I've been hearing this narrative a lot: "President Obama is the real target of health care protesters, not policy." Yup: the crowds are just pretending to care about changes to their health care options, but are really, all of them, lying. They have no concerns about healthcare at all. It's all just a ruse to embarrass the president.

Not a joke: top story on Google News at the moment.

Those people have been convinced by the current culture that we are dying to hear from them, and the louder the better. People who think that all they need to star in their own reality series is a couple of TV crews. But then this is Twitter America now, where no thought is supposed to go unspoken. We hear that all of this is democracy in action. It's not.

Funny how one election changes things, doesn't it? When ANSWER (which is an international socialist organization, not domestic) organized anti-Iraq protests, we heard that patriotism is the highest form of dissent. Now it's undemocratic.

Politics Daily:

Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, was having second thoughts — or was he? — about the way he had characterized people who are disrupting town halls with "lies, innuendo and rumor," and not letting others speak. They are, he had said, "evil-mongers."

Yup. They're not sincerely mistaken. The protesters know full well that the government healthcare plan would be wonderful for them and others, but are, for some inexplicable reason, being deliberately dishonest.

Nothing new, of course. We saw this last time 'round: Janine Garofolo on the "TEA" protests:

Let's be very honest about what this is about. It's not about bashing Democrats. It's not about taxes. They have no idea what the Boston Tea Party was about. They don't know their history at all. This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up.

Suddenly, right-wingers don't actually want lower taxes. Never did, apparently. They REALLY want higher taxes, but are just pretending to oppose an increase in government power and spending because they're actually racist, and simply hate the idea it came from a black president.

Though it's an unusual line of argument, it's not an uncommon one: "Our opponents actually agree with us and our policies, but only pretend to disagree." Instead of acknowledging there might perhaps be, perhaps, actually two opinions on a subject, which are coming into conflict, instead there is just one opinion, being held by two people: those with good intentions (the left), and those who, for some strange reason, know they're on the harmful side, but just want to do evil.