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.