That drawing of McConnell as a bloodthirsty killer who must be stopped is the giveaway. Why is he portrayed that way? Because he wants to alter the rules by which the government subsidizes health insurance. He’s not even trying to repeal Obamacare; the current bill is a messy compromise that mostly just tinkers with Obamacare. The only way this makes McConnell into a cold-blooded killer is if you project way too much importance and efficacy onto the activities of government—if you think that government policies, particularly those that involve more government spending and regulation, are the very wellspring of life, which your political opposition is arbitrarily cutting off.

If government power is the people’s best and only hope, then to deny the use of that power, or even to exercise it in the wrong way, is just like killing people. So you are naturally going to long to see the political malefactors behind such a policy struck down, for the same reasons we love the scene in the action movie when the bad guy finally falls off the skyscraper and gets what’s coming to him.