Town Hall Meeting and the VA "Death Book"

Last night I attended a congressional town hall with Adam Smith (D-WA 9th) with a crowd of nearly 2000 people. So many people, in fact, that the venue had to be changed twice, finally ending up in a high school stadium.

The crowd, as you can imagine, was restive, but this time the pro health care reform people outnumbered the astroturfers by about 2 to 1. And you know how it is with bullies -- if they are outnumbered, they tend to be less offensive, less pushy. Less asshole-y.

Plus Adam Smith is a pro at working a crowd, and he handled the few vocal hecklers pretty well. The only fracas that developed happened when some jerkwad held up one of those infamous Obama-as-Hitler posters. Everyone around him started shouting, "Put that picture down!" Naturally he refused to do it, and finally someone tore it away from him, crumpled it up and threw it over the railing onto the field. Then a small scuffle broke out, but I was sitting too far away to see any of the details of it.

But that was the only incident really worth mentioning. Otherwise people who were asking questions of the congressman were by and large respectful, even those who disagreed with him.

One guy got up and asked Smith if he knew about the "death book" that was being passed out by the VA and asked him to have it pulled from all VA facilities. Smith said he didn't know about it, but that he would look into it. Then the guy said that he'd heard about it on Fox News Sunday...

The crowd -- at least our 2/3 of it -- groaned loudly and almost in unison. I think the guy was a little put off that his favorite ox had been gored.

That VA "death book", by the way, is a pamphlet entitled "Your Life, Your Choices", and you can read it for yourself. Go ahead and then tell me whether it's a "death book" that advises ailing veterans to commit suicide, as we are being told by Limpdick, Slanthead, and especially Michael Oxymoronic-Black-Republican Steele.