Today on Twitter, hate radio host Neal Boortz advocated that businesses fire Obama voters to deal with the tough economy:
Steve Benen writes, “Obviously, as a substantive matter, this doesn’t make any sense. As a legal matter, it’s a crime to fire an employee based on how he or she voted.” Discriminating against Obama voters seems to be a new trend for the right wing. In Florida recently, a doctor posted a sign reading, “If you voted for Obama…seek urologic care elsewhere.”
Yesterday, Think Progress reported that hate radio host Neal Boortz used his Twitter account to ridiculously claim that Congress’s health care legislation will end up killing more people than a terrorist attack.
Last night, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann responded to Boortz, referring to him as part of the “lunatic fringe” that is intent on portraying health care reform as lethal, despite the fact that it’s a lack of proper health care coverage that kills 45,000 Americans every year:
OLBERMANN: Each day it seems the lunatic fringe finds a new way to permit its adherents to view the rest of us as a little less than human – we don’t count as much as they do, ordinary Americans don’t matter. Newest example, hate-radio-host Neal Boortz yesterday: ‘Obamacare will do more damage’ he said, ‘ than a successful terrorist bombing of an airliner and kill more people as well.’ So, rather than count how many things are wrong with that statement, or how many times Neal Boortz must have been abused for him to wind up so dehumanized for him to say such a thing, let us answer it on his terms. What would you do, sir, if terrorists were killing 45,000 people each year in this country?
Watch it:
Today, Boortz responded to Olbermann by vulgarly calling the MSNBC host a “prepuce” and then challenging him to a direct debate on whether Congress’s health care legislation will kill more people than a terrorist attack:
Boortz is presumably anxious to have a larger forum to disseminate his hateful rants. He has previously referred to New Orleans residents as “parasites,” has labeled welfare recipients as “human parasitic garbage,” and has suggested that lower-income Americans shouldn’t be allowed to vote.
Following the failed Christmas Day terrorist attack, many on the right have used the incident as a political football, trying to score partisan points on the issue of terrorism. Hate radio host Neal Boortz took this politicizing to a new level on his Twitter account yesterday, saying that the failed terrorist attack would have killed fewer people than the congressional health care bill if it is passed:
Of course, Boortz won’t acknowledge the fact that nearly 45,000 Americans are estimated to perish every year simply because they do not have access to proper health coverage. Stephen Flynn of the Center for National Policy notes that “Americans are at far greater risk of being killed in accidents or by viruses than by acts of terrorism.”
Yesterday, hate-radio talk show host Neal Boortz mocked President Obama’s pledge to rebuild New Orleans, calling the victims of Hurricane Katrina human trash. This weekend, President Barack Obama told the New Orleans Times-Picayune that he “remains focused on rebuilding New Orleans and the Gulf Coast,” and anything less “would be a betrayal of who we are as a country.” Boortz responded on Twitter by attacking the “debris that Katrina chased out“:
Boortz, who regularly mocks Latinos, women and the poor — even calling Rep. Cynthia McKinney a “ghetto slut” — made an expansive case that the combined natural and human disaster of Hurricane Katrina actually helped the city of New Orleans on his June 24, 2009 radio show. Although Katrina’s devastation cost this nation $80 billion, killed thousands, and displaced a million people, Boortz believes “Katrina cleansed New Orleans“:
Katrina cleansed New Orleans. It just washed out a lot of debris, including human debris.
Boortz has also called the overwhelmingly black and poor victims of the Katrina disaster in New Orleans “human parasites” and “deadbeats,” even suggesting that a victim of Hurricane Katrina consider prostitution instead of “sucking off taxpayers.”
Boortz is nationally syndicated from Atlanta’s WSB, part of the Cox Enterprises empire, whose billionaire heiress Anne Cox Chambers is the richest person in Georgia and a million-dollar tax evader.
Referring to research done for a Wonk Room exclusive, top hurricane scientist Kerry Emanuel of MIT explains that the “levees would have held” if not for global warming:
Probably if Hurricane Katrina had happened in 1980, the levees would have held. Global warming didn’t cause Katrina, but it did cause Katrina to be more intense than it otherwise would have been.
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