To hear the media tell it, the vociferous town hall meetings on Obamacare prove that the president’s opponents on healthcare are “dangerous” and possibly violent. But so far, none of the opponents have harmed a soul. The same cannot be said, however, about Obama’s supporters.
A case in point, which the media has just barely reported, is the unknown fellow who bit off an anti-Obamacare protestor’s finger. The hungry Obama partisan was affiliated with Moveon.org, a leftist group funded by leftist billionaire George Soros.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the finger biting occurred at Moveon.org’s “We Can’t Afford to Wait Vigil” on September 2. “During the rally at Lynn Road and Hillcrest Drive, near the Oaks Mall, the suspect and William James Rice got into a heated argument and began fighting, [a deputy] said. Rice … punched the suspect after the man called him an ‘idiot.’”
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And then, “one man bit off the tip of Rice’s left pinkie finger.”
The 65-year-old victim of the attack drove himself to the hospital; a witness quickly followed with the appendage “after the suspect spit it out.” But doctors would not reattach it because they feared an infection.
Moveon.org was understandably embarrassed by the feral attack. It was a “regrettable act of violence,” a spokeswoman said. “While we do not have any more facts about what happened than what we saw in press accounts, MoveOn condemns violence in all forms.”
Good that they do that. But the finger biting is of a piece with the intimidation and outright violence Obama’s supporters have visited upon his opponents at town hall meetings. At one of them in St. Louis, a union goon smashed a video camera into the camera operator’s face. A black conservative activist was beaten to the ground. Afterward, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius personally thanked the union goons for showing up and urged them to “keep doing what you’re doing.”
For the record, when an anti-abortion activist murdered abortionist George Tiller at his Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kan., the pro-abortion left immediately blamed pro-lifers and sympathetic radio hosts because they condemned Tiller’s long and bloody history of malpractice and botched abortions. It was the anti-Tiller rhetoric, they said, such as calling him “Tiller The Killer,” that launched Tiller’s killer toward his target. The “mainstream” news media offered a like opinion.
The question is whether this logic means the radical left’s incendiary rhetoric about those who attend town hall meetings, not least calling them racists, Nazis and un-American, inspired the attack on a 65-year-old man and the other violence that preceded it.
The suspect in the finger biting remains at large.
Photo: AP Images
