Can't we all just get along?

Passage of the health care reform bill in the House this past week and the ensuing reaction put me in mind yet again of how absurd our political rivalries have become. That such a watered-down excuse for a "reform" bill would cause this much vitriol back and forth across the aisle is utterly absurd to me. How is it that we've come to a point where something that should be a no-brainer-- figuring out a better way to provide health care to everyone-- leads to protests that our government is either socialist or fascist, or possibly both?

The main thing that confuses me is how we ever got anything done before this. Certainly emancipation, the New Deal, civil rights, and even Johnson's Great Society weren't uncontroversial. But they still happened. You could make the claim that extraordinary circumstances or the force of character of their proponents were the only reason they succeeded, but that seems overly simple to me. What has shifted in our society that now makes passing anything more than a weak excuse for reform all but impossible?

It seems fairly clear to me that the way ideas are presented to the public must play a major role in this. Rather than (as was the case before) elected officials working in what amounted to a vacuum where they could work simply among themselves to accomplish whatever they politically could, instead the public is fed whatever story makes the most headlines and immediately do whatever they can to send those officials off the rails. I'm not saying that the way it was before was ideal. Such a model can clearly lead to vast corruption and cronyism. But does this new model make any more sense?

We seem to be in a situation where whatever spin the media or the media face of our officials puts on an issue is what winds up shaping the debate. And for whatever reason, the media spoon feeds these angles to us instead of acting as the "4th estate" and trying to get at whatever truth is behind the spin. Outlets like Fox News are perhaps the most insidious and irresponsible examples of this trend, where there seems to be an extreme prejudice towards rhetoric over truth, with the result that absolutely nothing gets done. The ultimate irony of this to me is that in many ways Fox News is just as bad as Izvestia during the height of the Soviet Union. Viewers are told whatever the leadership want them to hear. Unfortunately the viewers are lapping up what Fox is selling them.

I have no idea how to get out of this, since the left has had to assume the same tactics in response to what has been coming from the right, and any news outlet that tries to go down the middle loses market share. All I know is that if we can't fix something as obviously broken as Health Care in this environment, how can we move this country forward at all?