James Joyner misses the point that Josh Marshall is trying to make. Marshall’s point wasn’t that everyone on the Right is a crazy nutbag while everyone on the left is cooly logical. Marshall’s key point is here (emphasis mine):
That’s the thing about where the GOP is right now. I don’t question that they’ve gotten some traction on a range of issues over the last month or so. But they’re still relying on some pretty far-out, alienated and often just generally whacked out folks to puts the gusts of wind into their sails.
When you are relying on birthers and teabaggers to push the fight against health care reform, you are doing something quite distinct from how the Democrats deal with the IMF and World Bank protesters. If the Democrats had sent labor goons into town hall meetings to scare the crap out of reps considering Bush’s Social Security privitization, that would somewhat equivalent to what the Republicans are doing.
But it’s even worse than that. The Republicans are actively turning their base into a bunch of misinformed, angry hooligans by their tolerance and tacit support for the Birther and Teabagging movements. These people would be unbalanced anyway, but they didn’t come up with the idea that Obama was born in Kenya on their own. Someone had to tell them that Obama wants to take their guns away and dictate their end-of-life decisions for them. If you keep feeding lies to the gullible, they get dumber and dumber. And if those lies suggest that their whole way of life is about to be ruined, a certain subset of them will turn violent and kill people.
As a Republican, Joyner should be embarrassed to see his party attempting to benefit from the growth of violent lunacy.
but he’s a republican and a conservative, and so by definition, he has no foresight whatsoever.
None of them do. Right now at facebook, some conservative buddy of mine is flipping out about email surveillabnce, and when i remind him that he cheered this on when Bush established it, his response was “yes, but THAT was or terrorists!”
no foresight.
Now congressmen are getting a beatdown.
What are the odds we get through August without some nut sneaking in a weapon and opening fire at a town hall?
they definitely need to be vigilant. It’s getting nutty out there.
yes, and james joyner didn’t foresee that happening.
proves my point.
Are you making the assumption that anyone in the Republican Party has any shame about any of this?
Because they don’t care what is done. They really don’t. As long as it gets results. And it is getting results. And the Democrats don’t seem to know how to deal with it. And much of our media continue to ply this lie that it is somehow a real grassroots uprising by average Americans. This is not going to stop, it is only going to continue to grow. And there really isn’t a damn thing anyone can do about it. Really, what can anyone do about it? There is no winning hand. Even if it is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is all nothing but manufactured rage, the Cokie Roberts rule will always apply, “Now that it’s out there, you have to talk about it”. Whether it is true or not, real or manufactured, it must be injected into the mainstream as conventional wisdom.
This genie is not going to be put back in the bottle. We can look forward to this kind of thing for the remainder of Obama’s term on any issue that does not comport with the lunatic right wing orthodoxy. They’ve seen its effectiveness and it will become their primary tool in their quest to neuter and destroy all things Obama.
The only question is, “What is the next step in the morphing of this kind of behavior?”
Yes he does. He gets the only thing his kind cares about: winning not matter what. If that means setting psychos loose at townhall meetings, so be it, and to hell with what happens to the country. When people start getting wounded or killed, enablers like Joyner, O’Reilly, Limbaugh, Beck, Dobbs, Hannity, etc. will wring their hands and deny any connection. And the “news” media will pretty much back them up, except maybe for a little whining by the “liberals”.
Maybe it’s time for the other side to start playing by the wingnut rules: identify these plants by name and address and track them back to their sponsors. At the very least, start arresting and investigating them.
arresting them for what?
Disorderly Conduct? If that law can be applied to a Harvard prof in his own home, couldn’t it apply to someone disrupting a public gathering?
Virtually the only way to deal with it is let it continue to it’s logical conclusion. That would be when they cannot help themselves and start shouting out birther stuff.
You cannot arrest them for disorderly conduct. The media would go nuts. And the logical conclusion to asking the police to do more than they are is the police using tasors.
That would be disastrous.
nalbar
arrest them for what?
how about making terroristic threats, for starters?
or simple assault: you don’t have to lay a finger on anyone for that, you just have to put them in fear of bodily harm or death.
i think a lot of what i’m reading about is assault.
