Oklahoma City, OK: In yesterday’s politics chat one of the posters wondered why it was “legal” for vocal critics of the administration to show up at congressional town halls and sometimes shout and yell. Does no one on the left recall eight years under George W. Bush when everywhere he went there were shrieking leftist protestors shouting “Hitler!” and hanging him in effigy? Some folks act like amngry fringe types are uniqie to the right.
I don’t recall George Bush being hanged in effigy by amngry fringe types. Does anyone else? Did this actually happen or is it just some new winger talking point?
xyzzy
I recall Bush protesters being restricted to “free speech zones” far removed from the events, myself.
sashal
yes , it did.
in Iraq
General Winfield Stuck
NO. What I remember are Bush Goon squads posing as Secret Service agents, harassing people for the crime of have a Kerry sticker on their car, or wearing a t shirt that something other than Bush is Gawd. And even in the unlikely event a dissenter got thru the wingnut sensors, any off message question got the asker pitched out on their keyster, if not arrested. The Right Wing in this country gets more delusional and dishonest by the day.
Short Bus Bully
I remember a big to do years ago when Eddie Vedder got up on stage and talked a bunch of trash about Prez. Shrub and then knocked around a stuffed doll of some sort. Small time shit like that. It was out there.
fish
I don’t remember any effigies, but I remember multiple arrests for just wearing T-shirts or buttons.
r€nato
Yes it did happen. Rush said it, I believe it and that settles it.
The Moar You Know
Those were good years, when leftists were hanging Bush in effigy and I was the multibillionaire owner of Microsoft.
J. A. Baker
Well, they’re certainly not “uniqie” to the Left, much as that commenter would like to suggest as such.
Also, too everywhere suchas.
Comrade javafascist
Oh it happened but the EmmEssEmm had stopped reporting on Dick Cheney’s antics by then.
DougJ
yes , it did. in Iraq
Yes, but here in the US?
Matt
Actually, if I recall correctly, virtually all of Bush’s public appearances were before audiences that had been carefully screened to weed out potential protesters/demonstrators.
Cat Lady
I was all WTF at that too – that prompted my comment to Pershing that my recollection is of people being escorted out or arrested for wearing a T-shirt or having a bumper sticker that security at Bush’s pre-screened, invite only, military as stage prop rallies didn’t like. The WaPo has officially become one big fucking right wing memory hole.
Matt
Actually, if I recall correctly, virtually all of Bush’s public appearances were before audiences that had been carefully screened to weed out potential protesters/demonstrators.
r€nato
Anyone wanna buy a creationist dinosaur theme park?
Judge clears way for dinosaur park to be seized
Only 6000 years old!
Sasha
I don’t remember corporate-sponsored Astroturf activists bussed to W.’s events, do you?
Demo Woman
There was no organized movement to disrupt free speech and open discussion that I heard about. There’s always going to be a few people that take it upon themselves to be disrupted. President Bush’s town hall meetings were with pre-screened individuals. Gee, folks were arrested for disturbing the peace if they wore an offensive t-shirt.
J. A. Baker
@fish:
And that’s assuming they weren’t relegated into “First Amendment Zones” miles away from the President’s virgin eyes.
ADM
Eh, like the first commenter said, I remember a lot about freedom zones and massive shows of police force around Bush… but yeah, I remember some code pink types shouting out at town hall forums. Especially democratic forums. I remember Pelosi having trouble addressing cameras post election 2006 so many anti-war protesters protested.
But whatever. All that matters is the fevered dreams of wingnuts remembering Bush standing athwart of vile liberals at every turn.
RSA
What I recall is that George W. Bush’s conception of “the American public” was “people my handlers choose to be in the audience and cheer when I talk.”
danimal
The anti-war rallies occasionally featured Bush effigies (and giant puppets, too). Maybe they’re confused and thought Bush’s virgin eyes witnessed the atrocities.
gwangung
Morons in Oklahoma.
A) Free speech zones. Remember THOSE?
B) Twits see no difference between being loud and shouting down the opposition. It’s all the same to them—being against their stated position is the same as being disrespectful is the same as being against free speech.
That said, there have been those on the left who HAVE shouted down conservatives, but not against Bush. If these folks want to loudly protest health care reform, I have no problem with that—I have a problem with astroturfing groups and I have a BIG problem of shouting down speakers so that no one other than them can make their point heard.
cleek
of course it happened. there are a shit-ton of fucked-up lunatics in this country.
for example.
