So my good buddy came up to visit me this weekend and, as we are wont to do, we fell to discussing politics. Now, this buddy has many virtues, but being informed and reasonable about politics is not one of them. He used a bunch of 30 cent words like socialist and fascist (same thing? Or has Obama discovered the political alliance that would have changed WWII and Western Civilization?). 

For him, "socialism" was synonymous with a single-payer system. I pointed out that this was absurd. (Sorry, I can't defend Obama from the charges of fascism. It was, after all, out of a desire for white supremacy that I voted for the first non-white president). 

A socialist system is one in which the government employs the doctors, nurses, and other health care employees. This will never happen, because the raging mobs of baby boomers who remember that socialism=bad will destroy us before it does. A single-payer system is one in which the government pays the bills to health care providers. An important difference, but an inconvenient one for the right-wing rabble-rousers. 

Now, my other good pal, Andrew Lohse, wrote today that it is American and free to protest government policy. I whole-heartedly agree with him, and I believe that the so-called "tea-baggers," who express themselves by shouting loudly to drown out their members of Congress when they try to speak, have every right to do so. It does not make them right, it does not make them intelligent, and it does not make them a valuable part of our social fabric, but it is their right.

However, I draw the line, as always, at Sarah Palin and those like her. 

This terrible woman, never tired of tearing our country apart by making horrendous accusations of her political opponents, posted this on her Facebook page (absurd, I know):

"The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil."

Needless to say, no one on the left or right has endorsed or suggested such death panels. Such things would be evil.

But I say to Sarah and those who defend her (care to give it a go, Andrew?) that they are the evil ones, because they prevent a civil dialogue and make it more and more unlikely that we will solve our enormous national problem of health care.

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Stay tuned to Bill's blog, Impolitic Observer,  for a more detailed run-down of the healthcare debate tomorrow. 

Disagree with Bill? So does Andrew Lohse. Keep tabs on him at The Cynic Speaks.