There is a dearth of appealing sporting events this August. Football, basketball, and hockey are out of season. All the good tennis events are over. The Tour de France is over. There’s 3 more years until the Summer Olympics. There’s 1 more year until the World Cup. I enjoyed reading about the swimsuit controversy at the swimming championships, but we don’t have whatever obscure cable channel had broadcast the actual competition.
All we have is golf, Nascar, major league soccer, and baseball, all sports which, in normal people, inspire fervent boredom.
Because my longing for spectacle is going unsatisfied, thank God for the health care town meetings. I mean, the next best thing to watching a Manning boy get sacked is watching Arlen Specter get sacked! Politically, that is, as his constituents express their rabid yet vague disdain for… for… well, anything that Arlen Specter says.
“One day, God is going to stand before you and he’s going to judge you!” one particularly worked-up man bellowed at Mr. Specter because the man didn’t get an opportunity to ask a question, a privilege limited to the first 30 people in line (here). “You’re trampling on the Constitution! … You and your cronies do this all the time!”
This man inspired possibly the most depressing headline of all time: “Angry area man becomes face of health care debate” (here). Yes, America’s health care reform is being held hostage by an “angry area man.”
In the article, the “angry area man” makes it clear that, like most of these wingnuts, the source of his anger is not health care reform. Rather, it’s something totally inconsequential and nonsensical. “He said Obama has named 31 czars, while the U.S. Constitution doesn’t allow anyone to be named a king, czar, or other terms that denote royalty. ‘How can we trust him with a health care bill if he won’t keep his oath of office? He’s supposed to obey the Constitution. Thirty-one times he broke that.'”
The article compared this guy to Joe the Plumber, but if Joe the Plumber was even half this batshit nuts, he’d have his own show on Fox News.
(Maybe after the raging debate about health care reform has fallen silent, we could have a little discussion about America’s education system?)
Anyway, with football still a long month away, I’m certainly enjoying the town meeting spectacles (paid sponsors for this spectacle include America’s private health insurance industry, the pharmaceutical industry, and Fox News, all of whom stand to profit when America remains sick and stupid.)
