Political Darwin Award: Anti-Healthcare Protesters Ridicule Parkinson’s Victim

There is a disturbing video making its rounds on the web today which deserves comment here.  The footage comes from the Columbus Dispatch’s coverage of a Health Care rally outside Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy’s (D) office.  In it, an elderly man holding a sign that reads “Got Parkinson’s?  I DO and YOU might.  Thanks for Helping.  That’s [illegible]” is shouted at, mocked, and ridiculed as the anti-healthcare protesters standing over him dismissively throw money at his face.

It is a profoundly disturbing image.

Not a great deal more is known about the unnamed man and his sign, nor the rest of his encounter with the protesters yet the few seconds of video tape leave a strong impression on viewers.

It is no great revalation that the Tea Party is an on-going public relations disaster. With its rallies liberally (no pun intended) littered with racist and sometimes fascist imagery, the upstart bastion of american social conservatism has faced and uphill climb in the mainstream press.  Even so, the footage of the Columbus rally is likely to be a serious bodyblow for the movment.

Certainly few who see the video will change their opinion of the Tea Party this late in the game but the light in which it casts the anti-healthcare reform movement as a whole is quite negative.  While the Tea Party has taken a vocal stance on healthcare it has not really had an opportunity to become emblamatic of the anti-healthcare movement.  Now, in the final moments of the healthcare battle, that seems about to change.

For many Americans, what happened in Columbus is what the healthcare issue is all about and the disdainful way in which the anti-healthcare protesters fling a few bills at the subject of their derision is a perfect illustration of everything that is wrong with the small-government narrative.

If this is what Conservative opposition to healthcare reform looks like, the Democrats have already won