Watching the video was informative for many reasons. (I think they should air this every hour on MSNBC.) But my favorite was the bit about NPR. The man listens to National Public Radio. He must therefore be educated. He must therefore be the enemy. THIS is the mindset of the party. A party once built on educated men and women, now made up entirely of small-minded thugs and sore losers. A party that once debated Edmund Burke and John Stuart Mill now screams fear-based myths about toilets and light-bulbs and wonders openly whether the President of the United States might be a Kenyan Socialist-Fascist who wants to kill their grandparents and allow the goverment to take over medicare.

If you could get these uneducated thugs to listen, I'd tell them: "Look, from one conservative to another, here's the reality. Your lives have not been made worse by the election of President Obama. He's doing a good, middle-of-the-road, acceptable job. He's not doing anything insanely liberal. He's compromising. You don't have ANY reason for that half-assed 'revolution' the one guy in the crowd talked about. You're just sore losers who don't like the fact that you didn't get your way this time. And you think you can bully the rest of America by being an extremist echo chamber. But it won't work -- America will reject you, and you'll be shouting at the wind."

But, of course, they would never listen -- because they're shameless sore losers and small-minded, uneducated thugs -- opposed to intelligence, ideas, and solutions, and beholden to fear, ideology, and hatred. The lowest common denominator. I don't care what their political views are -- conservative, liberal, whatever. If you let the passions of small-minded, bullying idiots guide the country, the country will fail. More importantly, a country that allows these small-minded, selfish idiots to lead it...deserves to fail.

By the way, the funny part of all this is that it's going to backfire. My expectation (and fear) is that Obama will learn that no matter what he does, it will be turned into "the first steps towards Hitler!!!!11!". And, if he really is liberal, he'll just say "screw it -- I've got 60, these damned idiots will scream no matter what we do, so let's do what we want."

By acting like spoiled children, these Republicans shut themselves out of the debate -- so they have only themselves to blame if the government decides to start ignoring them. In the end, democracy is a government for adults -- if you can't act like one, you don't deserve to have your position heard.

Why aren't the Democrats out there offering examples of why this legislation is so important? It's pretty obvious that it is -- I think most of us know someone who has been royally screwed over by the current system. Why aren't there commercials running about those? Why is all the persuasion from the left coming from some talking heads? The American people don't understand talking heads using logic -- they understand screaming hyperbole and examples.

Assuming that the Democrats aren't willing to resort to the Republican approach of just...flat out fucking lying...then you need examples.

I'll start: Good friend, small business owner, couldn't afford both to start a business and pay health insurance. Gets hit by someone going the wrong way down a one-way street -- they never caught the guy. So $100,000 later she's bankrupt, can't get coverage, but still needs additional operations so that she can walk normally again. She is, of course, now uninsurable -- "pre-existing condition."

Only after the example do you make the larger point: If she had been covered by an employer, then she'd always have had the choice to continue with her current plan. But as a small business owner, would she have been better off with national health care? Of-fucking-course. "National health care" beats the hell out of "Bankrupt, lost your business, and living on the public dole." It's slow and bureaucratic? (Assuming we do it wrong...though why the hell would we do it wrong, given that we know from other countries how to do it right?) Even if it is slow...it beats the living hell out of "non-existent."

Would WE (as a country) be better off? Absolutely. Whatever it costs to cover her, we'd be better off with her running a small business and contributing to the economy rather than living off welfare.

The ONLY people who are better off with her uninsured are insurers who could theoretically make more money off her without national health care.

I'd be shocked if we couldn't find a million examples like that -- examples that aren't made up out of whole cloth. (Trig isn't going to face a "death panel" -- give me a fucking break.) So Democrats -- get examples. Get them on television. Hit these screaming, anti-American, "blow up the country before we let a black man improve it" jackasses upside the head with pretty basic and obvious facts. Why you're not already doing that is a mystery to me.