Paul Krugman is making sense:

President Obama is now facing the same kind of opposition that President Bill Clinton had to deal with: an enraged right that denies the legitimacy of his presidency, that eagerly seizes on every wild rumor manufactured by the right-wing media complex.

This opposition cannot be appeased. Some pundits claim that Mr. Obama has polarized the country by following too liberal an agenda. But the truth is that the attacks on the president have no relationship to anything he is actually doing or proposing. [...]

Senator Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa, is one of these supposed moderates. I’m not sure where his centrist reputation comes from — he did, after all, compare critics of the Bush tax cuts to Hitler. But in any case, his role in the health care debate has been flat-out despicable.

Last week, Mr. Grassley claimed that his colleague Ted Kennedy’s brain tumor wouldn’t have been treated properly in other countries because they prefer to “spend money on people who can contribute more to the economy.” This week, he told an audience that “you have every right to fear,” that we “should not have a government-run plan to decide when to pull the plug on grandma.”

Again, that’s what a supposedly centrist Republican, a member of the Gang of Six trying to devise a bipartisan health plan, sounds like.

And this is who they are speaking for. The sad fact of American politics is that at least 35-40% of the electorate belongs in a mental institution, and there’s probably another 10-20% who are high-functioning retards. The Congressional numbers are no better. There’s no point in trying to make a deal with these people.

Also, I think the Obama death panels should be run like “American Idol”. Three sassy latte-sipping America-haters give their opinions on which grannies and babies die this week, and then the audience can place their votes by calling in to ACORN. The losers are allowed to survive for another week if they agree to have a Christian doctor forced at gunpoint to give them a sex change operation.