These disruptions of Town Halls must stop!

Nancy Pelosi faces a horrifying disruption at a town hall meeting (here via here):

By the way, speaking of Democrats revising their publicly declared policy positions:

We all know that all this “Death Panel” stuff is crazy talk, hell Obama himself has called such arguments “dishonest,” problem is, he’s also said this about his grandmother:

THE PRESIDENT: So that’s where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues. But that’s also a huge driver of cost, right?
I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here.

LEONHARDT: So how do you — how do we deal with it?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It’s not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that’s part of what I suspect you’ll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.

Ok, so the “Death Panel” people may have jumped to the clearly unsupported conclusion that when the government gives you “guidance” it becomes mandatory. I mean, our income tax is a voluntary system (meaning you get the choice of weather or not to file and the IRS has the choice of weather or not to imprison you.) But this is clearly not what Obama is saying here, right? He’s saying that these “panels” would not define your care, just give you suggestions. Clearly he wouldn’t say that if he didn’t mean it.

On Saturday, he added a personal story of his own, citing the death of his grandmother to push back against unsubstantiated claims that he wants to establish government “death panels” that would deny care to elderly patients.
“I just lost my grandmother last year. I know what it’s like to watch somebody you love who’s aging deteriorate, and have to struggle with that,” Mr. Obama said. “So the notion that somehow I ran for public office, or members of Congress are in this so they can go around pulling the plug on grandma? I mean, when you start making arguments like that, that’s simply dishonest.”

Yeah, we certainly don’t want any dishonesty in political discourse.

It’s a legitimate topic of discussion, and there was a fair bit of thought in what he said in April. But if your first response to someone successfully demagoguing an issue like this is try to paint them as dishonest crazy people and deny you ever said anything that even smelled like what they’re talking about, it sort of makes a reasoned person doubt your sincerity when you first brought the subject up.