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August 13, 2009
Consortium News
The right-wing fury at town hall meetings over health care and the Republican obstruction of any serious reform in Washington are not just symptoms of a complex debate on an issue packed with powerful special interests; it is a test of whether reality matters in the United States.
When a supposedly “moderate” Republican like Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa endorses the crazed view of the “deathers” who claim that President Barack Obama’s health-care plan would promote euthanasia, it is clear that the nation’s problem is bigger than any one legislative battle, even one as big as health reform.
The overriding question has become whether the United States – as a representative democracy – is on the verge of losing its sanity.
And this is not the first time this question has arisen recently. Only seven years ago, much of the American population was persuaded that Iraq was some lethal threat to the United States.
Then, there was fear-mongering about Iraq somehow sending small remote-controlled airplanes across the Atlantic Ocean and over the United States to spray chemical and biological weapons on the American people. There were wildly exaggerated (indeed, false) alarms about Iraq developing a nuclear bomb that would be given to al-Qaeda.
Some of this Iraq War craziness tracked Vice President Dick Cheney’s view that if there were a one percent chance of a threat to the United States, that possibility needed to be treated as a certainty – a mad-hatter approach to the world that would guarantee endless warfare seeking to erase hypothetical dangers while creating an endless array of other one percent risks.
There is a direct lineage from the Iraq War hysteria to the current madness surrounding the health-care fight. In both cases, the hysteria was stoked by leading Republicans and their right-wing media allies. Both involved disseminating farfetched, nightmare scenarios to a gullible (if not paranoid) segment of the population, which was then whipped into a frenzy that spilled over into intimidation and silencing voices of disagreement.
Regarding the Iraq War, any skepticism toward George W. Bush’s version of the facts was greeted with anger, from crushing Dixie Chicks CDs because of their criticism of the President, to condemning former weapons inspector Scott Ritter as a traitor for doubting Bush’s WMD claims, to pouring French wine into gutters in protest over France’s cautionary advice on Iraq.Today, anti-health-reform protesters disrupt town halls held by Democratic lawmakers, shouting down pro-reform arguments, issuing direct and indirect threats of violence, and escalating attacks on Obama, including preposterous depictions of the President as Adolf Hitler. Read the rest of the story at this link.
