WASHINGTON—This weekend, over one million Americans protested plans for public healthcare options. Citing variously “creeping socialism”, “Obamacare” or “just keeping Uncle Sam out of my Medicare,” Saturday’s marchers shared a conviction that even the discussion of public healthcare represented a break with America’s past.

The protest, organized in part by healthcare conglomerates, featured speakers such as Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh. Former Governor Palin told the assembled masses that Joe the Plumber was “truly disturbed by America’s liberals’ latest flirtation with Communism.” Even his “Canadian friends” were mortified by the prospect of “Obamacare.” Palin promised that the “Republican President that takes power in 2012—whoever that may be—“ (triggering loud cheers in some sections of the National Mall) would “roll back the sick Socialist thinking that was taking root, in blue states especially.”

Limbaugh, after repeating his recent calls for returning to segregated schools, buses, lunch counters, and ”public toilets,” (placing unusual stress on the word public), told the gathered throngs that Obama was also hoping to “inflate socialized retirement. True Americans will continue to hold themselves up by their bootstraps rather than accept a retirement income dictated by retirement panels here in Washington, DC.” Limbaugh went on to criticize Obama’s “diabolical plans” to “socialize water,” and to “ram student loans down the throats of our youth” undermining “their rights to choose private credit options.”

Various grassroots movements were represented at the protest, voicing their opposition also to government control of the postal service, national defense, and interstate commerce and banking regulation, all of which, spokesmen argued, might be better served by “private initiatives.”

“Liberals just don’t understand that corporations have always been the true engine of American greatness,” Limbaugh boomed during his speech. “Let’s face it: America was founded as a corporation, as the Virginia Company, chartered by the King of England. It’s practically un-American to say that public options are superior.”

The BBC quoted former UN Weapons Inspector Hans Blix as saying: “It’s amazing! Only in America, where 60% of bankruptcies are caused by health problems that allow healthcare companies to take a family’s life-savings, do people take to the streets to demand that they NOT be given what is practically a human right in much of the world.”