The Bell Curve:

So the grinder is at work.

We’ve entered Condition Red for the entrenched machinery of fear to gear up — the machinery that played a significant role in putting George W. Bush in the White House by turning John Kerry from a legitimate war hero into an inept pretender, and more recently, brought its guns to bear on challenging Barack Obama’s legitimacy as a U.S. citizen.

Health care is in its sights now, the new demon in an all-out war against the reforms that are — theoretically — being debated while Congress is taking a month’s vacation.

Our once-would-be vice president, Sarah Palin, set the tone for this new campaign recently by posting a note on Facebook that said, in part: “The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of the ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care.”

This is so awful from every point of view except one: its effectiveness. Its turgid language, smidgen of accuracy and emotional overkill are impossible to debate.

And that’s what makes it so effective — along with similar excesses that charge the Obama health-care plan with such nefarious schemes as pushing euthanasia on elderly patients and pursuing a government takeover of health care, which are equally non-debatable without assuming an unsupportable premise.

Only the single-payer system that serves almost all systems of national medicine approaches a government takeover, and that isn’t even on the Obama agenda.

We had a classic example of simply drowning out opposition with misinformation in Newport-Mesa a few years ago when the city of Irvine collected a multimillion-dollar war chest, hired away our publicist and reversed two previous elections that had authorized a commercial airport in El Toro. We made the mistake of not being tough enough against an opponent that didn’t play by any ethical rules.

Recognizing that same mistake and toughening the response is now turning the health-care debate into a political free-for-all.

That isn’t where the Obama administration would like to fight.

But this time, Obama can’t arrange a beer party to thresh out the differences — at least not until the decibel level is down sufficiently for the parties around the table to be heard, and reason to be allowed into the conversation.

We have three weeks before Congress resumes to get off the fear kick and get down to the business of coming up with the best health-care reforms possible in the current politicized climate.

And in this bastion of Republican rhetoric where we live, that means we may have to shout a little to be heard. Because the one line on all the battle flags of blanket opposition to reforming our health-care delivery system reads “socialism,” we should address that first.

Throughout a century of trying to create a health-care program that encompassed every U.S. citizen, the clarion scare word has always been socialism.

Leading the charge has been the American Medical Assn., which has instantly and successfully trotted out socialism every time a crack in the system appeared.

Giving any ground, the association insisted, would change the name of our health-care system to “socialized medicine.” And in a country whose citizens take to arms whenever they can be convinced their freedom is being challenged, that was enough motivation.

And so the reforms, needed more desperately each time they came up in a new administration, were always defeated.

But this time — 47 million Americans without health insurance and 14,000 others being added daily to this group — the need is great enough to move even the monolith of insurance companies and pharmaceuticals, with their own bad practices, to the edge of supporting substantial changes.

But so far, the politicians who have been calling the fear shots — more interested in damaging the Democrats than fixing health care — have prevented this threat to the status quo by tapping into a storehouse of unexpected and confusing rage.

This was caught dramatically on the front page of Wednesday’s Los Angeles Times by two articles, side to side and graphically illustrated. One described defiant and disruptive town hall audiences challenging health-care reforms.

The other depicted a traveling foundation set up at the Inglewood sports arena to provide free medical and dental treatment to patients without insurance. Some 1,500 were treated and hundreds of others turned away for lack of time and doctors.

Somehow both groups need to be accommodated, and that isn’t going to happen by demonizing “socialized medicine,” which Wikipedia defines as “a term used primarily in the United States to refer to certain kinds of publicly funded health care.

“The term is used most frequently, and often pejoratively, in the U.S. political debate concerning health care.” Of socialism itself, Wikipedia writes, “Socialism is not a concrete philosophy of fixed doctrine and program. Its branches advocate a degree of social interventionism and economic rationalization, sometimes opposing each other.”

Thus the demon. If you want to put a name to it, try “Medicare” — and the blessings it has offered to old guys like me over the years. And that could be available to all ages if we can ever lower the noise and get to the substance.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.