Ever since Barack Obama was elected President, Fox News has endeavored to sabotage his administration with insults and brazenly dishonest characterizations of his policies. They have referred to him as lazy, ignorant, and ineffectual, while simultaneously portraying him as a persistent, evil, genius, working hard and successfully at destroying the country.

Setting aside the obvious paradox in those contrasting descriptions, one of Fox’s proudest achievements was the labeling of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) as “ObamaCare.” It was an attempt to hang the legislation that was a product of a fractured congress around the President’s neck, and was clearly meant derogatorily. The President later adopted the name as an affirmation that he does indeed care about Americans having access to health care. However, now Fox is pretending that “ObamaCare” is some sort of official title, and that avoidance of it is tantamount to a snub.

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The absurdity of this criticism is mind-boggling on multiple levels. First of all, the name “ObamaCare” was the creation of the President’s foes and is in no way official. It would be like expecting GOP-controlled states to call their photo-ID laws, the Voter Suppression Act (although that, at least, would be accurate).

Secondly, the fact that states are creating names like MNsure, Vermont Health Connect, California Covered, etc., is evidence that refutes one of the biggest Tea-publican myths about the ACA – that it is a big-government, federally controlled program. In fact, the ACA is just an insurance reform that permits states to create their own system of exchanges that offer health coverage to people who cannot get it from their employer or other private provider.

The ACA’s exchanges are entirely implemented at the state level, which is something that conservatives ought to be celebrating. Instead, they invent lies about Washington intruding on the jurisdiction of the states. But this complaint about how the states name their programs is an ironic example of the right inadvertently admitting their own lies. The states obviously have the right to control their own affairs, and if they choose not to use a name that was invented by anti-health care activists, it is within their power to do so.

It is notable that this epically idiotic article is the product of Fox News, not its lie-riddled affiliate Fox Nation (whose dishonesty is documented in Fox Nation vs. Reality). And the embarrassment of an allegedly serious news operation spewing such nonsense is even more pronounced when Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal is cited as the source for the story. The Journal included a couple of telling examples of insurance consumers. One was a rather moronic Tea-publican who was opposed to his own self-interests:

“The all-Minnesota marketing of the insurance plan didn’t persuade Andrew De Jong, a 25-year-old volunteer in the Minnesota Republican Party’s state-fair booth who said he currently works at a ‘bunch’ of part-time jobs that don’t offer him insurance. He said he has no plans to look for coverage on MNsure because he opposes Obamacare.”

What a brainiac. He would reject even exploring potentially valuable benefits because of his anti-Obama indoctrination. And then there was the liberal who made quite a bit more sense based on actual facts:

“Mr. Schauer, a part-time student, also works part-time as a park-and-water patrolman at the Dakota County Sheriff’s office, where he doesn’t qualify for employer-based health insurance. He said he broke his arm last winter in a snowboarding accident and was motivated to keep coverage. The MNsure calculator estimated he would pay about $65 a month for coverage with tax credits. ‘I figured it would be higher,’ he said.”

The summations by these two prospective health insurance consumers pretty much says it all. Conservatives blindly reject things they’ve been told to reject without any thoughtful consideration. Liberals weigh the facts and arrive at conclusions that best meet their needs.

As for Fox News, they just continue to make up phony issues and disseminate them to their undiscerning audience. Their well established goal is to make ObamaCare fail by discouraging people from enrolling in the exchanges, even if that means they are left unable to seek care if they need it, or driving them into bankruptcy because of their lack of coverage. This was explicitly stated by a Republican quoted in the Wall Street Journal article who said flatly that “We want to keep people out of the exchanges so they will fail.”

Notice that they don’t want to keep people out of the exchanges because they don’t work. They want to keep people out so that the program fails, which, of course, would mean that Americans who choose to participate would be left without options to seek necessary, perhaps life-saving, medical attention. That’s what they must mean by “compassionate conservatism.”