Race, Taxes, Birth Certificates, and Eugenics

A Friday email cited by Ta-Nehisi Coates, at the Atlantic...

Yesterday evening I was to attend to the Health Care summit with(D) Rep Betty Reed and(D) Rep Kathy Castor, I'm a Precinct Captain (203) in Tampa and we received our talking points to rebut any NEGATIVE GOP talking points on healthcare. I never made it in the building. I've never in my life really experience outright racism in a public place. Signs of Obama hung in effigy, racial slurs on signs, people chanting negative words ( too many to list) and outright screaming at Obama supporters. The hatred was in their eyes and they actually scared me for a moment. At first I was shocked, then a little scared and then I got outright mad in the span of 1 minute.............. I actually left (the "hood" would have come out).  I was totally blown away it was a mad house. I'm kinda mad at my self now, because I left. I'm still shaking my head in awe....................I'm still cold inside.

There seems little question that something odd is going on with the healthcare debate. Foremost is the ridiculous extent to which the debate has been entirely commandeered by flagrant, outright lies -- things about euthanasia, and death panels, and the like, abject propaganda peddled directly from House and Senate offices. We have had lying in our discourse since the beginning of that discourse, but it has been a long while since the fabrications have been so blatant, so absolutely without even the smallest grain of truth. To take a Republican-sponsored healthcare provision that rather innocently and uncontroversially extends insurance coverage to those that want to create their own living wills and turn it into a declaration that the government will decide every five years whether or not you should be euthanized is something out of the Protocols, or out of Saddam's Iraq, or a mimicry of the worst and most stupid and most absurd of North Korean propaganda towards their own citizens.

Likewise, the explicit instruction to protestors not to debate, but to aggressively attempt to shut down the meetings entirely -- not normal. It is perhaps the best possible approach for insurance lobbyists to take, if their goal is to protect the profits of their industry -- but it is still not normal. We have always had the fringes of such speech, but I cannot recall a time it has been so celebrated as the formal solution to political debate. Certainly not by a major political party, coupled with the majority of their most popular pundits and talking heads, coupled again to lobbyist groups with long histories of corporate astroturfing. And the proud shuffling just-up-to-the-line-of-violence, right in the very faces of their own representatives of Congress, requiring police protection in order to escort those elected representatives safely from the meetings -- that part is new. That part is not normal.

It is more than a little troubling that each of the recent, most explicitly aggressive and loud and factless "movements" to appear on the scene since our first black American president took office appear to be, in large part, made up of the same people. Categorizing them informally there are the birthers, people who do not believe President Barack Obama is truly an American. There are the teabaggers (our name for them, cough, not theirs), a group that suddenly came to the conclusion that a tax structure that was begrudgingly tolerable in 2008, under Bush, is now the highest form of tyranny a mere handful of months later. There are the deathers, those that seem to quite firmly believe the propaganda of eugenics and euthanasia being cheerfully peddled to them by national leaders, and who take the conspiracy theory to absolute heart as being the nearly unavoidable result of any attempt to reform the straining, hyperexpensive and increasingly incompetent American healthcare system.