August 4: Talking Points Memo notes that the anti-health-reform crowd in at least one city has joined forces with the brainwashed followers of cult dingbat Lyndon LaRouche:
The Worcester Telegram & Gazette reports another Teabagger/Townhall incident up in the Worcester, Mass. This time it was Reps. McGovern (D) and Neal (D) heckled and shouted down several times by unruly Bay State Teabaggers at a townhall event U Mass Medical School.
Indeed, at one point, one heckler started likening Rep. McGovern to Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele, notorious for performing macabre experiments on concentration camp inmates.
But was it just Teabaggers?
It turns out a long-time TPM Reader (I’ll call him RZ to extra-super-double protect his anonymity) was there and he just after leaving the event he wrote in to tell us that at this event the Teabaggers were joined by a squad of LaRouchies.
July 31: this blog observes that the anti-health-reform crowd appeared to be taking its rhetorical cues from LaRouche’s nonsensical ramblings:
If you’ve been listening to all those Republican leaders spouting this nonsense and thinking “man, that sounds crazy”, there’s a good reason why. It’s because it is crazy. How can we tell? Because it is disturbingly similar to a line that has been pushed for a couple months now by an actual crazy person — political cult leader and full-on nutbar Lyndon LaRouche…
Now, I’m not saying that McCaughey and the rest of the Republican Party are taking their arguments directly from LaRouche. (Though anything’s possible, I suppose; LaRouchies have circulated in right-wing circles before.) What I am saying, though, is that it’s deeply, deeply weird that the leaders of a major political party — a party that claims to speak for nearly half of the electorate! — are out there making arguments on national television and on the floor of the Congress that are functionally indistinguishable from the rantings of a legendary crank.
Why are so many big-name Republicans lining up to buy a ticket on the crazy train?
Now we know the answer! It’s because their friends ride that train to work.