The American Spectator

CARACAS POLITICS
Re: Philip Klein’s Friend or Foil?:

It’s beginning to look a lot like Venezuela around here. Rat out your fellow citizens who disagree with the Obamamessiah, so he can add them to his Enemies List. Send paid union thugs to intimidate citizen protests at town hall meetings. Scapegoat doctors, insurance companies, drug companies, hospitals, and any other useful parts of the current healthcare system (even though many of the relevant associations have thrown in with the Obamamessiah to try to cut the best deal possible, and regardless of member sentiment). Legislative leaders engage in loose talk to characterize concerned citizens as Nazis, racists, rightwing extremists, and all the other bogeymen of the statist imagination. All this because the loony left is unwilling to engage in a debate over its healthcare goals, instead relying on fraudulent talking points and the politics of personal destruction.

The best part of all this is that AARP has finally made it clear to its membership that it is a statist front group first, a membership organization second. The footage I saw on Fox News with the youthful Ms. PR talking down to concerned members, and finally petulantly closing the meeting and walking away — just priceless! They actually wanted to express grievances, the nerve of them!

If we are ready and willing to protect our country from joining the socialist scrap heap of nations, if we are ready and willing to prevent the Obamamessiah from turning America into a third world banana republic, it’s time for the tea party patriots to step up.

Time to turn in AARP memberships and publicly burn the AARP membership cards.

Time to hold “Hall of Shame” meetings to identify the Congressmen unwilling to meet in person with constituents because of fear of what they might have to hear.

Time to run primary challenges against “get along and go along” Republicans. If a Crist is nominated in preference to a Rubio, we are not paying attention to the real world.

Time to document every thuggish anti-free speech initiative of the Obamamessiah and his loony left crew. Time for a patriotic media person to put this all together into a documentary to be promoted by conservative alternative media and distributed to all interested persons for nominal fees. By the way, the Enemies List is nothing new for BO. Here in Missouri, during the election, some local Democrat sheriffs and others involved in law enforcement warned people to be careful about what they were saying. There were clear attempts to intimidate anti-BO’ers from expressing opposition to the chosen one.

Time to organize a fall march on Washington to express our disgust with tax and spending, the debasement of our currency, and the nationalization of American enterprise.

Time really is growing short.
— Stephen Zierak
Kansas City, Missouri

I looked long and hard for the logic in Mr. Klein’s “Friend or Foil?” but could find none. He apparently sees some sort of irony or contradiction in Obama’s original efforts to obtain the cooperation of health industry powers, and current claims that these industry powers are at least partly behind supposedly grass roots anger at the town hall meetings. Why is it ironic or contradictory?

Only an idiot would attempt a major overhaul of health care without trying to get the cooperation of the major players in the field. And only an idiot would think that seeking the cooperation somehow precludes one from criticizing the tactics of these major players when they renege on their public statements of support for reform and resume their longtime efforts to sabotage reform.

Even worse, Mr. Klein also seems to imply that we — Democrats, and people like me who are not Democrats but strongly favor reform of our idiotic health care system — are claiming that these town hall protests are being manufactured solely by the major health industry players. That is not true. Some of the disruptive efforts may be prompted and/or financed by the health care industry, but my understanding is that most of the funding and organizing is coming from the usual suspects: extremists from the anti-government, anti-tax folks, probably the same ones funding the equally hokey tea parties.

Phony is phony, Mr. Klein, and propaganda is propaganda. The debate over something as crucial as what to do with a health care system that is broken beyond repair should never come down to this kind of paid thuggery and deliberate fear mongering (kill your grandma, indeed!) which increases the paranoia of the ignorant and threatens the very structures that we count on to keep us free enough to have debates.
— Lee Russ

If anyone thinks Barack Obama is their friend, that delusion shows lack of awareness of the Illinois community organizer’s credo that power and self-interest are all that matter.