You might have heard about this moment from last night’s clown circle-jerk Republican debate, where, when a question was posed to Ron Paul about whether we should let a person who chooses not to have health insurance die, the audience of Teabaggers decided to answer for Paul by screaming things like “Yeah!” and “Let ’em die!”  They are, in short, monsters.

Gabe at Videogum points out that this is an echo of last week’s debate, where the audience got just a lil’ bit too excited about how many prisoners Rick Perry had killed as governor, even though one prisoner executed during that time was almost certainly innocent. Yeah! said the teabaggers, excited about killin’ people ‘n’ stuff. Yeah! said the teabaggers, about lettin’ people just cold die because they don’t have health insurance! Boooooooo, abortion, though!

Anyway. Of course, leave it to a comedy writer like Gabe [motto these days of comedy writers: Mostly Better Than Actual Journalists] to explain how ludicrous what Paul said, and what Teabaggers seem to think [I’m usin’ the word “think” loosely, y’all], about the uninsured, really is:

This brings us back to Ron Paul’s argument that not buying health care is exactly the type of risk vs. reward scenario expressing PURE FREEDOM that his libertarianism supports. Neat! The problem with this, of course, is that it borrows the George W. Bush catch-phrase banner slogan down-with-Osama-Bin-Laden branded “FREEDOM” and uses it in the place of “ANARCHY.” I don’t mean that in a facetious or sensationalized way, I mean that libertarian philosophy quite literally represents an anarchistic distrust of the state and a desire to see it abolished. Freedom sounds nice when you think it just means that you can buy Kettle Chips in every imaginable flavor at your local bodega and stay up as late as you want. It’s not as nice when it means there’s no such thing as the fire department and if you want to have surgery you have to take competing bids from your local Organ Contractors. The reality is that we live in a world of rules that sometimes get confusing but that are, for the most part, the best attempt we’ve achieved so far at making this place as close to livable for everyone as we can. That doesn’t mean it couldn’t use some work, and I bet there are a lot of poor, disenfranchised people who might argue that it’s not so livable (although I don’t think those people are libertarians), it just means throwing the baby out with the bath water and then also throwing out the bath tub itself and hoping that it dies because the bath tub opted not to buy “Get Thrown Out Insurance” doesn’t seem like a useful step in the march towards progress.

But, OK. If that’s how Ron Paul feels, I can totally respect that. It’s a hard line to take, but I respect hard lines (that is what she said).

Indeed. Read the whole damn thing.

Why am I writing about this on Truth Wins Out? Oh, just because one of these goons [Rick Perry] is going to get the GOP nomination, and if liberals and gays don’t get out there and vote and stop complaining about how they haven’t been gifted with glitter ponies by the Obama administration, one of these goons [Rick Perry] could actually be elected, and that would open up a whole new can of hell for this country, including LGBT people.

Also: What The Rude One said.