If nothing else the GOP is an irony producing machine. The same Republican Party which fought to block Medicare in the 1960's and tried to gut it in the 1990's is now pretending to be the defender of the popular government-run health care program for America's seniors. RNC chairman Michael Steele is just the latest to deploy the elderly as human shields in the GOP battle to halt Democratic health care reform at all costs. But by both opposing and supporting cuts to Medicare in statements made within days of each other, Steele has impaled himself on the double-edged sword.
Along with its myth-making over nonexistent "death panels," the Republicans have tried (sadly, with great success) to scare the bejesus out of senior citizens by falsely claiming President Obama intends to slash Medicare benefits. Starring in a new RNC ad announcing a "Seniors Bill of Rights,"

"Let's agree in both parties that Congress should only consider health reform proposals that protect senior citizens. For starters, no cuts to Medicare to pay for another program. Zero."

Steele's spot followed on the heels of his August 24 Washington Post op-ed similarly dedicated to producing fear and loathing among the elderly. Despite the conclusions of Politifact and the AARP that the Obama White House is not calling for benefit cuts, Steele again portrayed the President as the grim reaper:

The Republican Party's contract with seniors includes tenets that Americans, regardless of political party, should support. First, we need to protect Medicare and not cut it in the name of "health-insurance reform." As the president frequently, and correctly, points out, Medicare will go deep into the red in less than a decade. But he and congressional Democrats are planning to raid, not aid, Medicare by cutting $500 billion from the program to fund his health-care experiment.

(Steele's cynicism and duplicity on this point wasn't merely lambasted by Democrats. The conservative National Review, no friend of Medicare, lamented that Steele's "blatant finger-in-the-wind leadership from the RNC is disappointing.")
Sadly, Michael Steele like most of his Republican colleagues had a long of history of advocating putting Medicare under the knife. In his case, Steele's support isn't off in the distant past, but reiterated just last week.
As a Maryland Senate candidate in 2006, Michael Steele assured the late Time Russert that "everything has to be on the table," including Medicare and Social Security, in order to "control runaway federal spending."
But it was in a comically catastrophic interview with NPR's Steve Inskeep last week in which Michael Steele's gymnastic contortions on "government-run" Medicare tied him in knots. Literally within seconds, the chairman of the Republican National Committee both rejected and endorsed cuts to Medicare:

STEELE: What makes it a valuable program is it's the last line of opportunity to receive health care for a lot of our seniors, and it has been now since the 1960s. The problem, as we all know, is the system has been raided over the years from time to time, it's become bloated, and in some cases, efficiencies have not been maxed out. Therefore it's running into problems where, you know, every few years we're having stories about Medicare falling apart, and we've already projected it's going to --
INSKEEP: It's going to run out of money.
STEELE: Exactly.
INSKEEP: But you're coming here reducing the spending for Medicare, restraining Medicare.
STEELE: No, no, no. That's not coming out against reducing the spending for Medicare. That's a wonderful interpretation by the left, but what I was saying was, "Don't go raiding the program without some sense of what we're taking from the program, the impact it's going to have on the senior citizens out there." You know, raiding a program that's already bankrupt to pay for another program that we can't afford is not good public policy.
INSKEEP: So you would be in favor of certain cuts?
STEELE: Absolutely. You want to maximize the efficiencies of the program. I mean, anyone who's in the program would want you to do that, and certainly those who manage it want you to do that.

After accusing Inskeep of "doing a wonderful little dance here" and "trying to be cute," a frustrated Michael Steele concluded, "I'm not saying I like or dislike Medicare; It is what it is."

Of course, what Medicare is - and has always been - is the target of perpetual war from the ideologues of the Republican Party. Except, as in today's battle and the GOP's 2003 charade over the Medicare prescription drug benefit, when Republican political survival temporarily requires feigned support for the program.
As it turns out, Michael Steele is just following in the footsteps of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). In July, McConnell accused Democrats of "sticking it to seniors with cuts to Medicare" and "cutting seniors." Of course, in 1995 McConnell was among the Republican revolutionaries backing Newt Gingrich's call to slash Medicare spending by $270 billion (14% ) over seven years. As Gingrich put it then:

"We don't want to get rid of it in round one because we don't think it's politically smart," he said. "But we believe that it's going to wither on the vine because we think [seniors] are going to leave it voluntarily."

When President Clinton and his Democratic allies in Congress rushed to defend Medicare from the Republican onslaught, Gingrich launched a blistering assault:

"Think about a party whose last stand is to frighten 85-year-olds, and you'll understand how totally morally bankrupt the modern Democratic Party is."

Fast forward to 2009 and Newt could have been talking about his Republican Party and its confused chairman, Michael Steele. As he told ABC this morning, just days after calling for "zero" cuts to Medicare, "You've got to deal with those inefficiencies, absolutely."