The guy that the local media interviewed as a spokesman for pro-Obamacare counter protesters at recent anti-Obamacare “tea party” events (like the Recess Rally at Congressman Carnahan’s Brentwood office last Saturday) is Franklin McCallie, retired principal at Kirkwood High School. He was the tall white-bearded man with the distinctive red beret.
McCallie has been following the Democrat playbook by going light on the facts and turning the discussion to negative personal attacks on the people who oppose the legislation. He told a reporter for CBS affiliate KMOV that opponents of the legislation were “keeping health care from other people.” In a taped interview with a student reporter on Saturday, McCallie said of anti-Obamacare protesters, “I don’t think they care about who gets health care.”
With all due respect, sir, these patriots are protesting a plan that would deny health care to patients lacking sufficient “Quality Adjusted Life Years” to have the “social usefulness” necessary to make their treatment “worth the investment.”
McCallie looked awfully familiar when he first surfaced in the health care debate. Tea party leader Dana Loesch figured it out. McCallie was the Kirkwood guy who defended the motives of “Cookie” Thornton, the shooter who killed 6 public officials (including the mayor and two police officers) at Kirkwood City Hall in February of 2008.
I can no longer find McCallie’s television interviews online, but I did find an op-ed piece he wrote for the Webster-Kirkwood Times immediately after the shootings. Describing Thornton as “a vivacious, enthusiastic member of the Kirkwood Community,” McCallie explained away the horrific acts as those of a person in “mental chaos.”
McCallie explained, “the specific issue of parking construction equipment and the fines for those acts under Kirkwood ordinance were bundled together in Cookie’s mind with an overall perception of racism over issues which many other citizens in Meacham Park also perceived. Many Meacham Park citizens protested the destruction of their homes for a mall. They perceived one more racist slight by the powerful white community over the smaller and powerless black community.”
Thornton, by the way, had supported the gutting of his neighborhood for that project because, McCallie noted, he believed his company had been promised significant demolition work. “When he did not get it, he told me [McCallie] it was one more act of discrimination against a black businessman, with all money going to white companies for destroying black houses.”
McCallie concluded that “the obsession of discrimination — whether real or perceived – overwhelmed Cookie’s judgment, causing him to do something completely against his normal nature.”
Such is the mindset of this Obamacare spokesman.
The Unablogger 