The longer I sit around and watch footage of the ridiculously ill-informed and angry town hall protesters, the more disturbed I am by the human spectacle they represent.

Not, I should note, because they're politically destructive to the cause of health care reform. I'm not entirely convinced that they will be. The anti-reform talking points that I've heard crop up in the media, post-town halls, are exactly the same as the ones I was hearing, before - they've just started to come with video of people shouting down their fellow citizens and elected officials, hardly an endearing visual. So, that's not a big worry.

Likewise, getting people on the far-right fringe riled up and yelling in public seems unlikely to me to greatly influence many Democratic Congressmen. Blue Dog Dems with any sense, after all, will realize that the people who are yelling about Obama plotting to kill Grandma aren't even going to consider voting for a candidate with a D near their name. And, meanwhile, angry rallies are being targeted at people like Arlen Specter, who're well-aware that it's actually their left flank that needs guarding. Those protests can't be expected to be effective in the first place - and they make it clear to representatives in more conservative districts that the opposition they're encountering in town halls is greatly inflated.

It's trying to imagine the internal workings of the minds of these people that freaks me out. A little fear and silliness from a person who's uninformed and hears a lie, that's understandable. It's also easily corrected by a brief encounter with the facts. But, if you're one of those people who is spending time listening to these lies, spreading them online, yelling about them at town halls, and being convinced of their truth - how terrifying does the world inside your head have to be?

In the world I live in, for example, our Congressmen and Senators are largely wimps. A lot of them are too worried about what might look bad when distorted in a ten second TV ad to feel safe supporting a public health care option, for God's sake. But in the world of a town hall protester, these guys are actually scheming to set up government death panels to kill special needs children and the elderly. And a lot of them are seemingly earnestly terrified by this, yelling and sobbing on TV.

I'd like to think that these people are just tragically uninformed or, at worst, stupid. But that doesn't appear to be the case, in my eyes. It looks a lot more like mass hysteria, to me.