{"id":4798,"date":"2009-08-10T14:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-08-10T20:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nmpolitics.net\/index\/2009\/08\/town-hall-violence-isnt-helping-anything\/"},"modified":"2009-08-22T15:09:01","modified_gmt":"2009-08-22T21:09:01","slug":"town-hall-violence-isnt-helping-anything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/2009\/08\/town-hall-violence-isnt-helping-anything\/","title":{"rendered":"Town-hall violence isn’t helping anything"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Many conservatives are angry about bailouts, tax-increase proposals, cap-and-trade legislation and health-care reform. Fine. But instead of resorting to violence, they need to take a seat at the table.<\/span><\/p>\n

A libertarian activist in Albuquerque crossed a line on Friday when he advocated physical violence against members of left-leaning groups at town hall meetings on health-care reform.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not giving the guy the publicity of linking to his page or publishing his name, but I will tell you that he posted messages on Twitter stating that people should use \u201cretaliation\u2026 be it verbal or physical\u201d against members of ACORN and the Service Employees International Union if they decide to attend or disrupt town-hall meetings and should \u201churt them. Badly.\u201d<\/p>\n

He even advocated that people take advantage of their \u201clicense to carry.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, the man\u2019s inappropriately dangerous tweets are only the latest disgraceful behavior in the national hijacking of the health-care reform debate that has included raucous town hall meetings<\/a>, physical violence<\/a> and at least one death threat<\/a> against a member of Congress.<\/p>\n

Though a violent incident in St. Louis appears to break the mold, in general, most of the potentially dangerous incidents have been caused by angry conservatives.<\/p>\n

Fanning the flames<\/span><\/p>\n

Some of the anger on the right is understandable. Conservatives have watched Republican control of the federal government slip away in recent years. But physical violence is not the answer.<\/p>\n

I understand the sentiment of many fiscal conservatives who worry about the nation\u2019s economic policies. I\u2019ve expressed my opposition to the bailouts<\/a>, and to recent tax-increase proposals<\/a> that I believe are foolish during a recession.<\/p>\n

Many people are also upset about recently approved cap-and-trade legislation. And now they\u2019re worried about the proposal to create a public option to compete with private health insurance companies.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s fine. Those are reasonable policy differences between many on the left and right, and I\u2019d be surprised if some Americans weren\u2019t upset about such major policy shifts.<\/p>\n

But the flames are being fanned by lies<\/a> spreading like a virus on the Internet about President Barack Obama\u2019s birthplace and false claims<\/a> that Democrats are making plans to take away Americans\u2019 guns. It\u2019s all garbage, but some people are buying into it. The resulting fear is creating a climate ripe for the type of violence we\u2019ve already seen, violence that threatens to get worse — maybe much worse — in the coming weeks.<\/p>\n

Obama is not Hitler<\/span><\/p>\n

To be fair, Obama has created an opening for conspiracy theorists and liars to spread their messages by acting a bit Big-Brother-ish in his first few months in office. First his administration asked all potential appointees detailed questions about their gun ownership<\/a> on a personnel form, as if that\u2019s any of the White House\u2019s business. Then, last week, the official White House blog asked supporters of health-care reform to send in \u201cfishy\u201d e-mails<\/a> or other misinformation that\u2019s being spread about the health-care debate.<\/p>\n

So now the White House is collecting e-mails sent by people who oppose its agenda on health care.<\/p>\n

That sort of action — collecting e-mails and information about gun ownership — is a little creepy to me, no matter who is president. But comparisons between Obama and Adolf Hitler<\/a> are not fair. They are outlandish at best, outrageous at worst because of the sentiment they\u2019re helping spread across the nation.<\/p>\n

America, we\u2019re better than this. How about toning down the rhetoric, stopping to the violence, and instead putting our efforts into attempting to understand each other and come up with real solutions to our problems?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Many conservatives are angry about bailouts, tax-increase proposals, cap-and-trade legislation and health-care reform. Fine. But instead of resorting to violence, they need to take a seat at the table. A libertarian activist in Albuquerque crossed a line on Friday when he advocated physical violence against members of left-leaning groups at town hall meetings on health-care […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1192,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","category-haussamen-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4798"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4798\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nmpolitics.net\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}