Instead, it’s a top-down, highly coordinated effort to create the illusion of a popular uprising. This phenomenon is known as astroturfing.

Let’s examine who’s really behind the scenes:

Rick Scott: Criminal. 1st Class 'chebag.

Before Rick started this group, he made a fortune as the Chairman and CEO of Columbia/HCA, a for-profit hospital business. He’s not a doctor. He’s a lawyer.

During his tenure, Columbia/HCA was indicted for Medicare fraud, and eventually paid nearly 2 billion dollars in civil suits and over 600 million to settle with the federal government.

As Paul Krugman says, you can’t make this stuff up. Why does a guy with a health care rap sheet even have a say in health care anymore? Well, he doesn’t directly. He’s the man behind the curtain, quietly pouring money into maintaining a status quo that made him extraordinarily wealthy.

Dick Armey: Republican. Dick.

Armey was the House Majority Leader during the “Republican Revolution.” He’s the total package: as a professor, he sexually harassed multiple students, and eventually divorced his wife to marry one.

FreedomWorks is hard at work to make sure that health care remains a money-making industry. But they’re not just a conservative non-profit; they actually sell insurance, so they’re directly invested.

Now, it’s pretty clear from watching the heightened emotions at the town halls that there is actual, genuine anger among the people in those rooms. The question is, what is it that’s making those people so angry?

Is it actual concern over actual issues? Or is it the fires of fear, uncertainty and doubt that are being carefully and calculatingly stoked by a right-wing machine that knows how to play the undereducated for suckers?

As Rick Perlstein’s excellent article points out: “the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy.” The Right is practiced and adept at playing off of the horrors of what a liberal administration might bring: boogeymen like “Big Government,” “Socialism,” “Nanny State” and a loss of “Freedom.”

None of this is real. None of these terms even mean the things the Right would have you think they mean.

“Freedom” to the Right means “freedom to make money.” It’s not about personal freedom (the gay marriage controversy should make that abundantly clear.) It’s about unfettered free markets.

The people who want you to believe that universal health care is “unAmerican” are in the health care business to make money. It really is that simple.

The United States remains the only industrialized nation without universal health care. Glenn Beck would have you believe that we’re the only ones that are doing it right, because we have the best health care in the world, but this is false by most metrics. We rank considerably lower than many universal health care nations in life expectancy and infant mortality.

Yelling “we’re #1″ without knowing what that means isn’t patriotism. It’s white noise.

Patriotism means looking at your country objectively and knowing that it’s capable of doing better. It means realizing that taking care of its citizens is self-evidently the right thing to do, and that this is more fundamentally “American” than the free market.

The Right likes to throw the Bible around in defense of whatever their cause du jour might be. The Bible is pretty ambiguous about a lot of things, but it takes some serious mental gymnastics to not understand what the Bible has to say about taking care of people:

‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

He will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.

The phrase “not even wrong” has since come to refer to ideas that are so malformed that they cannot even be assessed.

Here’s an example: you and I can disagree about the composition of the moon. I could argue that the moon is made of green cheese. You could reply that the moon is made of rock. It’s possible that one (or both) of us is wrong, and experiments and observations could resolve this. We can have a legitimate disagreement.

In contrast, imagine that I argued that the moon was made of green cheese and you countered by saying that the moon was made of lamps(|}hamster16z#. One of us (me) could be wrong. But it’s meaningless to say that your statement is “wrong” because your statement is meaningless. We’ve transcended disagreement; we’re not even speaking the same language.

Now, I’ve got lots of opinions about lots of stuff. I’m perfectly happy to argue with people about these opinions. But there are certain things I can’t begin to oppose because they’re not even wrong.

Here are some of those things:

1. The Earth is 6,000 years old.

We can disagree about the existence of a creator God. We can disagree about which God it might be. But we can’t disagree about the accuracy of radiometric dating without disagreeing about fundamental properties of matter. At this point, we would stop speaking the same language.

2. Sarah Palin is qualified to be president.

Not even wrong.

We can disagree about Sarah Palin’s values. We can even disagree about whether or not an educated person who shares those values is qualified to be president. But we can’t disagree about whether or not Sarah Palin is qualified to be president unless the word “qualified” (or, I suppose, “president”) means something different than what we already agree it means.

3. We know the Bible is true because it is the word of God.

This is an example of a logical fallacy known as petitio principii – “begging the question.” To beg the question is to assume as true the thing that you’re trying to prove.

Disputing this claim is not an argument against the existence of God, or even the truthfulness of the Bible. It is entirely possible for the Bible to be true and for it to be the word of God. But it is not even wrong to claim that we know that the Bible is true because it says so. A statement constructed in this way is not an argument. It is meaningless.

4. George W. Bush never lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

On May 23, 2009, George W. Bush gave an interview for Polish television in which he stated the following:

We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories. You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons. They’re illegal. They’re against the United Nations resolutions, and we’ve so far discovered two. And we’ll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they’re wrong, we found them.
(source)

At the time this statement was made, the Defense Intelligence Agency had already issued a report stating that the found laboratories were “almost certainly intended” for manufacturing hydrogen for weather balloons (source). To date, Bush’s claim has never been retracted or qualified. In fact, the quote’s link above leads directly to Bush’s official web archive.

We can disagree about whether or not the Iraq war was justified. We can even disagree about the broader aims of the war on terror. But we simply can’t disagree about whether the above quote is a lie unless the word “lied” means something different than what we already agree it means.

The point of Wolfgang Pauli’s statement was that disagreements are fine, but that they can’t even exist unless both sides of an argument are at least in the same ballpark.

The problem with a lot of current political discourse is that it doesn’t even rise to the level of discourse. What passes for a “position” is often just incoherent drooling that happens to use some of the same words found in actual ideas. These arguments, and their advocates, are not even wrong.