I wonder how Paul Krugman and Nancy Pelosi would explain my physician, Dr. Michael Richman. He is a thoracic-cardio surgeon in Santa Monica, Calif. who is liberal, who voted for Barack Obama, and who has disdain for most health insurance companies. Yet, he came on my radio show last week to announce that he deeply regrets having voted for Obama in light of the damage the president's plan would do to American medicine.
Now, if Dr. Richman attends a Democratic congressman's town hall meeting to protest the congressman's support for the government taking over about 16 percent of the gross domestic product, will he, too, be dismissed as a neo-Nazi or health insurance company stooge?
The answer is, probably yes. In fact, that is exactly what happened -- and captured on local Atlanta TV -- in Georgia's 13th Congressional District this past weekend. A local physician, Dr. Brian Hill, a urologist, went to a town hall meeting organized by Democratic Congressman David Scott. When Dr. Hill asked in a calm voice why the Congressman would support a government health plan in light of the failing government health plan in Massachusetts, Rep. Scott began yelling at him about people from outside the district coming to "hijack this event" and that those at his town hall meeting raising the health care issue should have had "the decency" to call the congressman's office to set up a meeting to discuss the issue and not take over the town hall meeting.
As reported by WXIA-TV News, the local NBC affiliate, however, Dr. Hill does live and vote in the congressman's district, had called the congressman's office numerous times and got no response, and is not a Republican.
But such people as Dr. Richman in California and Dr. Hill in Georgia don't exist in the Democratic Party's or in Paul Krugman's mind. Like most of the left since Marx, the American left today has created an image of the world to which reality is subservient. Left-wing theories define reality, not vice versa. And in that closed world, left-wing dissent is patriotic, while dissent against the left is fascistic at worst, or paid for by the greedy at best.