Teh stupid… it burns.

This is a something of a Churchillian moment. Never before have so many known so little about so much. The meme that my Slate colleague Timothy Noah has been tracking about Medicare not being a government program has two sources: ignorance and mendacity. Some people may really not know that Medicare is taxpayer-funded health care. That’s ignorance. Many more people know it—and know the degree to which taxpayers are already funding lots of health care for them and their loved ones—and argue otherwise. That’s mendacity.

The teabag movement is full of it.

We’re witnessing a conversation between various people who are dependent on taxpayer-funded health insurance telling the public why tens of millions of people shouldn’t have access to it. Most of the opponents of universal health care don’t really think the public provision of health insurance services is immoral, evil, or socialistic—after all, they’d be at risk of bankruptcy without it. And most aren’t opposed to deficit spending as a matter of principle. (How do they think we’re paying for the Medicare prescription drug entitlement the Republicans rammed through a few years ago?) In effect, they believe that taxpayer-funded health insurance is appropriate and crucial for some people—themselves, their staffs, their parents—but not for others; that some are entitled to it, and that others simply aren’t.

This is a key conservative conceit - which we’ll address in this weekend’s print edition - that the people who lack health coverage right now are undeserving, and that expanding government programs to help these “undeserving” may inhibit government largesse for the “deserving” - themselves.