Saturday, March 12, 2011

Daft NH GOPer wants 'defective' people to die in Siberia

Yup, that's right. According to Foster's Daily Democrat, a 91-year-old New Hampshire state representative named Marty Harty was talking with one of his constituents, a woman named Sharon Omand.
"The world population has gotten too big and the world is being inherited by too many defective people," he told her.
Omand said she asked him to clarify if he meant mentally ill and developmentally disabled and he responded, "I mean all the defective people, the drug addicts, mentally ill, the retarded — all of them."
"I asked what we should do with them," Omand said, and Harty said, "I believe if we had a Siberia we should send them to this and they would all freeze and die and we will be rid of them."
Normally TeamsterNation doesn't pay much attention to what dopey politicians say. There just isn't enough time. But this caught our attention because New Hampshire's Great and General Court recently passed a right-to-work (for LESS) bill.

Harty admitted he and his colleagues in the Legislature didn't know what they were doing. In a letter to Foster's editor, Harty wrote,
I'm a New Hampshire Republican representative. Got slid in during the Republican landslide last fall. So far I really don't know what I'm doing. The whole process is so alien to anything else...I think that a few of the other first time reps must be in the same boat with me. We're all sort of bluffing it out. The few votes I've made so far I really didn't know what I was voting for or against. Just looked at the people around me and went along with them.
The anti-worker bill is now in the state Senate. Gov. John Lynch says he'll veto it, but it's unclear whether the bill has enough support to override his veto. Perhaps Marty Harty will have figured out what he's doing by then and vote to support the constituents he was elected to represent.

Thanks to TalkingPointsMemo for flagging the story.