Health Care Reform = Civil War?

Maybe we can look back and laugh now at some of the extremes of opinion expressed during the great debate over the 2010 health care reform legislation, but some of you may not have been amused had you seen the latest junk fax from the Utah-based America Forever organization in your office last Friday. I last saw one last fall, and at that time the group was arguing that President Obama was advancing a malevolent homosexual agenda. Worse, the homosexuals collaborated with other nefarious elements to undermine the American economy in time to cost Republicans the 2008 presidential election. The new fax repeats that point in passing as the first step of a larger, more diabolical plot, here described in the form of a rhetorical question:

Is health care reform to crate total government control or to trigger a chain of events leading to civil unrest and state separation from the union? Either way the Constitution will DIE ... But who wins?

America Forever anticipates that some states will reassert their primitive sovereignty and not recognize the health care reforms, while individuals will refuse to pay taxes to fund the monstrous measure. In turn, the federal government will withhold funds from the defiant states. Then?

With the homosexuals, lesbians, Human Rights Campaign, and MoveOn.org, on his side, [Obama] counts with the support of the most ready and organized group with 20 years of experience in going to the streets as well as bringing along the immigrant minorities and african-americans, he is set and sure to create civil unrest and excusing himself to execute full control over all our rights by force.

I assure you that I leave out no words or punctuation in the above quote. In any event, America Forever has a delicious sense of irony. It turns out, they inform us, that Barack Obama, this arch-forger of totalitarian big government, actually wants to break up the United States. Health care reform is "a 'NO WIN' scenario for the American people, because even if by forcing the states to stand up, America will break apart, therefore achieving his ultimate goal."

How did they figure that out? To be fair, I can't expect them to show all their work in a single-sheet fax, but I don't think they can take this particular assumption for granted. Why on Earth would the "most powerful man on" it want to break up that power which makes him so? The nearest thing to an explanation (and it's not that near) is this charge: "He counts with foreign powers who want America, the watchdog of freedom, out of the picture." On the other hand, elsewhere in the document it's acknowledged that the dissolution of the Union could well be "a simple oversight of the President and his administration with the news media and who knows who else is involved."

Speaking of foreign powers, the rhetorical skills displayed in this latest fax again leave us wondering how American America Forever is. Odd little formulae like "counts with" don't seem like the work of a native or well-educated English speaker. Dare I suggest that these alleged patriots are in fact thinly disguised emissaries of an enemy state? As Ernest Hemingway used to say, "How do you like it now, gentlemen?"

America Forever aims to transcend partisanship. Last week's fax ends with an appeal to Democrats:

How can you live with yourself and face your family and posterity knowing you consciously betrayed your own blood, surrendering and delivering up the sacred principles of liberty, equality and justice bequeathed by the founding fathers to a grim Moloch of a President, who is lying and deceiving and trampling under foot our God-given rights, afforded to us by the blood of the ones who courageously died to defend the constitution and American way of life? We call upon you fellow Americans members of Democratic party to not forget who you are. You are defenders of the Constitution not destroyers of it.

Again, the telltale lapses in conventional grammar and punctuation could cause concerned citizens to question the nationality or national loyalty of these purveyors of black propaganda. "Members of Democratic party?" That sounds like an evil Asiatic from an oldtime movie serial. Is that the inscrutable signature of the Red Chinese? Or is it an unconscious cry for help, sent to offices across the country, from a disordered mind struggling with its own unreason? I might suggest that the government could arrange for some psychiatric help, but I fear that the sender would take that the wrong way. It might be too late now to do anything for this poor soul. Even as we speak, the author may be digging in, somewhere in the woods, waiting for the end....