Alan Grayson: I Was Right – GOP is Sadistic, Want You To Die Quickly

Former Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson reacting to Monday night’s Republican Tea Party debate — during which the audience cheered at the concept of allowing a 30-year old uninsured man to die — called it “sadism.”

As The New Civil Rights Movement reported earlier today, the GOP audience cheered, and screamed, “Yeah!” when moderator Wolf Blitzer asked Ron Paul if he was suggesting letting a hypothetical 30-​year old uninsured man die because he couldn’t afford to pay for his medical care. Ron Paul said, “that’s what freedom’s all about.”

This follows on the footsteps of last week’s MSNBC Republican Party presidential debate at the California Ronald Reagan Library, during which the audience cheered — twice — upon being told that Texas Governor Rick Perry had executed 234 people.

Via The Huffington Post:

The jubilant shouts of members of the GOP audience encouraging the death of a hypothetical uninsured man bring to mind the 2009 House floor speech delivered by former Florida Rep. Alan Grayson, in which he famously charged: “The Republicans want you to die quickly if you get sick.” Members of the crowd at the Tampa debate agree with Grayson.

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HuffPost asked Grayson what he thought of the crowd cheering for the death of the uninsured man. He writes:

My speech was about the fact I had been listening to the Republicans for months, and they literally had no plan to help all those millions of people who can’t see a doctor when they’re sick. So I said, in sort of a wry manner, that their plan was “don’t get sick.” All I really wanted to do was just call attention to the stark absence of a Republican plan. But Fox, trying to take the heat off Joe Wilson and Sarah Palin I guess, transmogrified that into a charge that Republicans want to kill people.What you saw tonight is something much more sinister than not having a healthcare plan. It’s sadism, pure and simple. It’s the same impulse that led people in the Coliseum to cheer when the lions ate the Christians. And that seems to be where we are heading — bread and circuses, without the bread. The world that Hobbes wrote about — “the war of all against all.”