Following the debate over the health care reform has been maddening and frustrating, to say the least. Watching scenes of Congressmen and Senators being shouted down before having a chance to say anything, as the shouters were instructed to do by email from various anti-tax, anti-change, anti-whatever organizations, we understood quickly that there would be no debate, no exchange of ideas to solve the problem of our country's having some 47 million citizens without health care.

Falsehoods abound. Betsy McCaughey of the Hudson Institute helped sink the 1993 Clinton administration health care program by claiming the bill made it a crime to buy supplemental insurance or to pay your doctor out-of-pocket. The bill said the opposite! But low-information voters are taken in by her "death panel" claim endlessly repeated by radio talk pundits and even a Vice-Presidential candidate. A talk show host's website places what he calls "Obamacare" with the swastika, tying it to National Socialism of the Hitler era. This idea is picked up and repeated. What must the spirits of those murdered in the holocaust think of this trivialization of its horrors?

A poster in New Hampshire reads, "Obama Lies, Grandma Dies." Another calls for death to Michelle Obama and her two daughters. A man brings a gun to a town meeting to "water the tree of liberty."

Georgia Representative Paul Broun throws the pages of the bill on the floor saying he cannot understand it. Great theater. But all bills are written in the same language! Does that mean he has never understood any bill passed by Congress? S.C. Senator Jim DeMint states this health care debate can bring down Obama.

What has all this got to do health care?

And it is not an Obama plan. The difference between now and 1993 is that legislative drafting of the President's ideas is left to Congressional committees.

Very definitely, the fear card is being played well. And this is what can be tied to National Socialism. Josef Goebbels, Propaganda Minister for the Nazi regime, is credited with saying that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it.

A final thought. To be consistent, one who believes that government