But health care reform is needed! You can get H1N1 any second now and be dead 2 seconds later unless we accept Obama's government run health care plan right this moment. As soon as we accept health care reform, everything will be better and no one will ever get sick and no one will ever die. Don't you want to follow our Savior, Obama? Or are you just a racist?

The entire previous paragraph is sarcasm. I'm just clarifying for those people that might have missed that.

Yeah, I noticed the comment when I posted mine. Classic strawman argument.

On the one hand, when you write something for public consumption, you have an obligation to make your point as clear as you can to minimize the chance of it being misconstrued. But there comes a point where you can't make it any clearer and people who want to misconstrue it will do so regardless of what you say and do. Like Howard The Duck says, "People believe what they need to believe."

I'm not sure if the strawman was intentional or not. If it was unintentional, then the poster was just trying to defend, but was doing it in a hamhanded way. We have discussed conspiracy theories, and our discussions usually focus on the mechanics, logistics, and reason behind such a theory in order to shoot it down. In order to address the points you made, however, requires quite a bit of background into crooked politics, something that, as residents of Illinois, we have been exposed to all our lives. With no really way to address those points, an alternate explanation is sought, one that makes sense to the responder. And concluding it is racism is simply applying Occam's Razor to a complex problem.

If it was intentional, and the poster genuinely felt you were being racist, then no amount of explanation will change the opinion. All you can do is what I did when I got fed up with the otaku -- salvage as much dignity as you can and move on, anything you say or do is only going to make it worse.