Healthcaremageddon

A post by David Frum, the former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, David Frum, that I cited Sunday night was all over the Net on Monday. Frum's take on the anti-government hysteria surrounding the health care debate included this:

Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or – more exactly – with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother?

Today, President Obama signs the Senate bill passed on Sunday. Passage of the health care bill is a Republican Waterloo, Frum writes. Maybe. But I’ll be holding my breath for some time afterwards.

Okay, I’ll say it.

I’m holding my breath waiting to see if some overstimulated tea party sympathizer strung out on too many months of anti-government hyperbole is going to fly a Cessna into another office building. Or fill a Ryder truck with another bomb made from fertilizer. Or shoot a few more cops answering a domestic disturbance call. Or walk into a government building in D.C. and open up on guards with a handgun. Or take his 12-gauge and the Liberal Hunting Permit he bought at the gun show and walk down to another Unitarian church to kill him some liberals.

Because Glenn Beck and Rep. Michele Bachmann and Sean Hannity and Rep. John Boehner (among others) convinced him that liberals are out to confiscate his guns, throw him into a concentration camp, and murder his grandma with the commie, fascist, unconstitutional health care bill that – under orders from the Kenyan pretender and committed socialist, Barack Obama – Nancy Pelosi and her gang of thugs passed illegally by, you know, besting the GOP in a House floor vote.

It’s Healthcaremageddon. Oh, the humanity.

As Jon Stewart told conservatives last spring, “I think you’re confusing tyranny with losing.”

Responding to the weekend follies outside the Capitol, Digby on Sunday contrasted the different reactions to losing on the left and on the far right:

The Republicans are losing their minds and their shock troops, the tea partiers, are facing the reality that they aren't likely to win this fight. They don't like that and they are acting very, very badly. This has nothing to do with "both sides do it." The facts have shown over many, many years that the left gets depressed when these things happen --- and the right has a screaming, spitting, head-banging tantrum. How the two sides handle defeat is a defining characteristic.

Obama has been trying to pass health care reform since last summer, but a few Senate holdouts in his own party have stymied his reported "dictatorial" ambitions. Until now. During Stewart’s recent interview on Fox News, Bill O’Reilly said Obama has shown his inexperience in being unable to handle congress. Stewart shot back, “How many tyrants do you know who really suffer because they can’t get cloture?” [timestamp 23:35]

This is the fearsome, freedom-eating tyrant that has the far right clutching their pearls, screaming epithets at legislators and reaching for weapons? If it weren't so potentially explosive....

Excuse me, but that’s ... just ... sad.

(Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans.)