Nick Coleman: Sometimes, America, you feel like a nut

I almost fell off my chair and needed a trip to the emergency room last week while watching a Fox news analyst do a postmortem on President Obama's New Hampshire town hall meeting on health care reform.

The reason the meeting fell flat, the Fox guy said, was because "too many reasonable folks" were in the hall, "undermining" the president's message. What Obama needed, the guy went on, was "more crazies."

I never thought I'd see the day when America didn't have enough crazies to go around. We've got oodles of them. So many that members of Congress, home on recess to press the flesh, are afraid to appear at public forums for fear they will be asked their position on Bigfoot sightings and alien abductions. One of Minnesota's most levelheaded congressmen, Democrat Collin Peterson, had to apologize for saying that 25 percent of his constituents believe in conspiracy theories. He didn't back down completely, though, explaining he was tired of public meetings being "hijacked" by people "outside the mainstream."

Still, it should be noted that Peterson was very wrong. It's not true that 25 percent of Americans believe in nutty theories these days.

Advance directives for medical care, especially measures to halt heroic efforts to prolong the life of the terminally ill, are now at the center of a "debate" being dominated by shouters and spouters who think Obama is a cross between Dr. Mengele and the Manchurian Candidate, sent by Satan to snuff your old ones, send you to an internment camp and brainwash your children at Socialist School.

How in the world has a country that has embodied the hopes of mankind for two centuries come to the point where the reform of an expensive and often inaccessible health care system can be halted in its tracks by the ravings of people like Glenn Beck, who said Thursday that rights come from God so Americans have no "right" to health care "unless Jesus comes down, opens a health clinic and heals us himself."

Jesus, of course, performed many miracles, including healing the sick. So what he has left to prove to Glenn Beck is a bit of a mystery. There are also many who have healed in Jesus' name: Thousands of poor residents of Los Angeles waited in lines this past week to receive free medical care from a charity named Remote Area Medical Volunteer Corps, overwhelming doctors who usually travel to Third World countries to minister to those who have no access to affordable, quality health care.

Maybe the Third World is coming to a country near you: This was the first time the charity came to a major American city. The outpouring of the needy provides a stark counter to this summer's crazy talk about socialism, death panels and the Brother From Another Continent who faked his birth announcement when he was 2 weeks old so that he could be president one day and make us slaves to the idea that all people -- even the poor, the unemployed, the homeless -- deserve health care.

Perhaps Glenn Beck's Jesus is not the same Jesus who is at work in Los Angeles.

But Beck will be at the helm of Fox's coverage Sept. 12 of the next round of manufactured outrage over health care reform, when "tea-bag" protesters take their anti-Obama act to Washington. Glenn Beck? That's as crazy as the idea that a well-heeled lobbyist for the health care industry might be behind the antireform "citizen" protests. Oh, wait:

Dick's Armey! Former GOP House majority leader Dick Armey, a major health industry lobbyist, is the chair of FreedomWorks, the organization behind the Sept. 12 march on Washington, reported by Glenn Beck.

America has the best health care and the worst health care system.

However you feel about it, it's of no use when it comes to fixing our ailing political system. That's a problem because there is far more at stake than health care reform. The country's ability to diagnose problems, to reason together, to mend itself, is falling apart.

Someone dial 911.

Nick Coleman is a senior fellow at the Eugene J. McCarthy Center for Public Policy & Civic Engagement at the College of St. Benedict/St. John's University. He can be reached at nickcoleman@gmail.com.