Latoya Peterson of Jezebel gives us some real, righteous anger at the direction teabaggers are taking the healthcare debate in this country.

The question isn’t health care or freedom! Where the fuck are you getting this shit from? The question is health care or more dead people!

…

No one here is actually interested in having a conversation about health care. They just want to scream. And this is unfortunate because instead of having an actual conversation about what this health care bill will actually provide (which is still murky) and how it will be paid (murkier still) or what is actually in this 1,018 page document, we’re still on a bunch of bullshit about socialism.

I have been wondering what the teabagger set who are going to congressional town hall events, grabbing mics and shouting their representatives down think is happening with healthcare reform. More to the point, I wonder what they think has happened since January 21st, 2009 and today that has caused them to believe the Constitution has been destroyed and now things have to change. Because, frankly, there hasn’t been a damned thing that has happened yet in this administration – certainly not anything pertaining to the Constitution. And certainly not yet with healthcare.

Why does the idea of free health insurance scare them? Likely because this is an outlet for tribal rage. The radical Republican base simply cannot handle the fact that they lost and now a Democrat (let alone an African-American with a foreign-sounding name) is President. Add in that the teabagger cohort is one that has tended to blindly support a legislative agenda that benefits corporations first and foremost and the confusion around the healthcare bill is even more bizarre. None of their “concerns”, from death panels to rationed care, are real. Most industry supports major reform. And the health insurance industry, by the looks of things, is going to profit remarkably from any reform legislation. So in the face of a legislative course of action that is going to greatly benefit the people they support (the wealthy and corporations), the opposition lacks coherence beyond tribal hatred for anything Democratic. As a result, you end up in situations where the people protesting the loudest are often the ones that stand to benefit the most from reform, a reality that is painfully depressing in its assessment of the state of affairs in American political discourse and dynamics.

Update:

Hunter at Daily Kos gets at a similar point that I’m trying to make here, citing a quote from today’s NY Times.

Standing two feet from the senator, Craig Anthony Miller, 59, shouted into his face, “You are trampling on our Constitution!”

You might ask yourself why, of all possibilities, reforming America’s healthcare system is the thing that “tramples on the Constitution” or “leaves the existence of the Republic at risk.” You might ask this, because you’re probably not insane. But again, this matches what we’ve been seeing in every “deather” protest so far –people angrily denouncing government intervention and “socialized medicine” — but they all love Medicare. They don’t want government to supposedly decide who’s too expensive to keep alive, with visions of “death panels” and the like — but insurance companies are doing that now, all the time, and there’s nary a peep about that. The opposition, in other words, doesn’t know the first damn thing about the thing they’re supposedly protesting.