(and no, i don’t doubt that at least a couple of those are ratfuckers trying to make the left look even worse than it is)
4tehlulz
The proper response to this is:
DATES AND
TITSPICS OR GTFOr€nato
The only thing even remotely comparable, was when Code Pink tried to disrupt Congressional hearings related to the Iraq war.
And when they did this, they were politely escorted out of the room and the hearing was allowed to continue.
When I participated in protests against the war (including one where Dickhead Cheney showed up at a GOP fundraiser at the AZ Biltmore), we never tried to storm the meeting and disrupt it. I am not aware that that sort of thing ever happened. We protested peacefully outside the resort, on a public sidewalk.
As ever, right-wingers suffer from an incurable victim complex.
SGEW
Well, people threw [footwear] at an effigy in Dupont Circle right before the inauguration. Does that count?
Hunter Gathers
Of course they did it to Bush, but he didn’t deserve it. Now our current POTUS, the filthy darkie? He derserves it! He’s going to kill my grandma and take her sex organs to pay for abortions that will feed cloning labs which will produce super-libruls that will come to my house and take me to a FEMA re-education camp and will force me to marry a dirty wetback to kick start a 20,000 year breeding program which will produce the Kwizatz Haderach.
4tehlulz
@cleek: Dates, pics, and tits. You win.
r€nato
@gwangung:
rat-wingers regularly say that you’re ‘peddling hatred’ when you criticize the stupid shit Sarah Palin says.
Sarah Palin herself has said that the First Amendment exists to protect politicians from being criticized. (well at least right-wing politicians like herself from being criticized)
SSDD. These people are a malignant tumor on the American body politic. They are not interested in an exchange of ideas or the marketplace of ideas; they want to cram their views down your throat, by force if necessary and they’ll rationalize it any way that they can.
Violet
I quick search of images suggests it was done a lot in other countries – Iraq, Pakistan, India, even in the UK. But if it was done in the US, it doesn’t come to the top of the images list.
Sarah Palin was, during the campaign, by someone in West Hollywood. They said it was a Halloween decoration.
SGEW
Moderation?! For what? I even avoided using the dreaded word for typical footwear and everything!
Evinfuilt
@xyzzy:
That’s all I remember as well. They were even fenced off, like pens. We had signs, but if we wanted to be heard we had to sneak in, in disguise as a Republican, and as soon as a single heckle was raised, you were “escorted” away, then handcuffed off screen and shuttled away to spend a few hours cooling down with fellow criminals.
Free Speech was MIA for 8 years (at least within earshot of a Republican.) Just look for the article about the father arrested in Colorado for saying one single thing in passing about Cheney (since Cheney was there.) And nothing violent, just arrested for disturbing the peace.
And that will return, and I’m afraid much too soon.
media browski
No, it did not actually happen, period. They’re trying to rewrite history, again.
General Winfield Stuck
@cleek:
Of course we have nuts on the dem side. But how many of them get segments on cable news on a daily basis. And we are talking about Bush v Obama rallies and townhalls/ I guarantee those left wing nut signs didn’t get anywhere near Bush’s events..
r€nato
Remember, they create their own reality. So yes, it did happen, if they say so and enough of them say so, then it did happen. Even more so if a right-wing media figure says it happened.
Whether it actually happened in the real world, is immaterial.
ChrisB
@General Winfield Stuck: @RSA:
Yup, you needed a ticket to go to one of Bush’s “open” town hall meetings and they were disseminated by the local Republican congressman’s office or the local Republican Party office. Even if you had a ticket, you’d be kicked out if you said something bad, wore something bad or drove a car with a bad bumper sticker.
Face
The difference:
We booed because Bush directly caused excessive death and hardship
They’re booing because Obama is trying to prevent excessive death and hardship
Messed up world we’re in.
Zifnab
Mild-mannered Web Crawler: What’s that? A citizen in need? My services are required!
*runs to phone booth*
*emerges as SUPER GOOGLE!*
http://images.google.com/images?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS321&=&q=George%20Bush%20effigy&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi
flukebucket
@cleek: Thanks Cleek. Those are fantastic. Looks like another difference in the left and the right is the left has this thing about public nudity. Kinda cool.
