Town-hall shouters showing their ignorance

Don Shirley, Las Vegas

Thursday, Aug. 20, 2009 | 2:04 a.m.

The last NBC News poll I saw shows that almost half of the American people believe health care reform legislation would permit the government to decide when to end medical care for the elderly (“pull the plug on Grandma”), pay for abortions, and pay for illegal immigrants’ health care. All of these fallacies are being spread by the health insurance industry lobbyists and Republican Party leaders and operatives to defeat the effort and “break” President Barack Obama.

As I watch the town-hall meetings, I see many people carrying signs depicting Obama as Hitler and labeling him as a Nazi and his programs as “socialism.” Don’t these fools realize that the Nazis and the socialists were mortal enemies?

Some people are wearing sidearms outside the meetings to make some kind of obscure statement. What is worse is the incessant shouting down and booing of the speakers and folks trying to ask and answer legitimate questions about the proposed programs.

The over-the-top screamers and shouters, according to the Fox News Channel, are “everyday Americans” who are supposed to represent the rest of us. In my opinion, most of the dissenters are either miserably uninformed/misinformed or are being led down the garden path by special interests whose sole purpose is to keep the money flowing. Maybe they’re graduates of the Glenn Beck School of Deep Thinking.

A perfect example is the photo with the lead letter in Wednesday’s Las Vegas Sun, headlined “Health care reform should be a no-brainer,” in which a man is yelling at Sen. Arlen Specter during a town-hall meeting on health care reform. This guy looks like a reasonable person? I think not.