And, taking my own advice.......

...which, by the bye (and unlike Alice), I do with reasonable frequency, I have recently subscribed to the Ann Coulter weekly newsletter. I have avoided the works of this particular person in the past, since it was just too easy to dismiss her as being so thoroughly outside of reality and/or rationality that the other Conservative True Believers noticed (being well brought up, I avoid the word "wingnut").

This also ties me into a whole group of other people who are so sure of their truth that they refuse to sully it with fact. Lots of fun. Also more than a little fright-making.

These are people who really believe that the President can simultaneously be a fascist, a socialist, a one-man Arab sleeper cell, a communist, a tool of the Zionist Owned Government, and a militant liberal. In between the "Obama invented the deficit" diatribes and the "Obama is the Anti-Christ" discussions, they send me e-mails touting a wonderful array of products. In general, these are the sort of things the infomercials wouldn't carry (out of respect for their customers).

As I write this, I am reminded of the last time the loonies of the right decided they could get away with saying the first thing that popped into the heads of their corporate sponsors. It was during the Kennedy/Nixon presidential campaign. Nixon put out ads that claimed that electing Kennedy would please the Communists, the Beatniks, the Unionists, and the Catholic Church. Didn't work, but it was pretty insane for the times. Nixon closed it all off when he wrote in Six Crises about his little girl asking him "Daddy, did people vote against us because we're Quakers?" What dreck, but we thought it was over.

Now we have Ann Coulter telling us we are going to have to stand in line for aspirins once "Obamacare" goes into effect. Outside the world of the Uber-Rich where Ms. Coulter apparently lives, there are people doing that now. They are known as the poor, the underinsured, and/or the uninsured. When the nonprofit organization Remote Area Medicine Volunteers decide to set up their tents in the United States instead of their usual locations of Third World Countries, you can easily believe we have rationing of medical care. The dividing lines are easy, in The States. If you have money, or a job with benefits, or you are drawing care from the VA, or TRICARE, or Medicare, or another single-payer system, you get a reasonable level of treatment. If not, tough.

When Medicare came in, the Right Wing claimed it was a plot to impose a national health care upon the nation. Didn't happen, but for a few years we had fewer elderly people facing the" sell your home to pay the doctors or die" dilemma. After the Bush II administration, it's close to getting back to the old days. But maybe not yet.

I do learn from the Human Events newsletter. I learn that there are a significant number of people (adjusting for the ones who are clearly sending the same posting with multiple different identities) who are willing to believe any number of long-disproved (and, in some cases, demonstrably impossible) lies. Moreover, they will cling to these ideas when even their leaders have found that level of shame beneath which even they will not cross. I'm sure most of them are, in many situations, perfectly nice people. But when certain subjects are raised, they have all the charm on the lady in Spokane, WA who, in 1992, apologized to me because she hadn't realized I had "Eye-talyun blood" and she had promised her neighbors she would only sell her house to a white family.