Reckon we will ever see old white people waving baggies with birth certificates while saying the pledge of allegiance naked?
I damn sure hope not.
geg6
Well, I remember an event at the Carpenter’s Union training facility here on Neville Island with Bush in attendance where we were forced into a “free speech zone” and an elderly man was arrested for standing on the sidewalk rather than the cage to which we were relegated. But no effigies or screaming because there was no point. We were a mile away from anyone who attended the event, let alone Bush.
Well, scratch that. There was LOTS of screaming about Nazis and such, but that only happened after the old man got wrestled to the ground, handcuffed, and hauled off to the county jail. For standing with a sign a couple of feet outside of their invisible line.
El Cruzado
It’s a spectacular combination of projection and self-delusion. They convinced themselves that it happened since it’s what they would have done themselves, and that way they also justify themselves for doing it.
There’s a reason authoritarians’ enemies are always capable of anything, so they can justify themselves doing anything while still being on the side of angels.
NonyNony
It doesn’t matter if some folks on “teh left” did it or not – the entire excuse is a dodge as the parent of any 5 year old can tell you. “Johnny did it first” is never an acceptable excuse for bad behavior. So if some numbnuts on “teh left” got it into their heads to burn the President in effigy (which I also don’t remember but it’s a huge country so maybe it happened somewhere) that doesn’t make it okay for some numbnut wingnuts to do the same thing to a different President.
It’s basically the “Clinton Did It Too” defense writ large to cover the whole “movement”. And it’s just as stupid when they use it to cover themselves as it was when they were using it to excuse the bad actions of Bush.
snidely
yeah, apart from Muntadher al-Zaidi i don’t remember very many protesters getting within shouting distance of bush. i feel fairly confident that, had anyone tried to hang him in effigy anywhere near his august presence, they would have been stopped by a sniper bullet pretty quickly.
does anyone else get excited by those first amendment zones? i always have a brief moment of hope that it’s the first step in a kind of secular stations of the cross, and that the first amendment zone will be followed quickly by a second amendment zone, a third amendment zone, etc. not sure what the tenth amendment zone would be like exactly, but the third amendment zone could be good.
geg6
@Zifnab:
My question is were these Democrats or were these anarchists and/or truthers? I attended several protests over the Bush years here. The only ones who did stupid shit like the puppets and such were the anarchists and truthers. We shunned them as much as possible.
gwangung
@NonyNony: Hell, yeah.
jwb
What, you think that rightwingers would just make shit up? In the venerable Washington Post? I’m shocked!
Seriously, I don’t doubt that you will be able to find an instance of some wacky fringe characters having strung up Bush in effigy (though certainly not everywhere), and you’ll definiely be able to find protest marchers and organized groups shouting outside venues and such. But those events would have been more on the order of the teabagging parties proper, which no one from the Democratic side has objected to (though we might ridicule them). Aside from the occasional heckler, I would be extremely surprised if you found systematic disruptions of town hall meetings by leftist groups during the Bush presidency—though whether that’s because the groups didn’t think of it or they thought it would be counterproductive is hard to say. (I attended a few townhall meetings held by my then GOP Representative at the time, and I can say that no special care was taken at these events to screen the audience, so it would have been very easy to disrupt them in just the way the teabaggers have been doing the past couple of days.)
chopper
sashal
@DougJ:
that’s the point.
not here and by the flowers throwing happy Iraqies
KCinDC
I remember seeing a Bush effigy in a noose at one of the huge war protests in DC, but in any protest that big you’re going to have a fair number of wackos. That sort of thing certainly wasn’t even representative of the attendees, and was generally disapproved of.
Zifnab
POST’D!
And we can have these annoymous conversations all day long. “I heard that a conservative was questioning whether a liberal had the right to protest a conservative protester at a Democratic Congressman’s political rally? Isn’t that conservative I heard about infringing on the Congressman’s freedom of speech by the transitive property of First Amendment Rights?”
This is all getting tediously meta and ultimately pointless. Even if you could decide, definitively, the legal status of protesters at political rallies, that wouldn’t stop any given protester from straying all over the neat little black line you’ve drawn in the sand. Short of dragging protesters off in riot vans, you’re not going to stop people from showing up and disrupting events. Welcome to America. People protest stuff. Learn to live with it.
