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Al Jazeera



But the sheer manic intensity of the foam-flecked tirades bursting out in the town halls, so out of proportion to their proximate cause, bespeaks much deeper roots of rage. These are some of the same people who howled "traitor!" and "kill him!" at Sarah Palin's rallies last year. They are the ones convinced Obama is a Muslim "sleeper agent" who will destroy American values and hand the country over to Osama bin Laden. The flip side of their rage is fear. They scream: "We want our country back!" Their country is one where white, Christian conservatives rule.

Glen Greenwald is, as usual, on the money in this dissection of Obama's politicking around healthcare reform. Two key points: 1) the GOP don't want any healthcare reform, at all; 2) Obama is using the excuse of 'bipartisanship' - notGOP support, butit in the interests of some specious national unity - to negotiate away the 'public option' . The knuckle-crunchers in the Democratic party, led by Rahm Emmanuel - who was appointed chief-of-staff for a reason - are cracking down hard on internal dissenters who favour a public health insurance system, but allowing the 'centrists' and 'Blue Dogs' (Dixiecrats as they would once have been called) to set the agenda. Tom Daschle doesn't get Emmanuel's stick for being the insurance industry's well-paid front-man , despite the administration's animadversions about that trade and its perverse incentives. The plan that is being arrived at, without the 'public option', has to be more or less what was sought.This being the depressingly typical way in which politics is done in America, it has been rather odd to watch America's unusually number of cranks get to work attacking Obama and his socialistic Nazi communist Muslim death panels. It has been pointed out that the last attempt at healthcare reform was defeated by the pharmaceutical-healthcare industry, with relatively little mass involvement. This reform process is being conducted with the industry on the inside, as it were - which is one reason why the potential for reform is being progressively eroded. The industry is working very hard to manage and contain reform from within, which it evidently saw coming a mile away (hence astro-turfing PR operations like this ). This time, the major public attack is coming from people incited by Palin's claim that health reform would lead to 'death panels' in which bureaucrats get to inflict some foreign eugenics or euthanasia programme in all but name. It has been pointed out that those 'death panels' already exist, and they're all about the stars n stripes. But nonetheless, Palin is being defended by others on the Republican right such as Newt Gingrich, and continues to double down on her assertion when asked. At this one point one recalls the kind of race-baiting hysteria that Palin and the McCain campaign indulged in during the election campaign last year, and the mass audience that clearly existed for it - a minority, but a truculent minority with altogether too many guns. This is yet another expression of exactly the same derangement.What accounts for it? Clearly, it is only incidentally about Obama's tepid healthcare proposals. The undercurrents of racism being reported at these rallies, and the appearance of heavily armed crowds , clearly indicates that something far greater is at stake. There are some good analyses out there, such as this piece on, which - despite basically resting on Hofstadter's analysis of the 'paranoid style in American politics' - hits the nail on the head with this:

racial state

"I don't believe this is just about healthcare. It's not about TARP. It's not about left and right. This is about the systematic dismantling of this country. I'm only thirty-five years old, I've never been interested in politics. You have awakened a sleeping giant. We are tired of this. This is why everybody in this room is so ticked off. I don't want this country turning into... Russia, turning into a socialised country. [applause, cheers, idiotic hooting] My question for you is, what are you going to do to restore this country back to what our founders created, according to the Constitution."

systematic dismantling of the country itself