The Mob Hysteria Will Outlast the Health Reform Debate (Joe Rothstein's Commentary)

September 7, 2009

By Joe Rothstein
Editor, EINNEWS.COM

Excerpts from Senator Mark Warner's town hall meeting in Fredericksburg, Virginia the other night.

A questioner says he's totally opposed to paying for health care for undocumented immigrants.

Senator Warner says there's nothing in any of the bills moving through Congress that would pay for health care for undocumented immigrants.

The crowd goes wild: booing, yelling, cat-calling. The protesters know Senator Warner is lying.

Another questioner says the U.S. is too deeply in debt to afford the health bill.

Senator Warner says that the President and the Democrats in Congress are committed to passing legislation that won't add to the national debt.

The crowd goes wild: booing, yelling, cat-calling. The protesters know Senator Warner is lying.

Another questioner tells about the time in had a heart attack while in Paris and was treated in a French hospital. When he returned to the U.S., he said, his cardiologist told him the treatment he received there was not up to date according to U.S. medical standards. The man said he didn't want the U.S. to sink into the sub-standard French system.

The crowd goes wild: booing, yelling, cat-calling----missing a very important point: French medicine saved the man's life….even though, to the French, he was an alien.

And so it went. For sheer irrationality, it was hard to match the run of statements and questions hurled at Warner, or the crowd's vocal reaction to it.

It seemed that to get a standing ovation from the anti-crowd all one needed to do was to make a totally false accusation. Abortion funding? End of life management counseling? Nothing was too bizarre.

One of the most common chants and homemade signs at these health care forums has been “Read the Bill!” But clearly, few if any of those packing the meetings have read the bill or have even paid attention to all the fact-checking that's been going on.

Another common argument against health care reform has been that nowhere in the U.S. Constitution does it say Congress has the right to legislate health care. Senator Warner responded to that question by pointing out that the Constitution also doesn't say anything about education or a person's right to own a telephone.

The crowd booed that answer, too.

What's going on here?

For one thing, and no small thing, all of this irrationality has been abetted by Republican congressional leadership. On one of last Sunday's talk shows, Republican Rep Mike Pence, seen as one of the GOP's rising stars, kept repeating the mantra that the Democrats were engaged in a government take-over of health care.

That, of course is not even debatable. It just doesn't square with the bills now moving through Congress, all of which are efforts to improve the private health care system and get a handle on soaring health care costs. The “government take-over of health care” argument is a lie, just a small step removed from “death panels.”

Republican leaders could do a lot to tamp down all of the nonsense and put the health reform debate on some kind of reasonable, fact-based track. But they're finding all of the mob hysteria politically useful, so why bother to be responsible about it?

Something else is going on here, too. Best expressed by a woman at Warner's health care forum who said she had lived through 11 presidents and "for the first time I don't believe the president we have now is a patriot....It's less about health care than the agenda."

The Agenda? Translation: Obama's not a legitimate President. He's some type of foreign, alien element who creeped into the White House. He wasn't born in the U.S. He's probably not a Christian. He certainly doesn't look like any other President we've ever had. He's determined to undermine freedom, democracy, capitalism and the American way.

Never mind that President Obama spent nearly two years appearing at thousands of events, large and small, in most U.S. states and cities. Never mind that no candidate for President in U.S. history had to run as rugged a gamut of travel, fact-checking, cable talking heads, Internet blogs, email blasts and YouTube videos. Never mind that when asked to choose among many experienced, qualified candidates, most voters in primaries, caucuses and the general election in November selected Obama. The result wasn't even close.

Now, President Obama is trying to implement the agenda that he clearly spelled out during the campaign....and which a large majority of Americans voted for.

But the hard right in this country just doesn't want to accept it. We're back to the Clinton days when “militias” roamed the hills waiting for UN black helicopters to begin a world take-over of the U.S. by the Tri-Lateral commission.

We used to think of this as crazy, fringe stuff. But now it's seeped into mainstream politics. It's tragic. It's ugly. And it's dangerous.

(Joe Rothstein can be contacted at joe@einnews.com)