Having spent more time lately in the U.S., one thing has become abundantly clear - Caffeine-Free Diet Pepsi is the nastiest beverage ever created. If ever there was a product that proved that American ingenuity is dead, it's Caffeine-Free Diet Pepsi.

It's probably a fool's errand to make attempts at parsing the paranoid, hysterical rhetoric that's been flying around in the healthcare debate, but that's never stopped me before.  So, I'm watching the fun on C-SPAN this afternoon.  Listening to some of the "against" calls, I noticed something that I probably should have noticed before, which is this: The bizarre dichotomy of professing your undying love for the Constitution, while breathlessly spewing venom at the fundamental evil of the government.

One of the recent propaganda tactics of the right wing has been to appropriate the leftist language of discrimination and civil rights to argue that liberal elites are persecuting white Christian conservatives. The most extreme form of this tactic is the Nazi attack, according to which liberals are portrayed as Nazis or fascists in order to represent them as brutal oppressors of helpless conservative victims. Commentators on the right have revised history to represent fascism as a leftist movement. They have invented or exaggerated associations between Democrats and Nazis.