Town Hall 'Paranoia and Violence' a Liberal Fantasia

To listen to the Obama camp and the liberal media, the anti-Obamacare protesters at last month’s town halls are a grave threat to our way of life, Mary Katharine Harn writes in the Weekly Standard. But “the climate of paranoia and violence that enveloped our political system this August was largely a creation” of the people who railed against it (think Olbermann and Matthews). In more than 400 meetings, “there were fewer than ten documented incidents that could be described as violent.”

What’s more, Harn writes, seven of those incidents “were perpetrated by Obama supporters and union members on Obama critics.” And that doesn’t even include the finger-biting incident. So when “the left's self-righteous leaders fire-and-brimstone the townspeople with tales of a country doomed by loud health policy protests,” Harn writes, “they sound as out-of-touch as Footloose's Reverend Shaw Moore inveighing against the great peril of dancing the watoosie.” (More health care reform stories.)