Teabaggers At It Again

Amarillo's right-wing nut fringe dwellers, commonly known as "teabaggers", had themselves another demonstration last Saturday. The Amarillo Globe News said six hundred people turned out for the event, but if the above picture is any indication, it was probably far less.

Even if six hundred nuts did show up, that's a pretty pitiful crowd for the reddest area of a red state. And as usual, they didn't make a lot of sense. For instance, one of the demonstrators had a sign reading "Obama is a Marxist, socialist, fascist". He's obviously never had any history or political science courses (if he even graduated high school) or he would know socialists and fascists are on opposite ends of the political spectrum. A person couldn't be both, even if they tried.

But then, rational thinking is not something these people engage in. Their idea of an argument is to throw as many accusations as they can, regardless of whether they understand what those accusations are or not. The truth is that they just can't stand the idea of an African-American president, and their racism overrides their common sense (if they ever had any to begin with).

The speakers they gathered to hear didn't make a lot of sense either. One of them made the bold declaration that America has the best health care in the world and it doesn't need to be fixed. She either doesn't know or doesn't care that America spend more per capita on health care than any other nation and receives far less for that expenditure.

Nearly 44 million people have no health insurance, and that figure grows daily by thousands. Many countries that spend less have longer life spans and much lower rates of infant deaths. That's a pretty odd definition of "the best health care in the world" to me.

But something else bothers me even more. Take a good look at the picture of the demonstrators. It's a rather old crowd. At least half of them (if not more) qualify for Medicare (and I seriously doubt they've refused those benefits). As recipients of government health insurance, how can they justify trying to deny that same insurance to their fellow Americans?

Maybe they're too stupid to know they've got government health insurance -- a large portion of Americans don't realize that Medicare is government insurance. Or maybe it's just that old "I've got mine -- screw you" type of greed that infects many Americans on the right. Either way, it's just wrong.

Don't they make you proud to be American?