Rules For Gray Flannel Radicals And Seersucker Subversives

David Harsanyi presents New Rules For New Radicals:

If you’re a virtuous and patriotic American, you may find this column either offensive or misleading. If so, please forward it to White House authorities at the Department of Fishy Activity. (E-mail the good people at [email protected].)

As many of you have heard, the White House now requests that the public tattle on those of us spreading “fishy disinformation” regarding Washington’s proposed takeover . . . oops, I mean “reform” . . . of your health care. This step, naturally, is for our own good.

Now, don’t get overly paranoid, you freaky right-wing zealots. Judging from the Obama administration’s track record, the program will do absolutely nothing other than add billions to the deficit.

The vital thing to bear in mind, though, is that the nation needs a concerted plan to corral this wacko “mob” of “thugs” who recklessly use the First Amendment to decelerate all this forward progress.

We are talking about a moral imperative here. As one senator asserted this week, passing government-run health care is the “sacred duty” of Congress. (Boy, it’s a good thing we banished all that moral preening from Washington.)

When your mission is the same as that of the Lord himself, well, you can imagine the kind of scandalous characters populating the opposition camp. It is the type of individual that Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi astutely points out has the tendency to carry “swastikas and symbols like that” to local town hall meetings on health care.

You might be curious to find out what symbols Pelosi believes are “like” swastikas. Maybe she’s referring to the Gadsden flag.

In any event, it’s true that people who believe in health-care choices and free markets are zombies. For one thing, they are entirely too well dressed to contemplate serious issues independently — and thank you, California Sen. Barbara Boxer, for pointing this out. A man without Birkenstocks, after all, is a man without a soul.

This is what happens when the wrong community is organized, the New York Post notes:

Get this: The party of “community organizers” is now whining that President Obama’s critics are organizing communities — against his health-care scheme.

The nerve of ’em, huh?

Faced with mushrooming opposition to ObamaCare, Democrats have launched a multi-media campaign that attacks foes as “extremists” who’ve “called out the mob” to “destroy President Obama” and “intimidate and silence regular people.” They cite “the playbook of high-level Republican political operatives.”

Actually, that sounds more like the tactics of the Chicago street, where Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel cut their political teeth. Indeed, you can almost hear Richard Nixon grousing about angry anti-war protestors and pleading for “the great silent majority of Americans” to rise up.

Except that now they actually have, as Glenn Reynolds notes, causing the left to get a collective case of the vapors, including, not surprisingly, Paul Krugman, whom Roger Kimball spots aiming for the fainting couch.