Right Wing Tactics

The right has managed to take over the Congressional Town Hall meetings this month by mainly busing in people from other places to attend and handing out talking points that tell the people to disrupt the Congress members any way you can. Anytime one of the right wing organizers is on a news program, they deny they are busing people in and telling them what to do and say. Of course, it's all a lie, like most everything that comes out of the right wing, conservative spin machine. Keeping the Congress members from speaking by using obstructionist tactics is the basest form of childish behavior. When asked, the right will tell you with a completely straight face, that these people are simply exercising their first amendment rights to say what they think and feel. How these people sleep at night is beyond my comprehension; I suppose they have no conscience. They claim to be patriots in one breath and tell lies that hurt America in the next.

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On July 24, an anti-health care reform group called Conservatives for Patients Rights (run by discredited hospital executive Rick Scott in conjunction with public relations professionals from the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign) sent a database to the Tea Party Patriots Health Care Reform Committee list serve with information on over one hundred upcoming congressional town halls. Robert MacGuffie, a volunteer for FreedomWorks who runs the website Right Principles, also chipped in by providing a strategy memo for the Tea Partiers, instructing them to "rock-the-boat early in the Rep's presentation...yell out and challenge the Rep's statements early....rattle him, get him off his prepared script and agenda...stand up and shout and sit right back down."

Today, the President had a Town Hall in New Hampshire and there was a guy, William Kostric, brandishing a sign that read, "IT IS TIME TO WATER THE TREE OF LIBERTY!" a reference to a Thomas Jefferson quote: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants." and he had a holster around his waist with a loaded gun in it. Chris Matthews interviewed the guy on "Hardball" tonight and asked him why he brought a gun to the Presidents Town Hall, he stated, "I wanted people to remember the rights that we have and how quickly we are losing them in this country." Now this is not a good way to get your point across if you ask me. Matthews also asked him whom he voted for in the last presidential election, he indicated he voted for Ron Paul the Libertarian candidate.

These tactics are very dangerous and will, I fear, cause violence. The right is taking us down a road where there may be no place to turn around and backing up will be very difficult. William Kostric may say that he had no intention to cause violence, but history shows us one does not need to have intentions, someone else may have them. How much effort would it take someone to wrestle a loaded gun out of a holster of a guy standing holding a poster? Then what would possibly have happened?

^{1 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/josh-horwitz/handguns-and-health-care_b_255839.html}