After last night's discovery that there are people in this country who actually believe Barack Obama inserted a clause in to the Affordable Care Act providing for the creation of his own private army - as I typed those words my brain was screaming "I can't believe I'm writing this!" - I ran across this post by Matt Yglesias that attempts to address the question in the title of this post. Both his own, and the original by Julian Sanchez of Cato to which he is responding, address bits and pieces of the puzzle.
It is one thing for conservatives to insist they disagree with the President and Congressional Democrats on all sorts of matters, based on their vision of what America should be. Nothing wrong with that; that's part of politics, and it does get heated because all sides root their arguments in a basic love of country, and the desire to do what's best for all of us. For the right, though, there is a fundamental illegitimacy in non-right-wing thought and political action that becomes apparent in the birthers, the accusations of socialism/fascism of the President and Democrats in Congress, the protests over the Nuclear Posture Review, and so on. It is quite literally impossible to have an honest discussion with people who insist that, at some fundamental level, their opponents have no legitimacy as partners in the American project. Rather than talk about the merits, say, of cap-and-trade versus source-taxing; the Affordable Care Act versus the alternative's offered that skirted around subsidizing current insurance industry plane via a general public option, we instead have accusations that all of it is nothing more than pieces of Obama's nefarious plans to destroy our country.
When I discovered last night that some folks actually insist that ACA provides for the creation of Obama's Private Army, I did what anyone with a modem would do. I went and checked the actual language of the ACA and discovered an innocuous provision concerning mobilizing health care workers during an emergency. What convinces me these folks do not consider liberals, Democrats, or the President worthy of any benefit of the doubt is that doing what I did - checking the actual bill versus the insane discussion of the bill by some folks on the right - never even occurred to them. If it did, there is certainly no evidence of it. It is a bit like someone insisting the sky is yellow and refusing to look out the window because even if the sky appears blue, they will manage to point out how illusory that color really is.
Why this is so . . . I'm quite sure race has much to do with it. Race, intellectual laziness, not having developed the habit of checking out claims made by those presented as "authoritative". Yet, there is a gap there. Like those who insist the constitutional provision for the census is actually unconstitutional, there comes a point where you have to throw up your hands and say, "You're freaking nuts!"
