This Country Needs Health Care Badly: Mental Health Care, That Is.

Every year, thousands of Americans (more than 20,000 according to some estimates) die because they have not received needed medical care, because they could not afford it. That is 7 times as many people as died on 9/11/2001, every year in the last eight years.

Medical bills play a part in 2/3rds of the bankruptcies in this country.

Millions of Americans do not have medical coverage ("go naked", in industry parlance) not because they don't want it, but because they can't afford it or they have lost it due to--wait for it--illness.

And yet, when President Obama outlines the need for reform of the health care system, the Republican echo chamber accuses him of orchestrating a socialist takeover.

Not only that: A significant number of Americans do not believe that President Obama is a natural born citizen.

Not only that: Opponents of health care reform carry around signs equating Obama with Hitler and the Democratic Party with Nazis. In fact, people go to political town hall carrying automatic weapons because, they say, "we still have some freedoms left in this country."

Jonah Goldberg, one of the stupidest and most dishonest people alive today, wrote a book called Liberal Fascism in which he makes the insane argument, rejected by anyone who has a clue about history, that fascism is a leftist ideology. Never mind the fact that typical principles and manifestations of fascism include ethnic purity, the supremacy of the motherland (or fatherland) over any other nation on earth, a sick concept of patriotism in which dissenters are unpatriotic, the violent suppression of dissent, the crushing of labor unions, the imposition of a certain kind of morality, almost always grounded in religion and the refusal to tolerate alternate views and lifestyles, and the complicity of political and corporate power. Never mind that all of these traits were visible during the eight years of unrestrained trampling of the Constitution and progressive values by Bush & Friends, years during which Goldberg was alive (though obviously not well.) He chooses to ignore all inconvenient evidence contrary to his premise and manages to reassign fascism to arugula-eating, Prius-driving, godless liberals, without a shred of reasonable evidence. His book was, needless to say a bestseller.

In Kentucky, there is a museum dedicated to the idea that Noah loaded dinosaurs and humans on the ark, with depictions of said dinosaurs being ridden by humans. In the first eighteen months of operation, it reported 550,000 visitors.

A large number of Americans believe that the Constitution should submit to the Bible.

And now, for final proof that this is a country gone mad: KFC has introduced a new chicken sandwich. Not one with a bun around a piece of fried chicken. One where fried chicken replaces the bun, and bacon and cheese are stuffed between two pieces of chicken. It reminds me of a classic comedy bit by Patton Oswalt about the KFC Bowls:



That is what happens to a country when you pretend long enough that there are always two equally reasonable sides to an argument: You lose the sense of what is sane and what is insane.