The Osterley Times: ‘You Are Terrifying Us’

Saturday, August 08, 2009

‘You Are Terrifying Us’

This is truly unbelievable. Peggy Noonan talks about the AstroTurfer's behaviour at Town Hall meetings and comes to this conclusion:

We have entered uncharted territory in the fight over national health care. There’s a new tone in the debate, and it’s ugly. At the moment the Democrats are looking like something they haven’t looked like in years, and that is: desperate.

They must know at this point they should not have pushed a national health-care plan.

She says this despite the fact that most Americans want a national health care plan. So now, the behaviour of the Republican mobs is the fault of the Democrats for ever daring to suggest that the American public should be given what polls say they desire? On what planet does Noonan live? And, if this turns to violence, she also implies that this will also be the fault of the Democrats:

And frankly they ought to think about backing off. The president should call in his troops and his Congress and announce a rethinking. There are too many different bills, they’re all a thousand pages long, no one has time to read them, no one knows what’s going to be in the final one, the public is agitated, the nation’s in crisis, the timing is wrong, we’ll turn to it again—but not now. We’ll take a little longer, ponder every aspect, and make clear every complication.

You know what would happen if he did this? His numbers would go up. Even Congress’s would. Because they’d look responsive, deliberative and even wise. Discretion is the better part of valor.
Absent that, and let’s assume that won’t happen, the health-care protesters have to make sure they don’t get too hot, or get out of hand. They haven’t so far, they’ve been burly and full of debate, with plenty of booing. This is democracy’s great barbaric yawp. But every day the meetings seem just a little angrier, and people who are afraid—who have been made afraid, and left to be afraid—can get swept up.

I get the gist of what she is saying. "If the left just gave the right what they wanted, none of this would be happening." Forget democracy and what the electorate voted for, it's best not to anger these people. And if their anger turns to violence, we should blame the Democrats for ever putting such a contentious issue on the table in the first place.

This is a truly repugnant argument. It's the same logic which states that Tiller would not have been murdered if he'd only stopped giving abortions.

Noonan is claiming that these people are being driven to their excesses by the Democrat's insistence on being unreasonable, rather than condemning Republican thugs for attempting to take over town hall meetings and prevent any discussion from taking place.

The Republican mobs may very well be angry, but that doesn't make them right, nor does it make them a majority.

Noonan is proposing that public policy should be set by avoiding upsetting the Republican hordes at all costs, and putting the blame for the behaviour of these thugs at the door of the Democrats for daring to attempt to implement the policy which they campaigned on and which the public voted for.

The Republicans might not like the fact that a majority of Americans voted for a national health system, and - whilst they have every right to make their case publicly - they have no right to have public policy driven by their threats that this might all turn to violence.

Noonan's argument is simply disgusting. She is implying that the democratic process is less important than the anger of the right wing mob.

UPDATE:

No doubt this is also the fault of the Democrats:

Based on the news that health care events are edging into violence, an anti-health care reform protester in New Mexico named Scott Oskay is calling on his hundreds of online followers to bring firearms to town halls, and to 'badly hurt' SEIU and ACORN counter protesters.