Concern Troll (R-OK) knows this, and he’ll be back next week when a bunch of pro-health care liberals get too close to a GOP game of lobbyist golf, explaining about how the Obamabots are trying to take away country club property rights.
It’s all bullshit. Everyone knows it’s bullshit. The bottom line is that, when a pro-issue Congressman comes home to sell a policy to on-the-fence voters, he doesn’t want to deal with anti-issue protesters messing up his vibe. Where you fall on free speech rights and property rights and public decorum rules always tends to hedge closely to where you stand on supporting / opposing the issue.
Legalize
Doesn’t matter. Individuals criticizing W, Palin and any other winger saint – in any forum, in any context – is a free speech violation. Corporate rat-fuckers bussing in mentally ill, violent, crazy mobs with the stated goal of disrupting and intimidating members of congress is democracy in action. Oh, and criticizing violent, mentally ill winger mobs is also a violation of free speech. See also, Real Americans; Also.
joes527
The Out of Iraq sign is perfectly legitimate political protest, but the Impeach bumper sticker is a crime.
Mary
I sure can’t remember things like people having to take loyalty oaths to go listen to a speech
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/08/09/bush_backers_only_policy_riles_voters_at_rnc_rallies/
And thank God I can’t remember things like one lone guy with a sign, being forced further and further away from a building where a closed Cheneyco speech was being held, and with some newly minted “no-protest” zone continuously evolving each time he moved – and I don’t remember a cash strapped city having to bear the burden of the judgment rendered on that case.
http://indianalawblog.com/archives/2005/03/ind_decisions_f_1.html
numbskull
DougJ, there’s an obvious false equivalency in the WaPo reader’s post. While there may have been protestors somewhere in the same city as Bush, none entered whatever hallowed halls he spoke (?) in and shouted him down. Certainly no corporate-organized groups ever shut down a Republican’s townhall meeting but shout en masse so that nobody else speak and all discussion shut off.
There is nothing equivalent about protestors acting outlandishily practicing free speech and organized groups PREVENTING free speech. Nothing.
And Cleek, you should know that, too.
cleek
And we are talking about Bush v Obama rallies and townhalls/ I guarantee those left wing nut signs didn’t get anywhere near Bush’s events..
of course they did. they got themselves arrested for it, though.
zmullls
There were of course puppets and things in parades (which is technically an effigy) though I don’t recall violent effigies in the US. I’m sure there were hangings and/or burnings in effigy in other countries, but that’s a normal sight for protests.
And there were probably fringe comments on blogs who brought up Hitler (and that notorious entry to the Move-On contest).
The difference here is that it’s the people at the front of the movement, the very visible ones, who are acting like thugs, not the people off to the sides. They are not able to make that distinction. If one lone nut does something on *their* side, I should be able to do it on *my* side.
Bottom line is there’s a difference between showing up to be heard, and showing up to shut someone else up. Especially a town meeting where theorectically a representative is there to explain his/her views and hear those of his/her consituents.
zmullls
There were of course puppets and things in parades (which is technically an effigy) though I don’t recall violent effigies in the US. I’m sure there were hangings and/or burnings in effigy in other countries, but that’s a normal sight for protests.
And there were probably fringe comments on blogs who brought up Hitler (and that notorious entry to the Move-On contest).
The difference here is that it’s the people at the front of the movement, the very visible ones, who are acting like thugs, not the people off to the sides. They are not able to make that distinction. If one lone nut does something on *their* side, I should be able to do it on *my* side.
Bottom line is there’s a difference between showing up to be heard, and showing up to shut someone else up. Especially a town meeting where theorectically a representative is there to explain his/her views and hear those of his/her consituents.
The Grand Panjandrum
If you didn’t see the Bush effigies you must not have been paying attention to the news. I remember seeing them, and cleek put up a good link that shows some of the more disgusting anarchist assholes. However, many of them would be insulted to be called a leftist, liberals, or progressives.
On more than one occasion I have personally called for the arrest, trial, and if convicted, the execution of all the war criminals in the Bush administration. Is that an extreme position?
