Last night I got an important insight into the thinking behind those opposed to health care reform. Okay, not thinking, because I have friends — a small business owner for instance — with legitimate concerns about what devil might lurk in the details. I’m talking about the screamers who are trying to shut down town hall discussions about the various bills in congress. 

Republican Dick Armey, the former House majority leader, is now the head of Freedomworks (nice name!), one of the conservative groups that is encouraging the protests that have been aimed at stopping debate. He was on the PBS News Hour doing the point-counterpoint thing with Richard Kirsch, the director of Health Care for America Now, a liberal group that is for exactly what the name implies. There weren’t too many surprises in the exchange: Armey was talking Tort reform, laying the blame for the health care mess on lawyers, with Kirsch insisting that wasn’t the issue and arguing for good, guaranteed coverage for all citizens. 

Kirsch pointed out that there is nothing in any of the legislation that says people would be forced into government health care, and that the Congressional Budget Office did an analysis of the House bill and estimated the number of people who would go into the public plan is nine million, even as Armey insisted 100 million people would lose their coverage — a number he seemed to have pulled out of the air. When moderator Judy Woodruff asked him, in polite PBS fashion, about the discrepancy, Armey said, “We have a difference in information here but I have to tell you, if you look at the unrest brewing in the country today it’s because the American citizenry at large does not believe what the government, or agents of the government, are telling them.”

That’s right: facts don’t matter. Don’t bother me with your analysis because we don’t trust your stinking bureaucrats. There is nothing new in this thinking, of course: It’s just the kind of knee-jerk reaction that has fueled the anti-government wing of the Republican party for years. But the fact that it was coming from a man who was once the face of government, or one branch of it, is particularly galling. And the fact that his law firm received over a million dollars from a pharmaceutical company this year is completely beside the point.

I can only hope that the screams being heard in the town hall meetings are the dying gasps of a wounded animal, the white conservative minority that sees Obama’s presidency as a comet headed for its planet. To them words like “socialized medicine” are still scary enough to keep them up at night. (A friend of mine told me about being in an ER with his daughter for nine hours — only to have a man who’d been there longer say, “It could be worse: You could live in Canada where they have socialized medicine.”) The rest of us (who I think actually represent the future)  look up from the campfire at the old scary costume — the pillow case over the head, the bloody ax — and say, “Really? A pillow case?” And then go back to tending the flame.