Thanks to the almost obsessive and completely Don Quixote battles via Twitter.com of this man, who I have been known to call a friend in the real world, I was reading some right wingers and their links. It’s a compelling, frightening read following those websites, kind of Stephen-King-eque. OK, no gore (or Gore), but scary.

It’s not exactly along the lines of John Edwards’ two Americas, but I feel like there are folks living in a different country than the one I am. For example, there’s the Glenn Beck effect. Now, I listen to old Glenn, and I think he’s either off the rocker or completely digging his dance with fame. I kind of think he’s the Jim Morrison of the FOXNews set, digging his own hype machine and taking his Lizard King news commentary on the edge further and further. One day, maybe he’ll whip his dick out of tight leather pants and claim he did it because of Obama’s hatred of his ivory soft, lilly white skin.

But, other people, like the folks on Twitter using hastags like #tcot or whatever the right is rocking these days, they think Glenn is a truth teller. They are retweeting the madness as important questions of the day.

He claims some kind of journalistic standard of research and facts. But, then, he goes on with absolute bullshit blathering of no fact, all opinion. In the irony of ironies, he wipes a broad brush over Washington, DC and all pols on the left accusing them of essentially rushing in quickly for no reason whilst waving his own brand of alarm, exactly the tenor he is accusing them of falsely raising. More weird is the high dungeon over things like 1,000-page bills or our trillion dollar debt. Where was the outrage under Bush and Cheney, for reals, were all of the bills back in those golden days an easy to read two, three pages at the same time that mounting debt made sense?

And, then there’s the health care debate. I’ve worked at hospitals and at the forefront of biomedical research. I know people who helped create and test life-saving drugs like Herceptin. I understand the good that is the U.S.-drive in novel therapies and new ways to combat diseases. You know what funds a whole lot of that there high-level research? Remember phrases like the “War on Cancer,” “new weapons in the war on HIV-AIDS,” and who’s brewing up badges of flu vaccines? Government fucking programs. Government grants.

You know, socialism. By the way, when did any and all government action automatically get disregarded as terrible and wasteful and/or the activities of apparatchiks in communist blocs? DMV aside, there are a whole lot of things going on by a layer of civil servants that are invisible by virtue of working out OK.

Hell, I even worked with that enemy of the people, Rahm Emanuel’s brother Zeke.

What I, and I’m sure a whole lot of liberals of my bent, with or without the experience working with doctors or in health care, find confusing is who is against health care reform. Blog after blog, CNN, MSNBC, FOX News, all have parades of outspoken citizenry shouting about the hell that change will bring. Taking aside the astroturf issue (and for me anyway, I would have to think twice about any protest I joined if I knew somewhere in the mix were lobbyists in suits with smug slogans feeding my anger), the fear seems palpable, yet completely misguided.

Misguided, because the folks interviewed, they all seem like regular folks. Jamokes with regular jobs and bills to pay just like me. People who live on a margin where catastrophic illness can break their situation pretty quickly. This interview ends with an outspoken dude, who had his 15 minutes of fame shouting in the face of Representative John Dingell, admitting he has “crappy” health insurance.

I’m sorry, but WHAT? And, how the hell do all of these folks contend the U.S. rocks the best health care in the world, when we simply (and statistically provably) don’t?

Why are so many people happy to pay out buttloads of cash to uncaring insurers, live with a status quo where literally millions are shit out of luck? I simply do not understand the logic.

I understand the fear, uncertainty and doubt. But, the venom and the slogans being screamed allude me. As does the intrinsic logic of government equals bad, business equals good and variations on the theme, at the same time the system is riddled with loopholes that favor no one but the soulless profiteers.

In the end, in today’s arguments, I heard a factoid on “Fresh Air,” as Terry Gross interviewed author T.R. Reid that surprised me, but shouldn’t have. The term “socialized medicine” was created by PR flacks working for the American Medical Association in 1947 to (successfully) torpedo President Truman’s proposed national health care system in good old-fashioned Cold War fear-mongering.

I’m thinking I might have to read that man’s book.

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