Ebbie--fascinating bit on Sarah's history.   Needs to be well publicized.

The "death panels" was nothing more than counseling every 5 years on end-of life issues. Any panel giving life or death decisions is in the fertile imagination of Rush, etc. and the brilliant minds who follow him (and are not called "dittoheads" for nothing.)

I wasn't going to contribute to this discussion at all, since I was a bit discouraged by the likely intellectual level of a thread in which the originator couldn't even be bothered to spell "Hitler" correctly in the title.

Having read it, I see I am still not needed. The wonderfully lucid explication of the position of sense, provided by John P especially, and echoed by some others, is all I could have said.

We are also forever indebted to John P for extracting from the champion of the Right, Doug R, the statement that he's proud to be a dittohead--believes 95% of what Rush says. That in itself is enough to tell us how useful a debate with Doug could ever be--if there were any doubt.   Doug would be a perfect source of comic relief if the subject weren't serious.

At any rate, I'll retire to the shadows, to other threads, or maybe even to something productive in Jan's eyes.

Before I go, I would only point out the spectacular success of the Bush Iraq propaganda campaign.   If the US public (or probably any public) is uneasy and looking for scapegoats, all you have to do for huge numbers is to indicate who to hate and fear.

It's just incredible that the hatemongers have settled on President Obama as the appropriate target. If he wants to handpick every member of every town hall meeting he attends from here on, this would be only prudent. And as for Rush, Sean and the other obscenely highly paid hatemongers (and the sheep who support them), they should stop whining about it.

And please spare us the feeble excuse: "they hate Obama just like liberals hate GWB". How many wars has Obama started with a propaganda campaign to assure support?

As for the 2nd Amendment defenders who feel they need to be armed at a town hall meeting: I wouldn't take any guns from them--aside from the assault weapons. (What they want above all is the excuse to say: "Obama's storm troopers took my weapon".) But I'd get their ID, especially address, and send them home. If they don't want to go home, monitor them closely the whole time they are near the town hall meeting.