By Jaren Love

Right now the New York Times top selling non-fiction paperback is a book entitled Common Sense, and no, it is not an ever so aesthetically pleasing newly released Penguin Classics edition of Thomas Paine’s revolutionary book, but rather a title borrowed by contemporary conservative commentator Glenn Beck. Blend that best selling book in the blender with the tea party protesters along with the rhetoric used at recent town hall meetings (see Senator Arlen Specter/Senator Claire McCaskill on youtube) by constituents angrily confronting their elected legislators coming home from Washington and one would think we are on the brink of a second American revolution. The question is, what exactly would this revolution stand for and what exactly do these dissenters of the Obama administration want and what are they arguing for?

Many commentators on television shows I have watched this week have said this is the angriest they have seen Americans in recent history. But I can not help but think that the situation in the United States with this growing niche of Obama dissenters is like beating up the firefighter instead of the arson. After all, the economic collapse, the two wars that put us trillions of dollars in debt, a lack of response to a natural disaster that devastated an American city and left many to die all took place under the previous administration’s watch. Now when a President steps in to fix all of those problems and also tries to give health care to uninsured Americans, the voices reach an unprecedented level of anger.

However, tonight when I was brainstorming to write commentary for this whole angry town hall and health care situation, I decided to watch Fox News, largely considered the more right wing friendly news outlet in this country. I could not help but notice that most of the reporting on the health care debate all covered hypothetical facets of health care reform rather than what has actually been debated in congress. There was coverage on the Sarah Palin “death panel” conspiracies, a conservative British legislator commentating on single payer health care which currently has about as much of a chance of becoming a political reality as a draft for the Iraq War, and other things that seem to be meant to scare people rather than to help create a productive debate in this country.

Not only that, all of this talk about the constitution and the revolution is nonsensical. How is trying to provide more health care any more unconstitutional than Medicare, Social Security, or any other kind of government bureaucracy? Watch some of those town hall dissenters on youtube videos. I would be willing to bet that any one of them knows somebody who enjoys their Social Security or Medicare benefits and would not want them taken away and would be very angry to have them taken away, probably someone near and dear.

I do not know what it is the dissenters want and I do not think anybody knows. The argument seems to be against big government but that little thing called the Industrial Revolution or the Great Depression or the New Deal has kind of given us an irreversibly big government that makes all of this “revolution” talk laughable. We tried electing a guy who wanted to do nothing about an economic collapse. His name was Herbert Hoover; remember what happened to him? The point is Senator Obama became President Obama a little over 200 days ago and inherited one of the worst transitional messes in Presidential history. What is it these people are so upset about that they were not upset about when Bush was President? I wish the media would stop giving so much attention to these town hall protesters because the argument is all bone and no meat and should be irrelevant. I have no problem with freedom of speech, I just have problem with speech that is a product of misinformed, regurgitated AM talk radio and Fox News talking points. If the public as depicted in these town halls was debating what was actually proposed in legislation, maybe we could have a civil and productive debate. Or maybe, if Fox News told them the truth, we could have a real debate, but, until then, I guess we just have to sit back and watch the madness.

Image Source: http://www.fogcityjournal.com/images/photos2008/lt_hr676_sb840_rally_080619/mw2w9555_std.jpg

Tags: dissent, health care, Obamacare, protest

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 16th, 2009 at 10:39 pm and is filed under Beltway Banter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.