Members of Congress may be glad to get back to the floor fights of D.C. after the Sterno heat at their home district town hall "meetings". As we've been blogging about, groups of anti-Obama anti-public option health-care protesters have been disrupting the sessions, shouting down the representatives and in some cases, threatening them.
The N.Y. Times has a roundup of the events.
There have been complaints by the Left that the tumult of the meetings represents an end to "civil political discourse", but I've got news for them: that train left the station so long ago the caboose is just a single red pixel on the photo of U.S. Democracy 2009. Civil discourse starting dissolving when Talk-Radio became Scream-Radio, and when the average length of a "sound-bite" in TV News dropped to single digits. These protesters don't just want to make their point, they want to make sure the other side can't make theirs.
The organizing elements, like Dick Armey's Freedom Works, insist the anger is real, and I'm sure it is. But it's also manipulated and fed by industry-friendly organizations who want to have it both ways. They want to blast the public insurance option as "a government takeover" of health care insurance that will put the for-profit companies like Blue Cross-Blue Shield out of business, and at the same time warn people what a terrible no-choice product a government health insurance agency would offer. How much of a threat to the for-profit companies can it be if it will be so bad? Do they think people are too stupid to leave a poorly-run government program for a well-operated private one?
And if this is "socialized medicine", I presume they will encourage Congress to kill Medicaid and Medicare and the V.A. when the House and Senate return after the recess, no? No.
If those on the side of health insurance reform want to start getting ground back, they could do a lot worse than adopting the "you can't have it both ways" argument. It's utterly ridiculous to argue that government run healthcare would be terrible, but millions of people would choose it over a private plan. Yet, that's precisely what some are arguing.
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