It has been over a year since President Obama announced his plans for comprehensive health reform.

Since the announcement, as Americans learned more and more about the Democrats’ health care bill, opposition to the left’s plans for big government health care have grown and grown.

It started with the explosion of outrage at town hall meetings over the bill’s cuts to Medicare to pay for new bureaucracies and programs.

It gained steam when Americans realized the frightening potential for “death panels” when you give government the power to deny care based on budgetary concerns.

And it reached critical mass when the corrupt manner in which the bill was being shoved through Congress was exposed to the American people.

However, despite all the polls showing that Americans want Congress to scrap the current bill and start over, it is now clear that Democratic leaders are bound and determined to ignore the will of the people.

"It's a free country."

That's a popular saying — and true in many ways. But for a free country, America does ban a lot of things that are perfectly peaceful and consensual. Why is that?

Here are some things you can't do in most states of the union: rent your body to someone for sex, sell your kidney, take recreational drugs. The list goes on. I'll discuss American prohibitions tomorrow night at 8 and 11 p.m. Eastern time (and again on Friday at 10) on my Fox Business program.

The prohibitionists say their rules are necessary for either the public's or the particular individual's own good. I'm skeptical. I think of what Albert Camus said: "The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants." Prohibition is force. I prefer persuasion. Government force has nasty unintended consequences.

I would think that our experience with alcohol prohibition would have taught America a lesson. Nearly everyone agrees it was a disaster. It didn't stop people from drinking, but it created new and vicious strains of organized crime. Drug prohibition does that now.

The Exceptionalism Backlash

P resident Barack Obama learned from Bill Clinton's mistakes in 1993-94. He ran, relative to Clinton, a buttoned-up transition. He sought to avoid Clinton's tactical miscues on health care. And he steered clear of cultural land mines.

The backlash against Democrats in 1994 was famously attributed to "gays, guns and God." Obama has mostly avoided stoking opposition around that hot-button triad, but faces a backlash almost indistinguishable in feel and intensity. Why?

Big government became a cultural issue. The level of spending, the bailouts and the intervention in the economy contemplated in health-care reform and cap-and-trade created the fear that something elemental was changing in the country -- quickly, irrevocably, without notice.

It was Father's Day, 1964, when the Phillies' Jim Bunning, a father of seven, took the mound against the Mets.

Ninety pitches later, Bunning had struck out 10 and allowed not one batter to reach first base. Twenty-seven up, 27 down. The first perfect game in 86 years in the National League, and the finest hour of the Hall of Famer's baseball career.

Beginning last week, Jim Bunning took the Senate floor for five straight days to object to Harry Reid's call for unanimous consent to waive through a $10 billion spending bill. First, the Kentucky senator demanded, show me how we're going to pay for it.

His own leadership abandoned Bunning. Susan Collins of Maine assured the Senate and country that Republicans did not back their colleague: "Senator Bunning's views do not represent a majority of the caucus. It's important that the American people understand that there is bipartisan support for extending these vital programs."

Stay with me, because you are not going to believe this column. This month in Chicago, an event will honor three men as "living legends." The men are Minister Louis Farrakhan, head of the Nation of Islam, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the former pastor of Barack Obama's church, and Father Michael Pfleger, a radical-left Catholic priest. The men will stand together, and thousands of spectators will pay to see them.

The press release announcing the program says, "Because of their legacy of educating, they are being honored as Living Legends for their unfailing work and dedication."

And who, exactly, selected the three men as honorees? Um, well, that would be the Rev. Jeremiah Wright!

That's right, the good reverend is honoring himself and his bomb-throwing pals — and charging up to $100 for a ticket. Who gets the proceeds? Again, that would be Wright.