The GOP front-runner in Nevada's senate race is taking flak for a health care policy idea so stupid it makes Sarah Palin seem like "a pointy-headed policy wonk," writes Eugene Robinson. Sue Lowden has seriously suggested that the people in her highly urbanized state barter with doctors like in the olden days, Robinson writes in the Washington Post. Democrats have labeled the idea "chickens for check-up" and gleefully mocked it, he notes.
Lowden's loopy suggestion highlights a trend infecting American politics and the Tea Party movement in particular: "Nostalgia for a Golden Age that never was," notes Robinson. The truth is that even in the days of Thomas Jefferson, America was "a big messy country," wracked by conflicts over slavery, the role of the government and economic policy, and where doctors generally preferred to be paid in cash instead of chickens, he adds.
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