I've seen a lot of twisted logic in the health care debate, and it especially annoyed me to see opposition to government health care being attributed to racism. I well remember during the 1993 debate over Hillarycare (to which I was adamently opposed), there were a lot of the usual insults, imprecations, and the impugning of motives hurled back and forth, but I don't remember anyone being charged with sexism for opposing Hillarycare. It would have been laughable -- even by the standards of the left. Obviously, leftist "standards" have changed since 1993, but that does not explain in logic how opposition to government health care is racist.

Has there possibly been a deterioration in basic logic since 1993? I realize that certain people have a way of "connecting dots" which aren't there, to their favorite causes which always are, but that's traditionally been the province of conspiracy theory thinking. (Black babies had AIDS. Doctors were Jewish. Jewish doctors gave them AIDS. Etc.)

What made me laugh out loud was an attempt by the former president of Columbia attempt to link health care reform to the war on drugs.

The former president of Colombia laid out Mexico's crisis to me in an interview this spring in Brazil: "Drug usage is unstoppable [in the United States] and the cartels have coyotes [people smugglers] planting on the streets hundreds of thousands of illegals selling drugs. The U. S. consumption has stayed level, despite huge costs and the jailing of millions of people."

He said the Americans must recant, and abandon, their drug prohibition policies and adopt European or Canadian-style health care to deal with the problem. Because they have not, Mexico runs the risk of being devastated as was Colombia.

Of course, anything might be in a 1000 page law that no one has read, so I don't want to be hasty.

Tell you what. If the congressional health care bill legalizes all drugs, I'll at least partially reconsider my opposition to it. Maybe I'll call my congressman and ask whether he could reintroduce the drug relegalization provisions as a separate bill.

Except, well, I strongly suspect that such provisions simply do not exist.

Alas! Sometimes the whole world seems like a vast conspiracy of missing dots.

They're everywhere, and it's so hard to fight them. They can't be seen, and they can't be caught! And the worst thing about them is that if you say they're not there, you're in denial!