Dear God. This is the way America is now. Some conservative radio host stages a "town hall" meeting in Las Vegas. The local news reports that it "was a packed house, full of opinions and no shortage of passion." How passionate? How does some dumb lady, yelling anti-Semitic slurs at another man grab you?
Media Monitor Jon, who holds it down daily on YouTube at NewsPoliticsNews, has the completely depressing clip, which shows an Israeli man holding forth on the virtues of Israel's health care system, which is "universal and compulsory, and is administered by a small number of organizations with funding from the government." I have no basis to judge its merits -- in 2000, the World Health Organization ranked it as the 28th best in the world. That said, let me sum up the countering argument, proferred by another town hall attendee: "Heil Hitler!"
That's right! Some idiot woman yells "Heil Hitler" at a Jewish man who was doing nothing more than being a passionate advocate for Israeli health care. The man, quite naturally, goes completely apoplectic, saying "Shame on you" over and over again. The woman counters by saying, "Well, you ought to be the most against President Obama." The poor man responds by saying, "I want to talk, not against Obama or for Obama. I want to talk about [health care]." He goes on to describe his own experiences with high-cost health care. For his efforts, the woman mocks him some more!
As ThinkProgress points out today, "Conservatives have strenuously denied that there is any anti-Semitism on display by anti-health reform protesters at town hall meetings nationwide." Those denials are no longer tenable, are they?
UPDATE: Various sources maintain that this awful woman is wearing an Israeli Defense Forces t-shirt, which is precisely the level of coherence we've come to expect from these Town Hall twits.
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