Photo via ARLnow.com“Rep. James P. Moran (D-Va.) is none too pleased with a new poster mounted at the Clarendon stop along Metrorail’s Orange Line. The advertisement is for Sick and Sicker: When the Government Becomes Your Doctor, a straight-to-DVD documentary bemoaning the 2010 health care law that detractors call “Obamacare.”
The poster begins with one of the most timeworn objections to the health care law: “Barack Obama wants politicians and bureaucrats to control America’s entire medical system.” But rather than stop there and just plug the DVD, it goes a few steps further:
“Go to hell Barack.”
In a letter to Metro’s General Manager Richard Sarles, Moran is calling for the poster to come down, saying it is “deeply disrespectful” toward President Obama. We won’t argue with that. Like the health care bill or not, there’s something about impugning the office of the president that just doesn’t sit right.
Moran, in his 11th term representing a swath of Northern Virginia, was a champion of the health care bill when the House of Representatives debated it in 2009. Moran’s district is also a reliably Democratic patch of a state that will once again be heavily contested in this year’s presidential election.
Unfortunately, Moran might not be able to convince Metro to take down the ad. In 1983, an artist, Michael A. Lebron, bought ad space at Metro stations where he posted images of then-President Ronald Reagan and advisers appearing to laugh at racial minorities with the caption “Tired of the Jellybean Republic?” riffing on Reagan’s preferred snack. Metro attempted to remove the posters, but a three-judge panel in U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled they were fair game and could stay up. That May 1984 ruling was signed by judges named Robert Bork, Kenneth Starr and Antonin Scalia—a murderers’ row of conservative jurisprudence if there ever was one.
Still, Moran’s office wants the Sick and Sicker poster taken down. “[Metro] does have a set of guidelines,” said his press secretary, Anne Hughes. “Things need to be truthful, and frankly, they need to respect the [president’s] office.”
But Dan Stessel, a spokesman for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, concurs with the 1984 ruling. “WMATA advertising has been ruled by the courts as a public forum protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution, and we may not decline ads based on their political content,” he told DCist. “WMATA does not endorse the advertising on our system, and ads do not reflect the position of the Authority.”
And, hey, just for the hell of it, here’s the trailer for Sick and Sicker:
Clarification: An earlier version of this post gave the ad the comma it was so glaringly missing. The ad reads “Go to hell Barack.” Proper grammer would include a comma after “hell.”
