August 17, 2009 06:39 PM UTC

Jeff Crank "Sistah Souljahs" His Own Crazies

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• by: Colorado Pols

We’ve been talking for some time about how some of the nonsensical claims being made by town hall protesters in the last few weeks were on the verge of severely harming the credibility of health care reform opponents, much to the chagrin of those who have found these “Obama wants to kill your grandma” assertions quite useful regardless of their basis in reality.

Nothing a little ex post facto whitewash won’t help, as the Denver Post reports:

One Peter Fleckenstein of Arizona is the Twitter-savvy keyboardist behind sheets of conservative talking points rolled up, waved and jabbed at testy forums across the nation.

Fleckenstein says he is a father of two in Phoenix and was in the military. Weeks ago, he began combing one of the primary health-care reform bills under his Fleckman persona. He blogged and tweeted, to more than 6,000 followers, with page references to what he saw as especially egregious liberal ideas in the bill, HR 3200…

“I don’t know the gentleman who put them together, but they’re everywhere,” said Jeff Crank of the Colorado office of Americans for Prosperity, which is fighting the health-reform bills…

But even some of his ideological soul mates say he has gone too far.

The Washington, D.C., office of Americans for Prosperity decided to do a line-by-line critique of Fleckman’s page-by- page critique, calling him out where the group thinks he has distorted the meaning of the proposed health bills.

“Page 29: This is PARTIALLY TRUE,” goes the AFP dressing-down of Fleckman. AFP’s analysis says the bill does not specifically outline rationing but adds, “These government imposed limits on benefits paid are the statutory groundwork for what could become rationing once costs inevitably spiral out of control in a government run system.”

In other places, his interpretation gets hammered with “This is FALSE.” Fleckman says on Page 50 that the bill gives free health care to “all non-US citizens, illegal or otherwise.” AFP counters that although the page might indicate costly programs, it “does not discuss providing coverage to non-citizens.”

Although many of Fleckman’s points are “serious and very accurate,” Kerpen said, “there were a lot of things on there we thought were false. . . . We wanted to make sure folks remained armed with this kind of information but give them the ones we thought were accurate and verifiable.”

“There’s enough bad in this bill that we don’t need to be untruthful or misrepresent it in any way,” Crank said.

Happy to see Jeff Crank belatedly feels that way–but where was he for the last three weeks? Where was he, for example, at his bus tour’s stop in Pueblo a week and a half ago, where a speaker on Crank’s own stage warned that “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?”

Crank’s Americans for Prosperity has subsidized totally insane and untruthful claims about the health care reform bills pending in Congress from the beginning of this recess campaign. They have allowed assertions much worse than anything this guy Fleckenstein has claimed to parade unchallenged before the crowds they goad out for these rallies. For them to say “we don’t need to be untruthful” this late in the game, after everything they’ve already done and abetted, is nothing short of preposterous.