SS Nazi sign carried at town hall protest

From Raw Story

Right wing pundits are mocking House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for claiming that there are protesters "carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town meeting on healthcare."

The wizbang blog calls it a crock.

While it's possible the top House Democrat might have been misinformed (due to non-specific media reports) about a swastika, the following sign written with Nazi lettering, spotted at a Congressman Lloyd Doggett event, has been widely reported on liberal blogs and in the mainstream media.

DNC spokesman Brad Woodhouse referred to the sign in a recent statement, as Brian Beutler reported for TPM.

"The right wing extremists' use of things like devil horns on pictures of our elected officials, hanging members of Congress in effigy, breathlessly questioning the President's citizenship and the use of Nazi SS symbols and the like just shows how outside of the mainstream the Republican Party and their allies are," Woodhouse said.

The Atlantic's Mark Ambinder noted that a Democratic party strategist had emailed a YouTube clip that sported the sign (which can be seen below). The New York Times' Opinionator blog noted Ambinder's column, and quoted the sign paragraph.

Yesterday, Roll Call reported,

Van Hollen predicted that the groups’ more dramatic tactics — which have included the display of Nazi signs, a hanging effigy of Rep. Frank Kratovil (D-Md.) and a tombstone bearing the name of Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) — will “backfire in a big way” because their aim is to keep citizens from having a conversation about health care.

The San Francisco Chronicle is also reporting that "traditionally sleepy town hall meetings have become rowdy shout-fests across the nation, including Northern California, with opponents hanging members in effigy and mocking them with Nazi and devil imagery in an effort to derail discussions of health care."

Minnesota's Star Tribune reports,

Remember the Tea Party protests from earlier this year? Those same groups appear to have shifted to the health care front, armed with talking points, with horns painted on politician's pictures and, in at least one case, a sign with a Nazi "SS" logo.

In addition, at another town hall held in Worcester, Massachusetts, Democratic Congressman Jim McGovern, the Telegram reports, "was likened by an attendee to Josef Mengele, the Nazi officer who performed experiments on concentration camp survivors."

While some Republicans continue to mock Pelosi for her "I see swastikas" comment, not every conservative dismisses the possibility that it has happened.

Last night, Fox's Bill O'Reilly said, "They say it's easy to stack any town meeting with anti-Obama zealots, and it is, it is. You can do that through the Internet. You can say let's get out there, let's disrupt. I don't know if you have ever given a speech where they have far-left nuts in the audience and they go wild and scream and disrupt. This, that, and the other thing. How do you know that these people disrupting these meetings are legitimate folks?"

Thanks to a Huffington Post reader, a swastika picture surfaced Thursday afternoon, taken at "a protest last week outside the Fort Collins office of Rep. Betsy Markey (D-Colo.)"

Sam Stein writes, "A woman protesting Democratic plans for health care reform was captured holding up a sign of a Swastika, with the president's name below it, encircled and crossed out by a red line. The implication is that Obama is a Nazi -- though the culprit, in this case, added a question mark next to his name, as some sort of caveat."

The picture can be viewed at this link.

Also today, Media Matters notes that conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh has ratcheted up the nazi rhetoric.

Two examples posted at Media Matters include:

"[T]he Obama health care logo is damn close to a Nazi swastika logo."

"Adolf Hitler, like Barack Obama, also ruled by dictate"

Limbaugh's likening of the Obama health care logo to a swastika has led to an online rush to compare the two.

As The Times Online's Hattie Garlick notes, "'obama health care logo' remains one of the hottest search terms on Google."

In fact, Friday morning, two of the top five results on Google's Hot Trends for USA are related to it. The name of the blog Limbaugh promoted for advancing the Nazi logo figure comes in at #5 on the list: Sweetness and Light.

On Thursday, Media Matters remarked, "In reality, Obama's logo incorporates the caduceus -- the ancient symbol for medicine. If Sweetness & Light want to say that looks Nazi-ish, fine, but that's more the fault of Hippocrates than Obama."

Newsweek's Conspiracy Watch also labeled the comparison "pretty lame."

Meanwhile, health care reform opponents didn't leave the Nazi gear home when they went out to protest Thursday night.

"Two members of the audience at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D-Calif.) town hall meeting in Denver, Colorado, on Thursday -- including a toddler in a stroller -- were bedecked with images equating Barack Obama's policies to Nazism and the president to Hitler himself," Sam Stein reports for Huffington Post.

Stein notes, "In one image, a young man with a shirt that reads 'Hitler Gave Great Speeches Too' is photographed making what looks like a Hitler salute."

In a video posted on YouTube, the 16-year-old Alaskan told Talk Left's Jeralyn Merritt that he opposed the plan because this is America not Canada.

More on the anti-Pelosi demonstration can be found at Mike Stark's Firedoglake blog posting.

M.C.L comment: The right has finally lost their lids, remember back during the Bush era the right wing media would attack anyone if they said anything negative about Bush, the Dixie Chicks almost got their careers ruined by the right, Joe Scarborough bragged for weeks about getting Danny Glover fired from his phone company endorsement. Freedom of speech for the most part during Bush's term was restricted but now since the letter after the president's name changed from (R) to (D) the right wing media found a new respect for freedom of speech so much so they encourage fake tax protest that look like KKK rallies, wanting the president of the united states to fail and sending their followers to Democratic representatives' town hall meetings just to cause trouble. I wish these people that go to these events because they were prompt to by Rush, Hannity, Malkin and Beck just admit that they're mad because the President of the United States is a black man. They may out themselves as racists but at least their it's honest, because the stuff they're raging against they either have it i.e. medicare which is a government program or they supported it in the Bush administration i.e over the top government spending.