In the trenches or on the front lines, I'm not sure which...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/07/opinion/07krugman.html?ref=global
http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/article1025529.ece

Paul Krugman has a good column about the crazies who disrupt the town hall meetings held by Democratic congressmen. My husband and I attended a town hall meeting held by our Congressman Jim Himes. I had gotten an email earlier in the day telling me that there was going to be a town hall meeting about health care that evening. I RSVPed and got linked to a grass roots Obama cite, which I didn't think much about. We got there pretty early, and I got my first taste of lunacy. We weren't supposed to go upstairs until a certain time, but people were pretty much ignoring that directive, so we decided to ignore it too. I slunk on the elevator first, and there was another woman on the elevator. She looked at me and said, "Are you for or against?" I said, mildly, that I was for health care. I asked her if she was for or against the bill, and she answered, "This is a bill that Hitler could have designed, but you won't hear that tonight." And although I had read that one shouldn't debate because these people do not listen to reason, I couldn't help myself and answered, "Because it is not true." Blessedly, we were only going to the second floor, and I took a vow of silence. The invocation of Hitler I find deeply offensive. Talk to any Holocaust survivor or anyone who lost family, and they will tell you just how deeply offensive it is. And I suspect that many of the people making those comparisons have some thinly veiled anti Semitic feelings themselves. Many more people turned up and it was quite a vivid crowd. It turned out that it wasn't a town hall meeting about health care, but a meeting with FAA officials about airplane noise in Fairfield County and that another meeting would be scheduled for health care, but after the noise meeting Himes would stay and discuss health care for a while. We decided to stay. We happened to be sitting in front of two lunatics, and there was one next to me. It is hard to describe the running invective that spewed from their mouths. One was a proud tea bagger and the other was a proud ignoramus, who gave a running commentary about the people at the meeting. His most awful comment was when a noise person said something asking the FAA officials what could they do about the noise, and he shouted out, "Shoot them down!" In my book that is advocating terrorism. The man sitting next to me started appreciatively snickering, and I looked at him with my jaw dropping and eyes rolling, and he knew I wasn't a fellow traveler. Some of the noise people were totally bat sh-t crazy, and several of them went on long prepared rants. The noise people talked more than the FAA officials which was not really the point of the meeting. After more than an hour of noise discussion, the FAA people and the noise people left. Dan Malloy stayed with Himes to hear the health care discussion and after hearing the noise people I was glad to see someone else in the sane column, as well as several police officers. I couldn't tell how many people were in favor of some kind of health reform and how many were against. I know that the anger is being stoked by the republicans and their stooges in the media, but the level of anger emanating from the anti reform people was astounding. I mean us pro reform people are the ones that are feeling currently screwed by the status quo, and I was happy to see that there were several people that supported a single payer system. I said on the way home that I thought that the anger had less to do with health care, but more to do with Obama, and I was happy to see that Krugman had the same thought and guessed that many of them were probably birthers. The angry crowd were white mostly, but not all, working class. My non fellow traveler was in a suit and joined a group of scary suited men who were sitting in a row. Whenever Himes mentioned undocumented aliens, he kept shouting, "Illegals! Illegals!" Himes was quite deft in handling questions, even from the hostiles and there were some sane questions and comments. We kept our mouths shut, except to say let him finish his answer. I was well coached from a piece in TPM who wrote, it is useless to debate, but encourage civility and urging people to let Congressmen finish. I still don't understand why everyone, except those robber barons in the heath insurance industry, are not behind reform. Doctors are getting screwed by the insurance companies, every business is being hurt by health care costs, hospitals are being squeezed by the industry, not to mention patients. Anyone who has ever had to deal with a serious illness has a full understanding of how these companies operate. We fled as soon as it was over. When we got home I read that a town hall meeting in Florida ended in a fist fight. Apparently there were many more confrontations at meetings, and I fear this is going to get uglier and uglier. Honestly, after being at the town hall meeting, it is wonder to me why anyone would want to run for Congress.