This is the direction that this going, I’m afraid. It is the standard evolution of an authoritarian movement with fascist roots.
With the smaller venues of these town halls and the fact that there are so many in localized settings, law enforcement is generally going to be the town or county P.D. At the large campaign venues, security was widespread and very concentrated. Secret Service and Federal Agents. But that isn’t the case here. And are the locals equipped to deal with an organized threat of this nature? I don’t know. I would doubt it.
Someone is going to be severely injured or killed. That is almost a certainty.
As sjct writes arrest them for disorderly conduct. Bring back the fairness doctrine, and for God’s sake, protect our Congresspeople by appropriate legislation if necessary. Or will the Obama regime go down without a fight? We are facing collective insanity on the part of the right wing Republicans. If they want sedition and revolution, then, it’s time for the national government to protect itself and handle this conservative threat directly. Pass the proper laws and, then, enforce them.
Don, if you want to see the wingnuts go orgasmically ecstatic from coast to coast and have the media go all-in in these lunatic’s defense, it will be because the Democrats and their supporters do exactly the things you prescribe.
I think Nalbar has it right. You have no choice but to let it proceed to it’s logical conclusion. It cannot help but self destruct. The only question is just how much damage is left in it’s wake. That is the sad truth. This is America, warts and all. And the system that we have allows people to do the kinds of things they are doing right now, with impunity.
The thing that makes it especially maddening is that it would likely be very easy for the movement to be exposed for what it is, if we actually had a press which gave a flying fuck about doing their job. But, for the most part, they don’t.
So just like the nuts during the campaign, it’s going to take an accumulation of crazies regularly displaying their craziness in large forums, before anyone in the media even begins to contemplate reporting the real story. And at that point we will probably be so hopelessly far down the road of being a horribly fractured and polarized country that we will be able to accomplish nothing of any substance. But that is the goal of all of this, now isn’t it? Heads they win, tails you lose. That’s the playing field they are striving for. And right now it looks like the rules of the game have been defined just as they would have hoped for.
What can I say, our political system is supremely dysfunctional and fucked up. And one side is hell bent on destroying it totally. The question is, will anybody care enough to try and save it or will we all just stand by and watch it come down?
I wish I had the answer. Anybody care to take a stab?
Now come the death threats.
I don’t think the Democrats should surrender to domestic terrorism of the Republican, or any, variety. Democracy cannot exist under such a hostile climate. If the country is worth saving, then this internal threat must be faced and the sooner the better. How long will the lunatics and their allies in the press resist when they face fines and jail sentences? Further, at the rate things are coming unglued, it is just a matter of time before America faces once again civil discord. If the losing party will not accept the will of the majority, then, democracy as we know it is over. Plus, a civil war with nuclear weapons on both sides spells out an American Armageddon and what good will money be if everything is radioactive?
At this point most of it is still a form of civil disobedience. You cannot over react to civil disobedience, you have to return it with civility.
True, it is a strange corporate financed type of CD, but the people demonstrating are passionate true believers.
But they are still bat shit crazy, and if you reply with civility, and attempt to have a conversation, the Hitler posters will soon be out.
nalbar
This situation is not new. Howard Zinn in ‘A Peoples History of the United States’ talks about this during the time when some politicians were stirring the pot of the alienated to get support for our own revolution. Howard Zinn points out that they did not want to stir it too much or they might get a real revolution (riot) instead of the change of ownership at the top they were seeking. The politicians knew they had to limit this. John McCain faced the same thing and tried to pull back when Sarah Palin stirred the pot.
This is different now because it’s not the politicians but the corporations that are stirring the pot. They will not pull back because it’s about money, not people. This will get ugly. Do you think any member in congress is not aware that this is a corporate sponsored astro-turf activity?
The only thing that’s important is that members of congress understand that the voting public is behind health care reform. Polling from their district is a much clearer measure of this than an astro-turf mob and the members of congress know it. We have the Internet to make sure this information gets to and stays at the surface. Just cancel all the town halls for every ones safety and let the media talk about why the town halls were all canceled.