Former Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) said on MSNBC today that he agreed with House Minority Leader John Boehner that health care is the biggest threat the country has ever seen.
“It is in fact socialism,” Tancredo said. “It is a true, very scary threat.”
He couldn’t, however, answer when anchor David Shuster asked if Medicare and the Veterans Administration, both single payer programs, pose a similar threat.
Tancredo left midway soon after when Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas took a shot at Tancredo for avoiding military service during the Vietnam War. (Tancredo deferred being drafted after college because he was being treated for depression.)
“I’m a veteran,” Moulitsas said when Tancredo claimed veterans would prefer vouchers over VA care. “I did not get a deferment because I was too depressed to fight in the war I supported in Vietnam.”
“That’s a cheap rotten stupid thing to say,” Tancredo said. When Moulitsas didn’t apologize, he took off his microphone and left.
Late Update: The original version of this post reported that former Rep. Tancredo (R) said that it was a appropriate for Tea Party protestors to carry Holocaust imagery to dramatize the horrors of health care reform. He did answer “you bet” to the question of whether it was appropriate to use such images. However, further review of the videotape makes us think this answer was a product of confusion in the crosstalk between Shuster and Tancredo. The latter seems to have thought he was answering a different question. And understood in this context, “you bet” meant he thought it was inappropriate. Tancredo said plenty of crazy stuff in the interview. But we don’t think he meant to defend the use of such imagery.
