re: #21 Charles

Look — the tea party groups are absolutely heavily promoting this mob behavior, and so is Glenn Beck. I don’t know why you want to pretend it isn’t happening.

I’d like to see civil conversations about this as much as anyone else. What I see developing, though, is a storyline that regardless of how many counter-examples are brought up, that the only problem with townhalls are those introduced by right-wing extremists.

We have a black conservative that is beaten by SEIU thugs.

Crickets.

We have people asking legitimate questions at townhalls that are belittled by elected officials.

Crickets.

We have elected Dem officials that re-frame their town halls as prayer vigils.

Crickets.

Mainstream town halls in Bush’s term disrupted by shouters and interruptions. (I’m not talking Code Pink either, I’m talking about the Social Security townhalls attended by “mainstream” folks).

Crickets.

People tried other forms of protest. I think they called them tea parties. Now matter how many decent people attended those, they were painted as the lunatic fringe because it just so happened some fringe people showed up.

So now the option of offline protests is out the door because a bad guy might be there.

Could some of the townhalls be less disruptive? Absolutely. Would I like to see them less disruptive? Absolutely.

Do I wish the Dem thugs had not escalated this to the level of violence? Absolutely.

There are a lot of features to this debate.