Today’s reality is that Nevada is a highly urbanized state — almost three-fourths of its residents live in and around Las Vegas — where the collapse of housing prices, the epidemic of foreclosures and the lack of access to health care are as acute as anywhere in the nation. No wonder some people might find a sepia-toned fantasy more attractive.
This same false-memory syndrome infects the Tea Party movement, which harks back to some imagined time when the United States was a sylvan utopia where everyone walked around peacefully carrying guns and quoting Thomas Jefferson. But this was a big, messy, complicated country even when Jefferson was president, with sharp conflicts over slavery, economic policy and the rights of the individual vs. the welfare of all. To mention just a few.
Oh, and doctors really preferred to be paid in money. Not livestock.
Eugene Robinson
(From Robinson’s latest column in The Washington Post, discussing Harry Reid’s Republican challenger Sue Lowden and her crazed notions of how to address this nation’s health-care problems.)