Zifnab
@geg6:
Six of one, half a dozen of the other. In the eyes of a Bushie, a protester is a protester is a protester. The fact that you’re a Maine area anti-war libertarian with anarchist views and I’m a Florida resident pissed that Al Gore lost my district in a rigged election doesn’t enter into Guy From Oklahoma’s calculus, regardless of which of us is waving the signs.
I roomed with a guy who was deep into the Truther thing and I spent hours trying to spell out to him that, yes, a plane can in fact bring down a sky scraper. He voted for Kerry in ’04, and I’d be surprised if he didn’t vote for Obama in ’08. What else matters?
mark
Rush said it, I believe it. nuff said.
SpotWeld
Let’s skip over the details and just take it as a given that somewhere at some time in the 8 years of the Bush presidecy that someone did something as vitrolic as described. I’ll call it plausible.
The final statement is:
…Some folks act like amngry fringe types are uniqie to
the right.
Okay, fair enough. It’s not unique to the right.
However: The left doesn’t give it’s fringe podium time during primary campaigns. The left doesn’t have it’s “fringe” elements interviewed on news channels getting full journalistic credibility for thier crackpot “theroies”.
On the left, the fringe is treated as exactly that.. the fringe. The outlaying bit that is the super-minorty and is often ignored. (Well, except maybe Code Pink, but that’s a dicussions for another time.)
On the right… they are catered to and expected to act as the main “foot soldiers” who get out and set the tone for the rest of the party.
The Raven
Actually, I don’t remember there being many townhall meetings during the Bush administration’s term.
I do recall that Bush and Cheney events were scripted with planted questions, and that attendees were screened and had to sign “loyalty oaths” in some cases.
But these townhall events that the Teabaggers are disrupting? We just didn’t have many of them at all.
Warren Terra
Let’s assume there was some metaphorical violence of the sort alleged, effigies and whatnot, and also a whole lot more shouting than effigies: it’s still a red herring, because none of it was organized mobs deliberately disrupting public meetings. Another point of difference is that the anti-Republican protestors were never cheered on by multibillion dollar media conglomerates, let alone organized by them.
Leaving aside Bush, who is a special case because of the Secret Service, the laws about threats, and his uniquely closed gatherings, some administration officials (analagous to Sibelius) did have more-open meetings, and no doubt many Republican congressfolk did. The worst they ever faced was a tiny number if rapidly-ejected Code Pink protestors or anti-Gitmo activists (some of whom did shoit and were disruptive). People asking smartass questions, which some no doubt also faced, is in no way comparable to the Weimar tactics of the modern Right. Almost all the shouting, and any effigies, were outside, on the street – when not relegated to “Free Speech Zones”.
SpotWeld
An easy check would be to run a seach over at LGF or RedState.. an event such as an effigy of Bush being burned would. They’d be all over that.
Zifnab
@SpotWeld:
Nonsense. FOX News digs those folks out of the wood work if they have to show up the reporting scene with mining gear. We regularly get exposed to the “fringe left” on cable news. You know, for balance.
General Winfield Stuck
@cleek:
Occasionally, a few individuals. And I doubt any of the pics at your link were actually at a Bush of GOP town hall meetings. If they were then please provide evidence.
In my lifetime , I have not witnessed what others here have called systematic organized mobs of wingnuts deployed with premeditation and training from a central command for the express purpose of closing down democratic congressional events. This is what I see as the topic of this thread. Your making a false equivilence argument that is out of context. Same as the wingnut in the thread post/
dslak
@Warren Terra: Also, the people in those groups had the courage to accept the consequences of their actions. The people disrupting these events are not only doing that, but also trying to conceal their identities (and psychologically inflate their numbers) so that they cannot be held to account for what they are doing. That is distinct from a mere disruption.
The Grand Panjandrum
BTW cleek thanks for the link to the pics of the guys with the little boy dicks. I got a pretty good laugh out of it. Oh, and the breasts sagging down to the navel was a real nice touch. Why is it that most of the people who want to walk around naked in public are people I don’t want to see naked?
PeakVT
Moron: Some folks act like amngry fringe types are uniqie to the right.
Ben Pershing: That is a good point
No, it’s not a good point. Protesting war != protesting health insurance.
What a total f**ktard. And he gets worse from there.
El Tiburon
Just because it never happened doesn’t mean it never happened.
Just because no ‘welfare queens’ ever existed doesn’t mean they didn’t exist.
