August 07, 2009 09:42 PM UTC

"Patients First" Bus Tour Skids Off Course

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• by: Colorado Pols

From TPM, covering yesterday’s “Patients First” tour stop in Pueblo:

Patients First is a project of Americans for Prosperity–one of the key conservative interests groups helping to organize the town hall protests we’ve been covering. The speaker repeats the debunked conservative canard that Democratic health care reform will mandate physician assisted suicide. “Adolf Hitler issued six million end of life orders–he called his program the final solution. I kind of wonder what we’re going to call ours.” [Pols emphasis]

And after comparing Democratic health care reform efforts to the murderous regimes of Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot, the speaker advises his audience to “go to offices of members of Congress and put the fear of god in them.”

We talked yesterday about manipulating ignorance for political advantage, and an underlying viral message being spread among excitable conservative activists that Obama wants to ‘kill old people.’ In this particular stop on Jeff Crank’s Americans for Prosperity Colorado bus tour, it appears the ignorance and ‘kill old people’ message wasn’t delivered with much subtlety.