer system – like the one in Canada – over the next decade. The public option is the Trojan horse. On the outside it’s all about “choice and competition”, but once it has been dragged within the walls of American medicine it’s true nature will become evident. By that time, it’ll be too late.

You want proof? We’ve got plenty.

Starting in April on our blog at VerumSerum.com, we have uncovered many prominent advocates of health reform revealing the hidden agenda behind the public option. Most prominently Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) and Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), but also Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI), and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. Even Rahm Emanuel got into the act.

More damning still, we uncovered video of the original architect of the public option, Yale professor Jacob Hacker, describing how it was designed to not “frighten people into thinking they are going to lose their private insurance” even though that is the inevitable result. In another clip he denies the plan is a Trojan horse saying, on the contrary, “it’s right there”. In other words, it’s not even a secret. Most relevant of all, Hacker admits in another clip that the real advantage of his plan is that “at least you can make the claim that there is competition between the public and private sectors”. In other words, this is all a marketing strategy designed to get around public resistance to government-run health care.

For his part, President Obama has been an extremely disciplined salesman. The mantra of “choice and competition” has been repeated to the point that it is little more than political background noise. To this day, neither the President nor any of his spokespeople have been challenged by the media about these claims, despite the fact that there is video evidence which directly contradicts what he is saying. So confident is the President that the media will toe his line that, in a speech in front of the American Medical Association, the President explicitly denied that the public option was a “Trojan horse” for a single payer system. On this, and numerous other occasions, he has said that opponents of reform who claim this are not telling the truth. Outside talk radio, the conservative blogosphere, and a couple editorials in the Wall Street Journal, no one has been willing to suggest that the opposite is the case.

With so many proponents of reform caught on tape directly contradicting the President, it almost seems as if the mainstream media has intentionally avoided covering this story. And as anyone who has been paying attention knows, that’s something they’ve been guilty of more than once since Obama took office. NY Times public editor Clark Hoyt admitted in a bombshell statement that the paper had risked appearing biased for its failure to cover the Van Jones and ACORN stories as they broke. The Washington Post was similarly chastened.

And as it turns out, both papers may have an additional reason to avoid touching this story. Because politicians are not the only ones we have exposed admitting the truth about the public option. Back in June, we posted a video of Ezra Klein from the Washington Post revealing how the public option was designed as a “sneaky strategy” to move towards single payer. And we have posted videos of Paul Krugman from the NY Times admitting much the same.

But nothing we have uncovered previously is as comprehensive and breathtakingly direct as a new audio clip of Paul Krugman we discovered this week. Krugman is speaking on health care reform at Hunter College on July 16, 2008. It’s a long clip at ~5:00 (unedited), but if you want to know why liberals are continuing to fight tooth and nail for the public option, here it is in astonishing detail (click below to listen):

Paul Krugman – Single Payer and the Public Option

TRANSCRIPT HERE.

FULL AUDIO PODCAST HERE.

Just a couple of quick points on this. Since I already knew about this hidden agenda, what I found most striking was Krugman’s admission that even without a public option the system would largely look like a single payer system. Based on the subsidies for lower wage earners, and the fact that everyone else is paying for these with taxes on top of their insurance premiums. (And with the bills being discussed in Congress, subsidies are provided up to 300-400% of the federal poverty level).

Also, I should point out that a “Rube Goldberg device”, which Krugman used as a metaphor, is a term for an over-engineered solution to a simple problem. In this case, designed to obscure the solution they are actually looking for, i.e. single payer.

However, the critical point in all of this is the sheer scope of this deception on the part of the Administration – and the media. Paul Krugman and Ezra Klein have been two of the most prominent media advocates for healthcare reform throughout the debate this year. With numerous appearances on television and their blogs at the New York Times and the Washington Post, respectively. And while they are both unabashedly partisan, this should not excuse them from direct and honest reporting. But of course they have not been fully candid, as they were last year, because in doing so they would reveal the dishonesty on the part of the President and his Administration. (Klein has recently added a whole new layer of deceit.)

It’s long past time for an honest broker in the news media to report on the Administration’s ongoing and deceptive strategy with regards to the public option. The President has made claims which directly contradict statements made by numerous of his supporters – people intimately involved with the health reform process. How can we trust our government to reform one-sixth of our economy when a central element of their plan is based on a deception? And how we can trust the accuracy of information reported by the media when by and large they have been complicit in covering this up? It’s time for these questions to be answered. It’s time to let America know they’ve been getting a hard sell, not an honest diagnosis.