Another way of putting this is just because there never were any WMDs doesn’t mean Saddam didn’t possess WMDs.
That you’ve never seen a unicorn doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Kind of like the g-spot.
Making sense yet?
Zifnab
@The Raven:
They were big in 2005, during the “Privatize Social Security” push. And, again, after Katrina. Bush was all over the South doing photo-ops, kissing babies, and hugging the elderly. I think Bush did a wave of town halls in the ’04 election as well.
Everything was very carefully scripted and orchestrated, but that’s the breaks.
xochi
The big distinction is that these are town hall meetings. Now if you remember, when Bush had town hall meetings, the audience was limited to supporters, and the questions were thoroughly vetted. There were occasions when protesters happened to get inside and start shouting, but they were generally quieted down and shuttled out the door quickly.
What it comes down to is that Republicans may complain about angry protesters, and tactics out of the Saul Alinsky playbook, but they are more than willing to engage in the same if it works to their benefit. Roger Stone, for one, is a big fan of Alinsky.
Bob
I just want to know where the lobbyists are recruiting the town hall hecklers from.
-If we posted photos of them online would we recognize them as Republican Party staff?
-Are they being paid?
-Is K-street just taking advantage of an existing group of crazies?
Parrotlover77
I’m pretty sure it happened overseas where he was so popular after “liberating” the middle east. But I would hardly call them angry leftists — or even Americans.
I’m sorry, Crazy Right Wing. You are the ones with the insane protesters with violent tendencies. The “left” hasn’t had anything of the sort in decades. And even when our side did, it took a lot more than just marginally higher taxes for rich assholes to get us there.
The Grand Panjandrum
Something else is clear to me in the discussion in this thread. The townhall meetings held by a President and the townhall meetings held by a member of the House are very different animals. Do you think the Secret Service is not going to put up the heinous restrictions for Obama? You do need a ticket to get into those meetings. They are not impromptu gatherings where one and all can come and join in on the celebration of greeting our new President.
Bokonon
It is a faith and tribalism thing for the conservative faithful. They FEEL that Bush was burned in effigy, that liberals were torching the flag during Iraq war protests, and so on. There were exagerrations (and outright lies) on talk radio and viral e-mails several years back, which reinforce these false memories. But based on these feelings (and false sources of memory), they now BELIEVE that it is true. And it is payback time.
Sort of like they FEEL that Obama was born in Kenya, and therefore BELIEVE that he is an illegitimate President. And that the burden is on everyone else to proove them wrong.
itsbenj
@cleek: wow, I bet you’re really dumb enough not to see the contradiction here.
SpotWeld
@Bokonon:
What he said.
It’s simialar to the “Taxs cuts for the rich will fix the ecomony” or “We will be greeted as limerators”
It fits perfectly into the tribal explaination of how the world works, it *must* be true.
Just Some Fuckhead
Look, protesting the President has a long and storied tradition in our country. In keeping with tradition, I recommend using a single shot muzzle-loading longarm – commonly known as a musket – against these protesters. Yes, it is generally slow and cumbersome to load but the suspense alone will make it a showstopper. My second ammendment can beat up your first ammendment, as we used to say when we were kids.
Napoleon
During what TPM termed bamboozleopalloza (the Social Security privatization drive) Bush was going to be attending one of his staged events where he talked to a handpicked crowd. The place was several miles north-east of me and the airport he was flying into was south-west from me. I had taken the day off and was doing yard work when I could hear a big slow chopper (I get air-ambulances all the time because I live a mile from a major hospital but you could instantly tell this mother was big and slow).
It got closer and closer and suddenly the presidential chopper was right over my head at treetop level. I felt like I could have tossed my rake in the air and knocked it down. After the sound faded I could hear another one and what do you know a second presidential helicopter was just 100 or 200 feet overhead. After it passed it occurred to me I should have stood there giving the choppers a double barreled middle finger salute because he sure wasn’t going to get any negative feedback at the event.
Jason
As I recall, anti-Bush people were not even allowed into his townhall “meetings”. The crowds were made up entirely of his supporters.
monkeyboy
This just like hippies spit on returning Viet Nam vets which ‘everybody’ knows is true even there are no contemporary reports of such behavior.
Anyway, maybe I should get a blue windbreaker, put big yellow letters on the back that say DHS or FEMA, go to a town hall meeting and start obviously taking pictures of protester’s faces.
