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How did health care go so terribly wrong for the Tea Party's true believers? They made the mistake of believing their own hype -- and Fox News.
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Watching Fox News personalities recently come unglued as the realization set in that (surprise!) Democrats might actually have the votes to pass health care reform -- and noting how extraordinarily loopy and dire both the attacks on the White House, and the proclamations for pending, apocalyptic doom were becoming -- I was getting nervous that one of Fox News' more unhinged hosts might finally just snap and pull a Rev. Jim Jones, beseeching viewers to make the ultimate sacrifice.

Honestly, unless you've been monitoring the ticking time bomb that is the far-right media in recent days, you probably don't appreciate how frighteningly possible that cultish scenario has become, as the GOP Noise Machine, led by Fox News, publicly suffers a nervous breakdown. It's a mental and emotional collapse that's been advertised in recent days as cablers, radio talkers, and right-wing bloggers have reached for increasingly hysterical, often blood-curdling rhetoric to describe the irreversible atrocity -- an incurable, metastasizing malignancy!! -- that's about to seize and destroy the United States in the form of a bill to expand health care coverage.

Listening to the calamitous warnings (i.e. "the end of America as we know it"), it's not that unreasonable to think that at some point one of the media mob leaders is going to suggest that life itself just is no longer worth living.

After all, late last week the nation stood on the precipice, just three "days away from the United States of America being over as we've all known it," according to Rush Limbaugh, who warned that reform would drive every private insurance company out of business. Glenn Beck also went full tilt, warning that the bill represented a "turning point," like the Civil War and Peal Harbor, while colleague Sean Hannity pinpointed the health care vote as the "very hour" that America turned "completely towards socialism."

The Washington Times likened reform to the "Black Plague," and the online reaction was somehow even more unhinged. It was "RIP USA," because with the vote, America would become "occupied by a hostile foreign power." Indeed, a "socialist putsch" had been sprung and "America's Day of Wreckoning [sic]" was at hand. Why? Because the Democrats' health care legislation "will make every American a POW, strip them of their Freedoms and Liberty and shove them in a meat cellar for cold storage."

Not scared yet? Well, just keep in mind that "Fascist healthcare will destroy America," "civil unrest is coming," and President Obama is to blame. More? "Fascist House Democrats are preparing to euthanize America." And don't forget that Sunday's health care vote in Congress represented a "dark day for America, the worst since 9/11."

And, progressive politicians, heed this warning: "Democrats who crammed this unwarranted bill down the throats of the American people who clearly and overwhelmingly opposed it deserve to be drawn and quartered."

That's right, tortured.

As Jon Stewart noted last week while playing the straight man in a Daily Show bit about the increasingly unhinged, right-wing response, "The rhetoric seems completely divorced from reality." And that observation came before the weekend theatrics inside the Beltway, when self-described patriots, egged on by the right-wing media, rallied to "Kill the bill!" and in the process reportedly tossed racial and anti-gay epithets at Democratic members of the Congress. (The far-right reaction? So what if they did?)

Trust me. This televised, incoherent meltdown has gone way beyond sore loserdom. Or even sore loserdom on steroids. This hasn't just been more of the usual Democrats-are-crooks type of whining that Fox News has turned into an art form since Obama's inauguration. And it's gone far beyond the usual scare tactics that the cable channel has trademarked. (Recent on-screen graphics: "Will the health bill ruin the economy?" and " Does Obamacare mean millions more jobs destroyed?")

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