Daily Beast: Republicans stole the "death panel" from . . . the LaRouche crazies?

Over at the Daily Beast, Max Blumenthal has a quick, gratifying article which exposes the crackpot roots of the the right-wing's obsession with so-called "death panels." Blumenthal traces this utter lunacy back to, well, utter lunatics: the rhetoric appears to have been absorbed from comments made by Lyndon LaRouche's followers. As we reported after attending Barney Frank's town-hall meeting last week, the Larouche people have been conspicuously showing up at congressional town-hall debates on health care reform sporting a signature poster: a photo of President Obama photoshopped with a Hitler mustache. 

(For what it's worth, Max should add the Phoenix to his Google Reader: he correctly takes the mainstream media to task for looping the footage of Barney asking a LaRouche follower what planet she's from -- after she compares Obamacare to the Third Reich -- but no one, save us, has been mentioning the woman's ties to LaRouche.)

What's sickening isn't just that Republicans have latched onto the LaRouche crazies' wildest claim -- that somehow health care reform would lead to euthenasia -- but that the Obama-as-Hitler rhetoric has begun to show up as a common trope among right-wing