Twelve (Million) Angry Republicans

In his masterful social history of the 1960s, Nixonland, Rick Perlstein describes the mindset of establishment liberals who ever certain, even in the face of overwhelming polling data, that purehearted George McGovern was going to defeat the criminal, war-mongering butcher Richard Nixon in the '72 election: "It would end like a Henry Fonda movie--something like Twelve Angry Men, where only the jury's prejudices had blinded them from seeing that they were about to condemn an innocent man, and where the liberal's gentle, persistent force of reason had compelled the brutish conservative, by the last reel, to realize the error of his ways."

And so we've entered a national reenactment of Twelve Angry Men, with the defendant being Health Care Reform. For the entire summer, the nation's Teabaggers, Birthers, Deathers, LaRouchies, Crypto-Racists, Zombie-Birchers, Carlists, Silvershirts, Kluxers, Falangists, Minutemen, Pseudo-Libertarians, Know Nothings, Black Helicopters jockeys, Militiamen, Skinheads, and Buchananites have staged a giant, idiotic, reactionary freak-out at town hall meetings around the country. It's like somebody cloned Lee J. Cobb's Juror Number Three and set him loose in front of every cable news camera they could find. The stream of hysteria, ignorance and barely-concealed racism had their desired effect, muddying the waters of the health care debate sufficient that most of your dumbass, disengaged public didn't know whether to shit or wind their watch...or whether the inability to figure out whether to shit or wind their watch would be covered by the public option.

And now, stepping into the breach to turn back the tide of fear-mongering and self-serving misinformation, is Juror Number Eight, Barack Obama, Henry Fonda for the 21st century. With his speech, Obama cut through the bullshit to point out the undeniable truth at the the heart of the problem: the current system is broken. It costs too much, it leaves tens of millions uninsured, and it leaves even the people with insurance precariously balanced on the knife edge of revocation of coverage or lifetime caps. It's a fundamental responsibility of government to provide a basic level of security for its citizens, and its time we accept that.

We know how Twelve Angry Men ended. And we know how the 1972 presidential election ended. Now we're going to get a front-row seat for another edition of this timeless morality play. Will the voice of reason and compassion quiet the voices of avarice and bigotry? Or will the brainless, hate-filled howls of insurance company shills and Medicare-exploiting retired racists win the day? Remembering poor, pure George McGovern, I'm not putting my money on Fonda.