Letter

I've mentioned before that my local daily, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, turns over about a dozen column inches every Sunday to a local dope named Katherine Kersten.  Today's essay was on how liberals are slandering the health care protesters who keep showing up at these "town halls" across the country.  I wrote the following letter to the editor:

To the editor:

Katherine Kersten strikes out again (“Left protests too much over the town halls,” August 23)! No one is saying that critics of health care reform can't speak up. But the ignorant things they say--and their preening loutishness--are richly deserving of contempt.  A few examples:

• The retiree who, at a town hall sponsored by his representative, loudly inisted that he did not want the government messing around with his Medicare. (Medicare, of course, is a government program.)

• The penchant of health care protesters for bringing guns, including military-style assault rifles, to their events. Apparently the wing-nuts have won enough battles so that nothing can be done about this practice. According to police in Phoenix, a protester who carried a semiautomatic rifle slung over his shoulder violated no law. President Obama was at the time speaking at the city’s nearby convention center.

• At a town hall sponsored by Rep. Bob Inglis, Republican of South Carolina, citizens were angry about more than just “socialized medicine.” One woman asked a question about government-mandated vaccinations. Inglis told her she should find something new to worry about, and the crowd hissed its disapproval--at Inglis!

• At a town hall sponsored by Rep. Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, a normal looking woman carrying a picture of Obama doctored to look like Hitler asked the congressman why he supported the president’s “Nazi policy.” Frank spoke for many of us when he retorted, “My answer to you is, as I’ve said before, it is a tribute to the First Amendment that this kind of vile, contemptible nonsense is so freely propagated.” He then excused himself on the ground that he had an appointment back on planet Earth (where, by the way, 47 million Americans have no health insurance).

--Eric Jorgenson