Dear Senators Warner and Webb: Do I look like astroturf to you?

For the record, I'm a right-leaning libertarian. I'm a registered independent. I've voted for presidential candidates from all parties, including the midget, Ross Perot, back in the 90s. I do not listen to talk radio. I do not watch the news on TV that much and am not a big Fox News fan (although I have no idea why so many people get in such a lather about them). I don't have a right-wing secret decoder ring and I'm not on the Republican Party fax list. I do not receive payments from special interests. I am not particularly scared of anything, although there are things that I feel deserve attention.

To the best of my knowledge, I am not misinformed about the health care issue.

I feel that our current healthcare system has a lot of problems and something should be done about it. We do not have a free and open market for healthcare -- insurance agencies and the government set the prices and consumers don't actually pay directly for anything they get. That means prices will continue to spiral out of control and people will continue to not have insurance.

I do not have health insurance myself. So whatever you think, I am not opposed to the idea of fixing healthcare and I am not a partisan hack.

I've had to say all of this stuff because, to hear some people tell it, anybody who isn't for the current fix must have something wrong with them. They're shills, they're paid-off, they're rubes who have been hoodwinked by clever PR men.

Isn't there a chance that the outlines of the current proposed solution just isn't a good idea? Anybody ever think of that?

Simply because something needs to be fixed does not mean that any fix is better than the status quo. indeed, looking at the problems Congress has had with the payroll deduction for health insurance, good money says whatever they pass will just stick around and keep getting bigger and bigger. So it's not like they can try something and see if it works and then adapt. That's simply not in the cards.

In addition, these wonderful programs that people brag about so much -- Social Security and Medicare, are two of the largest threats to the national budget.

Recently our president flew into a nearby city to help the Virginia gubernatorial candidate
he supports. While there, he said something I consider extraordinary.

"I expect to be held responsible," Obama said. "But I don't want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking. I want them to get out of the way so we can clean up the mess. I don't mind cleaning up after them, but don't do a lot of talking."

I couldn't help but wonder -- am I one of the people who caused this mess? After all, I wasn't crazy about Hillary's healthcare solution either. There's just something about what he said that really didn't go over so well with me. Why do people have to be so hateful to each other?

Recently a Georgia congressman shouted down a doctor at one of his town hall meetings. He thought the guy was a plant, a fake. Seems like a lot of congressmen think that the honest protests and questions they're getting must be fake -- ginned up by the opposing party. A congressman from Ohio said in a CNN article yesterday that such displays of protest didn't bother him, since he had to put with a lot of it during the civil rights years! Read between the lines folks: health care opponents are modern versions of racists: stupid, easily led by fear, uniformed, trying to stop their good work.

Just today the Speaker of the House of Representatives -- the number three person in government -- said that opponents were "un-american", because, in her mind, people were trying to shout down pertinent facts about healthcare.

But see, that's the problem -- it's possible to want to hear all of the facts and still oppose the current solution. But it sure looks like to me whenever people ask honest questions and confront the supporters of the current plan, the people are the ones seen as shutting down debate by their leaders. Some polls show 85% of people are happy with the health care they have -- even if they don't have insurance. with numbers like this, if Congress thinks it can change 1/6th of the economy and not get some interested people showing up in town halls, it's crazy.

Healthy debate consists of intelligent people with divergent viewpoints trying to find a solution that works for everybody.

The alternative -- one side demonizing the other, the extreme wing of one party "going to war" over social causes and attempting to shut down the debate -- doesn't work. It doesn't work for the right-wing folks and abortion, and it's not going to work for the left-wingers over health care either. As Reagan put it (when asked about abortion) until the country has a moral change of heart you can't and shouldn't legislate these things.

Yet from what I hear, some folks are advocating "fighting back twice as hard" -- sending out the union troops, fighting inch by inch. Hey -- I love a rhetorical fight as much as anybody, but is this the way to form a solution that the entire country can live with? It sounds like something they'd do in one of those tin-pot dictatorships. What's next? Rallies around the capitol every weekend? Maybe we can escalate it to the national guard getting called out? Is that where we want to go?

I sent a letter to one of my senators a while back - Jim Webb. In it I asked him to try to control spending. Don't make a scene, don't break with your party, just please do what you can to control this crazy spending we have.

In return I got a form letter that was a hacked together list of how great he was for supporting all these great programs.

So I'm not going to send a letter to Webb or Warner this time. I figure they don't want to hear from me -- they're my senators in job title only. To them disagreement looks like astroturf: fake grassroots efforts.

I couldn't help but think about the constitutional debates, what a nasty argument that was. But in the end we achieved a synthesis of ideas, which gave us our Bill of Rights. From both extremes reasonable people discussed and compromised, and something greater than the individual pieces emerged.

I sure hope something like that happens this time.