Are Anti-Health Care Astroturf Groups Using Pro-Lifers to Drum Up Support?

The abortion debate in this country is a complex one, for sure. Dr. George Tiller's brutal murder earlier this year is evidence that there is a sense of vigilanteism that pervades a fair amount of self-proclaimed pro-lifers. In light of that hate crime and Wednesday's arrest of an elderly man in Spokane, Wash., after he was caught making threats to Warren Hern, a doctor at a clinic that performed abortions in Boulder, Colo.

The man, named Donald Hertz, has never before been arrested for demonstrating outside an abortion clinic or other related crimes, but it seems as though in his retirement, he's had time to do some reading. Maybe on the internet.

There is a disillusioned group of people in this country who seem desperate to retain their identity in the face of a changing political landscape. For at least eight years they were told by religious leaders and vocal "morality"-driven peers that voting Republican was the moral choice (we had an Evangelical president who told the French president that, "Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East," after all). This group was convinced of this in large part due to the trend on the Left to support a woman's right to choose to have an abortion. It seems a Democrat in the White House incenses some in this group; the last abortion provider was murdered over ten years ago when Bill Clinton was in office. People start listening to Randall Terry when the political party their religious leaders endorse loses. They see the need for Jihad, as it were. They see the right to commit terrorism.

So is this group being manipulated by the Right in order to drum up opposition to the Obama health care agenda? I have no proof, but the connection between the two otherwise completely unrelated issues has been made by angry mobs on the Right. Rachel Maddow played a clip of this last night before she talked with Dr. LeRoy Carhart, an abortion provider well-known with his involvement in two supreme court cases. Terry called for protesters to gather outside Carhart's clinic in Nebraska this weekend (they're probably there right now!). His rhetoric is sure not to be toned-down.