Wednesday, August 05, 2009

Mob riots brought to you by your health insurance.

Crooks and Liars:

The DNC has a winner here, going straight for the jugular with these assholes.

"They lost the election. They lost on the Recovery Act, the budget and children's health care," the script reads. "They've lost the confidence of the American people after eight years of failed policies that ruined our economy and cost millions of jobs."

Now, desperate Republicans and their well-funded allies are organizing angry mobs - just like they did during the election. Their goal? Destroy President Obama and stop the change Americans voted for overwhelmingly in November."



Who is behind these fake mob attacks.

Joe Sudbay of AmericaBlog:
The Republican National Committee doesn't want to hear from people who are upset over its thuggish tactics at Town Hall meetings. The DNC launched an ad, Enough of the Mob, which asked people to call the RNC. Heard from readers, Tim Beauchamp and ShirleyGoodnessandMercy, that the RNC is dumping those who call about the ad.
Stuff you can do. And here.

Commenters at Digby's Hullabaloo's post have suggestions.

Who the individuals in the mobs are:

A telling anecdote recounted by Pat Buchanan to New Yorker writer George Packer last year captures the dark spirit that still hovers around the GOP. In 1966 Buchanan and Richard Nixon were at the Wade Hampton Hotel in Columbia, S.C., where Nixon worked a crowd into a frenzy: "Buchanan recalls that the room was full of sweat, cigar smoke, and rage; the rhetoric, which was about patriotism and law and order, 'burned the paint off the walls.' As they left the hotel, Nixon said, 'This is the future of this Party, right here in the South.' "

That same rage was on display again in the fall of 2008, but this time the frenzy was stimulated by a pretty gal with a mocking little wink. Sarah Palin may not have realized what she was doing, but Southerners weaned on Harper Lee heard the dog whistle.

The curious Republican campaign of 2008 may have galvanized a conservative Southern base -- including many who were mostly concerned with the direction Democrats would take the country -- but it also repelled others who simply bolted and ran the other way. Whatever legitimate concerns the GOP may historically have represented were suddenly overshadowed by a sense of a resurgent Old South and all the attendant pathologies of festering hate and fear.

And:
The right, by contrast, seems perpetually fired up, and not just on health care. At a town meeting last month, Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.) was booed and heckled when he wouldn't concur with a noisy "birther" who argued that President Obama had been born in Kenya. This bit of social psychosis is limited almost entirely to Republicans: 77 percent of Americans, according to one recent poll, believe that Obama was born in the USA, but only 42 percent of Republicans do.

When future historians look back at this passage in our nation's history, I suspect they'll conclude that this Obama-isn't-American nuttiness refracted the insecurities and, in some cases, the hatred that a portion of conservative white America felt about having a black president and about the transformation of what many thought of as their white nation into a genuinely multiracial republic. But whatever the reasons, a mobilized minority is making a very plausible play to thwart a demobilized majority.

Media Matters.

We've seen this before. Think back to the recount of the election in 2000 and consider what we got then by not saying enough. We will not be hijacked again.

Update: Don Briggs of the Daily Kos: Tea Baggers FAIL to disrupt Health Care meeting, lessons shared.

2 comments:

Mike Goldman said...

The Tea Baggers will fail, and fail, and fail. They are made of fail.

ellroon said...

I pray you are right, Mike.