In response to the violence that occurred at Representative Russ Carnahan’s town hall meeting held in St. Louis on August 6^th 2009 the Service Employers International Union or SEIU posted a video on YouTube suggesting we get back to more peaceful and respectful debate on the issue of Health Care Reform. While I would agree with that basic premise there is a problem with their video.

The video they posted shows union demonstrations as completely peaceful and nice while opposition to reform as being ugly and violent. They even used portions of the video of the incident that followed the Carnahan event. The problem is they edited out significant portions of the video including all portions that show people wearing SEIU shirts behaving erratically, cursing, and threatening other people on scene and finally at least one union member being arrested.

Who actually started the violence and what lead up to it is not entirely clear by any reporting I have seen to date. I am sure there will be law suits over this and the courts will have to decide who is at fault but it is clear the SEIU wanted no part of the embarrassing video of their members behaving in a manner that befits the label of union thug which they took strong offense to apparently.

Here is a link to the union website posting on the incident and the video.

http://www.seiu.org/2009/08/stop-the-violence-at-health-care-town-halls.php

Here is a link to the full video and below that is a link to the Weekly Standard Blog, which attempts to decipher the dialog in the video.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/weblogs/TWSFP/2009/08/eye_witness_to_st_louis_scuffl.asp

You be the judge of what really happened but what is hard to deny is there was more to this than the union wanted to acknowledge on their site.