So my country seems to have gone insane while I was on vacation. I write a lot of posts in which I make fun of right-wing crazies, and I suppose I'll continue to. But it's really not funny right now.

There's a famous quote from Thomas Jefferson, about the tree of liberty needing to be refreshed every now and again with the blood of tyrants. When you see protesters carrying signs that say things like it's time to water the tree of liberty, as I saw on the news last week – well, they mean of course that Obama is the tyrant, and the rest of what they mean you can figure out for yourself.

There was an election. One guy one, another guy lost. It wasn't disputed. It wasn't decided by an ideologically divided Supreme Court, which gave the win to the guy who won fewer votes. This election wasn't even particularly close. It means that the side that won is entitled to try to pass its agenda. But the protesters don't respect the result of the election.

And of course, every piece of evidence that runs counter to their beliefs is merely a part of the dark socialist conspiracy that surrounds them. If you try to argue to them that the administration is in fact not keeping a Mao-style list of Americans who oppose their goals, or that Obama's America will not in fact be rationing toilet paper in a few years' time, your statements are evidence only of the fact that you've been brainwashed, too.

The way out of this? There may not be one. The only possible way I see is for prominent to Republicans to stand up to them and say, enough; this is not how dissent in meant to operate. But again we have a Catch-22 here, because the only Republicans who might conceivably do this are ones that this contingent already suspects of being sell-outs (John McCain, Lindsey Graham).

Their mania will produce some degree of backlash, and health care will still pass, I think, in some form or another. But this situation will continue – indeed, if I'm right and health care passes, it will worsen. And this is not one of those dialectical "the worse, the better" situations. This is ugly.

Did you miss me?