The Globe and Mail's Michael Valpy had a big screed in Saturday's paper on whether the bonds of Canada's social cohesion were breaking down. I'm going to excerpt the media part of his essay.

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Veteran U.S. Rep. Barney Franks (D., Mass.) on a woman who compares U.S. President Barack Obama to Hitler for his proposed health care reforms:

Addendum

Gawker had the following on Wednesday:

Crazy woman repeating Republican talking point was not technically a Republican

Fox News's guide to winning an argument: Recut the tape

Addendum 2

You might also want to see this Gawker item from Tuesday: Town hall crazies go through the ideological rabbit hole

Barack Obama built a huge army of volunteers who flocked to his message of hope and change, propelling him into the White House. But where are they during this current frenzied attack on health reform?

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Author Rick Pearlsten says the kooky have always played a role in landmark U.S. policy debates. What's different different today is the structure of the media. Be a kook at a town hall today, be a guest on Fox News later that night.

The whole thing is well worth a read, but I'll excerpt a media-related part.

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Sarah "Will Ya Stop Makin' Things Up?" Palin seemed to be the first to get the 'death panel' ball rolling in the bizarrely ferocious U.S. health care debate.

But did she? This NYT article says the groundwork was laid long before.

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John Ibbitson, the Globe and Mail's Washington bureau chief, had a few thoughts on American political culture that I'll excerpt here:

... Americans love to argue, and much of what they yell at each other is crazy talk. ...

Americans argue so furiously because there is much to argue about: the health-care and immigration systems are utterly dysfunctional, and the administration and Congress are racking up trillion-dollar deficits with no clear understanding of how to bring them down.

They argue because U.S. society is cleaved by region, race and class more deeply than in Canada. But they also argue because they care. They believe their federal government matters and they have strong opinions about how that government should act.

Canada always struggled to define itself as a nation, and in recent years appears to have given up that struggle, retreating into regional isolation. What Canadian federal politician has a clear sense of what this country should look like in the 21st century?

Politics in America is loud, rude, messy and sometimes deeply weird. But at least the U.S. matters to its citizens.

Do we keep quiet because of our famous politeness? Or is it that we just don't care?

Now with that, here's a little taste of American crazy. Hear U.S. President Barack Obama described as a "long-legged, half-breed, usurper, illegal alien" -- by a black preacher ... who then goes on to predict that white people are gonna rise up with guns!