Remember the election, when Republican political leaders such as Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh (The heart and brains of the party) and Michele Bachmann (whom I shall not attempt to define) encouraged their followers to be violent? Well, it is happening again, only this time in relation to opposing health care reform.
This sort of thing:
is being done as part of an organized effort by the Republican party.
This sort of thing is happening with greater frequency and greater severity every day. This is the legacy of John McCain and Dick Cheney.
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Where is the violence? I disagree with the protesters but I did not see any violence.
So far the violence has been verbal, disruptive screaming and stopping legitimate speakers from speaking that sort of thing.
As more information comes out we learn that there is an organization busing these people from town hall to town hall. They are all bible thumping crazies, and it is starting to look like they are ex-reproductive services clinic attack groups.
This is just more evidence that universal healthcare is needed in this country: All these poor people can’t afford the meds they so desperately need.
Joe, the violence in question is actually just the threat of violence. The congressman described a protester carrying a sign depicting a tombstone with his name on it. That’s a clear threat. No, it’s not technically violent, and 9 times out of 10 I expect the protester wouldn’t follow through, but that’s not the issue.
Yeah, I wouldn’t go so far as to call that violent. Threatening, yes. Childish, rude, and bullying – absolutely.
One of the members of congress at one of these events had to be escorted by five armed police officers to his car because of the crowd. Signs threatening physical violence and death have been carried around. We have not heard yet of specific threats being yelled out, but this is the same crowd that wanted to “bomb obama” and “kill obama” during the election, that vandalized property and so on.
I don’t particularly accept that there is some arbitrary line when shoving your way into a town hall you don’t belong it and screaming at people who are presenting ideas or asking questions to make them sit down and shut up, and so on, is “technically violent.” There is no sense in waiting for this to happen.
There is almost no line between what we see here and Westboro Baptist church. There is very little difference between Westboro and any of a half a dozen very significantly violent acts carried out by Republicans and Libertarians over the last half-year, including murder. This is just more of the same: An organized Republican circus, whipping ignorant people up into a frenzy some of them will not be able to come back from.
Has no-one learned from the Bush Administration’s Potemkin Village, er, town hall meetings? Don’t let in anyone who disagrees with you and eject anyone who looks like they might. Tip: scan the parking lot for bumper stickers and have your goons pretend they’re Secret Service.
Seriously though, set some simple ground rules (no signs, no slogan shirts, people line up at a microphone to ask questions, questions limited to a minute, moderated, etc.) Basic guidelines for a civil Q&A with the stated intent of making sure all voices get heard, not just the loud ones. Oh, and disruptive people will be ejected, possibly arrested. The “no sign, no slogan shirt” part should keep most of the overt bozos out in the parking lot. There shouldn’t be any First Amendment issues with this, otherwise be mostly reasonable, and let the courts settle the fringe cases.
The crazies will have none of this, of course (being crazy, entitled, and whipped to a spittle-flecked frenzy by the talk radio blowhards.) So eject them, politely at first, dragging their sorry asses out like dirty fucking hippies if necessary. And it will be necessary. Let them cool their heels in jail for a weekend and let them play martyr. And keep doing it.
And make sure the local media is there to pick it up. O’Reilly, etc. would make this shit up or blow it all out of proportion and trumpet it anyways, so you might as well really toss the low-level protesters in the can. It gives them an arrest record and a taste of the criminal justice system, and might well inject a bit of reality back into their Limbaugh fantasy worlds. See, the real activists, left or right, will take this in stride; they expect to be arrested, in some cases they want that as an outcome. 99% of the birther loonies don’t realize that actions have consequences simply because there have been no consequences for being one brickbat shy of a rioting mob. A night in jail will break the will of most of these cretins.
If this was a peaceful protest, a march, a rally, a sit-in, 12 nuts with a box of teabags and a bullhorn from Harbor Freight, it’d be a different situation. But these people are disrupting a public event, so up the ante, set some rules, politely draw a line in the sand and enforce it. You don’t need truncheons and tear gas (make sure the cops get the memo; they seem to love that shit especially where DFHs are involved and nobody’s looking.) There’s no point in cracking heads; all that’d do is rearrange the rubble.
My 8 years at the University of Wisconsin in the mid-80s solidified my hatred of disruptive mobs; my views on peaceful protest have softened considerably having left that cloistered, radicalized environment for the real world. The loonies can say what they want but they don’t get to shout down the opposition or disrupt the conversation.
So let them speak, in turn, civilly, just like everyone else. Strip away the safety of the mob. If they can’t control themselves as individuals, toss them in the pokey for a weekend and let them see how far that gets them in life.
This isn’t solely a Republican tactic. Go to any hearing involving a contentious large construction project and you’ll see lots of union thugs employing the same tactics to intimidate those who oppose the construction.
Joe, that simply is not true. To begin with, most public hearings are organized so that this kind of thing can’t happen. If there is this sort of hooliganism, or vote-packing (another tactic) going on, people have to identify themselves as proper stakeholders to vote or speak. Lining the back of the room and the aisles with non-stakeholders eventually results in thier expulsion. The cases we are seeing here are cases of a system built on trust where there were not really problems like this before, i.e., soft targets, being attacked by organized morality-free hooligans.
Futhermore, in case you were trying to suggest this, inappropriate use of the public forum by one group does not justify it for another group, AND, for the cases you claim, the Unions may have been actual stakeholders, but people bussed into a district “town hall” meeting are not. They are lying liars telling lies.
I never thought I’d see Limbaugh described as the brains of anything, but if that’s the best they have, it really explains a lot.
No, Greg, it simply is true. Unions around here routinely bus workers to development hearings for the sole purpose of intimidating those that are opposed to the construction project.
Don’t get me wrong, I am completely in agreement with your sympathies, but when you exaggerate your claims and reflexively and lazily call me a liar (instead of doing some critical thinking and a modicum of research) when I am simply trying to add to the discussion you lose a lot of credibility.
Joe, that article doesn’t suggest the union was bussed in to disrupt. It says they did, but it also shows two council members shouting at each other. The whole thing looks anything but organized, and as Greg pointed out, the union appears to be an interested party.
Yea, Joe, it is totally different. Yes, unions not only try to do this sort of thing but they have done worse in the bast (I do support unions, but I also am prepared to disagree with some of their tactics) but no, this is not the same thing at all. As I said and Stephanie affirmed, the unions are stakeholders here.
Bob: Right, in fact, this sort of thing is not allowed and is stopped in its tracks at public hearings that have been previously inoculated by this sort of crap. You start off not bothering with the distrust of those who show up because you don’t need to distrust them. Then, a bunch of yahoos show up and from then on you’ve got to make rules.
So, you can get tased for asking John Kerry an awkward question out of turn, but you can get away with this shit just fine? Weird…