Holy Crap Will All You People Just Calm The F– Down?

Ah, politics. Debate and disagreement. Which degenerates into shouting matches and name-calling. Which sometimes then degenerates into fistfights. Well, it’s only fun until someone gets their finger bit off.

Look, I have my opinion about health care reform. (I’m moderately in favor of Wyden-Bennett.) You have yours. That’s what politics is for. We disagree, we argue, we don’t convince each other, then we vote. Then the winner gets his way and the loser gets to go to court.

That’s how it’s been since 1789 and there is nothing different about today’s political disagreements than any of the other disagreements we’ve had for the past 230 years or so. Except for slavery, and let’s not go there over this, okay?

I found it in my heart to live with the passage of California’s Proposition 8. No one has actually voted on anything yet for health care reform. So grow the f— up, people.

Seriously, have we acquired a national case of borderline personality disorder all of a sudden? Is it time to start spiking the public water supply with Ritalin?

While it may seem to some that it’s the politically conservative opponents of the pending health care reform proposals who are acting like they were raised by wolves, note well that in this case it was a liberal supporter of health care reform who did the biting in this “incident.”

An “incident” which is more than “regrettable,” Moveon.org — you’re looking for words like “appalling” or “deplorable.” To the author of that astonishingly bland evaluation of a man biting another man’s finger off his hand, I suggest you publicy and loudly disown the frothing barbarian who did this, or be prepared to explain why you think this sort of thing ought to be considered part of legitimate political debate.

The point is, lunacy is not something that any party or ideology has a monopoly on. Maybe you’re liberal and you think that conservatives are whackjobs for obsessing about birth certificates and bringing assault weapons to political rallies. Maybe you’re conservative and don’t want union thugs throwing wrenches through your plate-glass windows or having your finger bitten off. But either way, your side is guilty of this sort of thing, too, and there’s no excuse for it on anyone’s part.

Somehow, there is a surplus of crazy out there in the body politic, unlike anything I’ve ever seen so far in my nearly forty of citizenship in this nation. It’s high time that all of America stopped and took many, many deep breaths before doing anything further. In through the nose for five seconds, hold for five seconds, out through the mouth for five seconds. Repeat until your adrenaline glands shift down from hyperdrive.