The Barney Frank town hall video

Democrats have been ineffectively treating health care reform as a “policy debate,” said Dan Turner in the Los Angeles Times, while Republicans see it as a “political slug-fest.” So the Democratic base must be thrilled with Rep. Barney Frank, the first Democrat to “seriously slug back,” in an unusually “entertaining” broadside at a woman who asked at a town hall why he supported President Obama’s “Nazi policy” to expand health care. (watch the Barney Frank town hall video)

The trouble is, said John McCormack in The Weekly Standard, the target of Frank's "smack down" was not a conservative or even a Republican. The woman who called Obama's health plan a “Nazi policy” is a “Lyndon LaRouche Democrat.” So much for the Left’s “cheap trick” of lumping conservative ObamaCare opponents in with the “few” protesters carrying Obama=Hitler signs. Yes, “LaRouchites are on the fringe—but it’s indisputable that they are fringe Democrats.”

That’s “gibberish,” said David Weigel in The Washington Independent. Democrats have “repeatedly purged” the “LaRouche cultists” from the party. More to the point, the “deranged” LaRouchites oppose Obama’s plans because “they think he’s trying to euthanize old people and the infirm”—the same nonsense spouted by conservatives like Sarah Palin.

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“Nutty protesters” aren’t emblematic of reform opponents, said The Boston Globe in an editorial, but they “fully deserved” the mildly “apoplectic” one-liner retorts in the Barney Frank town hall video. The real “losers,” though, are those who went to Frank's town hall meeting seeking reasoned debate, and their loss is “compounded” by the “incessant replaying of the food-fight moments.”