Run for the hills: The Unsilent Majority stirs

"I really reject the notion that the American people oppose [health-care reform] because somebody" -- I liked that, a lone "somebody" -- "on the Republican side has deliberately spread misinformation about the plan," said the Senate's minority whip, Jon Kyl, on Tuesday.

That was amusing enough. But he went on to add, "In this democracy, there is no way voters can be fooled to this extent."

When I first read that addendum, I naturally thought he was referencing electoral gullibility, which is, after all, a GOP specialty, since the GOP is to electoral enlightenment what subtropical botany is to post-expressionist art.

Yet is soon occurred to me that Sen. Kyl, like a criminal returning to the scene of the crime, was, out of some deeply insecure and twisted need, actually referring to his original statement: in effect, "There's no way anyone is going to believe that I believe what I just said."

And, so far, the numbers bear him out. In this democracy, this pluralistic hodgepodge of hype, this diaphanous mirage of bottom-up control, one with experienced expertise in mass communications and truckloads of cash can convince huge swaths of voters of damn near anything. To wit, from the latest NBC News poll ...

"Majorities ... believe the plans would give health insurance coverage to illegal immigrants ... would lead to a government takeover of the health system ... would use taxpayer dollars to pay for women to have abortions ... [and] forty-five percent think the reform proposals would allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing medical care for the elderly."

Students of propaganda once studied totalitarian regimes to learn the finer points of mass bamboozlement, but those brutes, as we now know, had nothin' on modern liberal democracy, in which there seems to exist an inverse relationship between amounts of information and levels of understanding. The more we're bombarded by cable-television news, talk programming and cyber-elucidation, the dumber we get.

It's really quite astounding -- how gossamer lies, hovering like some sort of broadcasting incubus, can so easily smother the simple truth.

Even though, for instance, there's not so much as one word -- not even an insidiously placed ambiguity -- in any Congressional health-care proposal about illegal immigrants being cared for by taxpayer dollars, more than half of this "sleeping giant," as that paranoid bimbo at Sen. Arlen Specter's first town hall meeting called us, believe border-crossing sneaks will be treated to gold-plated health care, no questions asked.

More than half, mind you. And let us not even long ponder, for fear of democratic night terrors, that nearly half believe their government is gunning for grandma. I know I shouldn't, but when I encounter statistical stupidity like that, I laugh.

I know, I know, I should instantly steel myself to battling such dastardly lies with Edward Bulwer-Lytton's mighty pen -- as though thousands of others hadn't already done that, only to stumble on polls like this one -- but instead I find myself wondering, after the chuckling, how much third-class passage on a slow steamboat to Europe might cost. That, at least, is what the warrior Sun Tzu would advise, when confronted by an opposing army of such overwhelming knuckle-dragging.

Last night, on "Countdown," I heard the unflappable E.J. Dionne mention that he once heard Rep. Barney Frank confess to an audience that his ilk -- Beltway politicians -- are indeed no great shakes, but you voters, he continued, are no day at the beach, either. And if the above isn't confirmation of that enough, here's some more: "A combined 60 percent of respondents say the [health-care] system needs either a 'complete overhaul' or 'major reform,' " while those who disfavor, say, a public option, which at least minimally qualifies as "major," outnumber those who favor it. Huh?

Furthermore, it turns out that 64 percent of respondents were willing to venture an opinion on something they possessed no clue about, whatsoever. Only 36 percent, you see, initially told the pollsters that President Obama's reform ideas were good ones, yet when the others were "read a paragraph describing Obama's plans," the percentage jumped to 53. Oh, those plans.

Now, if the president only had time to call the other 192 million Americans to re-explain what he's been explaining for, what ... about three years? But, of course, after all that dialing, the 64 percent would then see or hear some catchy little 30-second piece of "deliberate misinformation" -- the honorable Sen. Jon Kyl's denials of such partisan humbug notwithstanding -- and back to Square One we'd go.

For politics junkies and propaganda beholders, it's a kind of masochistically amusing game, all this. It's just a shame we can't be amused, for a change, by things that didn't mean so much.