We had a dog once named Milo...

...that we all loved but had to give away because he had, as they say nowadays, "anger management issues." He was great with us but uncomfortable around strangers, especially little kids. He also seemed to get more and more aggressive when someone would come to our door, and instead of just whacking him upside the head like dog-owners from an earlier generation might have done, we did the only thing normal, modern-day suburbanites do: we consulted with a professional dog-trainer. And after extensive one-on-one quality time with the mutt, our trainer met with my wife and me as if he was the Best Child Psychologist on the North Shore. "Please," we pleaded with the trained expert, "tell us what's wrong with our precious little Milo." I can't relate exactly what he said, because it would be a serious violation of the doctor/patient relationship, but I can tell you that the gist of it was that Milo didn't even know why he was getting so agitated and there wasn't a lot of hope for turning it around. So we had to eventually bite the bullet and give him away to a young woman in her twenties who lived in Lincoln Park with some roommates. As the young children in Lincoln Park are kept on even shorter leashes than the dogs, Milo had little further contact with kids and everyone involved lived happily ever after.

Charles M. Blow has a good column in today's New York Times in which he begins by saying,

One of the most frustrating aspects of the health care debate is that the people who most want reform are the most apathetic about it.

I'd like to add my own corollary to that: One of the most frustrating aspects of the health care debate is that the people who are arguing most strenuously against it, such as these "tea-bagger" types who are disrupting all of these town hall meetings lately, are the ones who stand to benefit from it the most.

Health care reform is intended to stem the rise in health care costs and eventually "bend the long-term curve," bring about universal coverage, and end the abuses of the private health insurance industry. Now unless all of these tea-baggers are on the payroll of the private insurers (and I have no doubt that at least some of them are), then they are exactly the kind of people that President Obama and the Democrats are trying to help.

Which brings me back to Milo. Just like our old family dog, I wonder if any of these people even know why they are so agitated about health care reform. I know it sounds terribly condescending, but I truly wonder if they know what it is that they are protesting. The opponents of reform have spread so much fear and misinformation that the tea baggers don't seem to realize that they are the ones who stand to benefit most from the legislation. It's as if the neighborhood bully (the insurance companies) were beating up on a kid (the public) and an older kid (Obama) stepped in to protect the kid from getting beat up. But instead of blaming the bully for beating him up, the kid gets convinced by the bully that the older kid is the one that's doing the beating. In real life, the public intuitively knows that they are losing under the current system. But the insurance companies have done a better job of convincing them that the government is the villain.

Rather than go on vacation for the month of August, the president should visit every Blue Dog's district to speak on health care. If reform doesn't pass, it will be the fault of Obama and the Democrats for not properly educating the public.