5,000 villages were missing their idiots

What would you think if 75 million Americans came out for a demonstration for or against something?

Pretty impressive, huh?

But the fact is, 75 million people is less than 25 percent of the country, and 25 percent of the country is the percentage of people who identify themselves as Republicans there days.

Of course, it wasn't 75 million people who showed up at the U.S. Capitol Thursday to demonstrate against President Obama's health care proposal.

Was it 7.5 million, 2.5 percent of the country?

Nope.

Was it 750,000, .25 percent?

Not quite.

Was it 75,000, .025 percent?

Keep going.

Was it 7,500, .0025 percent?

Almost. The estimated number of people who showed up at the Capitol Thursday after being invited on Fox News last Friday by Rep. Michelle Bachmann, R-Lunatic, for what Bachmann called a "Super Bowl of Freedom" was 5,000.

About .0016 of the country, the really nasty part.

That's right, 5,000 people, probably less than the number of people who would show up for a high school football game in Pigs Knuckle, Arkansas. And just like those football fans, they brought signs to cheer for their side.

Those signs didn't say "Go team" or "Beat the Cheeseheads." No, they weren't that nice. These hard-core fans carried signs like "Stop Obamunism" and pictures of Dachau dead describing it as National Socialist Healthcare 1945, and they had that old standby, Barack ObamaBarack Obama as the Joker.

House minority leader John BoehnerJohn Boehner, R-Orange, called the health-care bill "the greatest threat to freedom that I have seen," apparently ignoring both Adolf HitlerAdolf Hitler and the Soviet Union.

Then Boehner said he would read from the Constitution and in fact held up a copy of the Constitution before saying, "We hold these truths of be self-evident ..."

Apparently, his brain tans too.

These events are rarely without irony, and it was extremely ironic that at least five people at the event needed emergency health care from the U.S. Capitol staff at the same time the crowd was chanting against government-run health care.

I'm not saying there aren't legitimate arguments against health care reform, particularly from a conservative point of view. But anyone who views a crowd of 5,000 people -- including a good number demonstrating against abortion -- raised by Bachmann as anything but Theater of the Absurd is making a mistake.

We wouldn't pay attention in our own hometowns to whatever the village idiot was ranting about, would we?

Well, on Thursday, 5,000 villages were missing their idiots.