Health Care: Is This the Kind of America We Want?

I still cringe when I see this video from earlier this week of a group of Columbus, OH, teabaggers mocked someone with Parkinson's Disease, hurled all sorts of verbal insults at him, and even threw dollar bills at him. Disgusting!



Well, now he explains why he was willing to put himself in the line of fire.



And Lancaster Sunday News editor & columnist Gil Smart explains very well the method to their madness.



And today, we learn of this (H/T this DKos diary):

The "Slaughter Solution" on health care isn't the only thing that has come under attack in U.S. Rep. Louise M. Slaughter's world this week. Sometime early this morning, someone threw a brick through the front window of her Pine Avenue office.

The damage was discovered about 12:30 a.m., city police said.

The brick put a hole in the outer-most window at the office at 1910 Pine Ave., but did not damage a second interior window, police reported. A piece of broken brick believed to have caused the damage was found at the scene.

I just hope the police will be ready to deal with whatever riots break out at the teabagger events in Searchlight and Henderson next Saturday.

But anyway, isn't it horrifying to see this kind of hate and vitriol manifest itself so violently? When did it become OK to harass someone with Parkinson's? When did it become OK to throw bricks through windows? When Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin and the whole Faux News crew said so?

These kinds of actions reveal the thinking of today's radical right. They will stop at nothing to make their "statement", even resorting to violence if it gets them their desired attention. And now, they're resorting to this selfish "MINE, MINE, MINE!!!" argument to veil the reality of them essentially shilling for the insurance companies and the GOP. But still, when did we become a country that neglects its own? When did Lady Liberty stop accepting the sick, the tired, the poor, and the weary, and started telling them, "Don't tread on me! Go fuck yourselves!"?

I just hope this weekend is the last gasp of relevancy for the teabaggers. They may have been entertaining to watch before, but now it's just sad to see their ugly temper tantrums go haywire like this.