Hunter Gathers
@Just Some Fuckhead: That will never work. By the time you get the second shot loaded, the cops will have you tazed and handcuffed, and you will have nothing to look forward to but your choice between jelly or syrup for your daily salad tossing of ‘Big Mike’.
Elie
@68
I don’t think that Alinsky’s methods should be characterized as showing up at meeting screaming at participants as a means of “organizing” the community…
Chris DOwd
The essence of the reich wing is wallowing in their own sense of persecution. Of course they think Bush was burned in effigy everywhere he went. In Reich Wing land Bush was abused by the “liberal media” all throughout his presidency, in which he did quite literally anything he wanted with nary a peep from this “Liberal media”.
Half of the “liberal bias” against Bush the Reich Wing actually points too are quotes from stand up comics and celebrities saying something off color about Bush. And for each one of these incidents- one hundred reich wing talk radio hosts around the country talk about it for days. All the while- the “star” who said the nasty remark? Matters nothing in anything.
The only “abuse” Bush the blood drenched imbecile ever suffered at the hands of the press or public was when an Iraqi reporter threw his shoe at him- and then was promptly beaten to the point of being hospitalized and given a one year prison sentence.
Funny- contrast the public exposure of Iran’s Ahmadinejad to that of Bush or Obama. Ahmadinejad has been shouted down at public speeches, had pictures of him burned in the audiences of speaking events, been in shoving matches with students . . . say what you will about Ahmadinejad- but clearly he mixes it up. A modern American president doesn’t even go before any audience that hasn’t been pre-screened or even hand picked. No public event is “Casual” with the American President- no matter how casual they try to make it appear.
Iran’s political culture is a hell of a lot more republican (little “r”) than ours in my judgment.
Toonscribe
Sarah Palin was, during the campaign, by someone in West Hollywood. They said it was a Halloween decoration.
Well, yes, that happened, but since Palin wasn’t actually in West Hollywood at the time and never actually saw it in person, I’d say it doesn’t count — sort of like if the shouters and heckling thugs this time stood on their patios and bayed at the moon, no one would care but the neighbors.
Irksome
My two cents: I think anybody who starts screaming like an idiot or even being off topic in a town hall meeting should be forcibly ejected, regardless of which side they’re on.
bayville
Sure it happened. Don’t you remember what Natalie Manes said over in England in 2003:
At the time, the conservatives were very reasonable while reminding everyone about the First Ammendment and the right, and value, of protest. While some of those crazy leftists did compare Bush to Hitler (way, way over there in the Free Speech zone) the right wingers were the adults.
And because of this, The Dixie Chicks were embraced and beloved. Since then, they have gone on to great success and are now embraced by freedom lovers, rednecks and traditional country music fans throughout the nation.
Hell, they even won a bunch of Grammy’s in 2007.
Patriot 3
Because of his Gestapo, no one but asskissers and flunkies could get within earshot of Bush so he probably didn’t hear anyone call him Hitler, but if he did, he probably would have taken it as a compliment.
One of the best was somehow, someway W. or someone made Dick Cheney do a post-Katrina battlefield tour in Gulfport an ER doc yelled a Pat Leahy, “Go ***k yourself” at Cheney and in the only good thing I can think to say about Cheney, he smiled and took it pretty well. Don’t know what happened to the Doc.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qij13CVq17E
Mary
Impeach Bush t-shirt wearer forced to leave National Archives
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/30068
Then there was Sheehan being arrested before the State of the Union for wearing her anti-war t-shirt.
And it’s not like there was a concerted, directed, organized effort to ban Dixie Chicks music after their ant-Bush comments
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/mar/20/arts.usa
along with:
In recent weeks a man has been arrested for wearing an anti-war T-shirt in a shopping mall in Albany, New York; a county councillor who passed an anti-war resolution was encouraged to leave town in Pennsylvania; and one of President Bush’s senior advisers branded a journalist who wrote a critical article about him as “the closest thing journalism has to a terrorist”.
kay
I think it’s progress that they’re admitting it’s angry fringe-types.
Yesterday birthers/tea party types were frustrated centrists, according to the media.
Huge concession, that.
I’ll take “fringe”, in 24 hours.
ChrisB
@Zifnab:
If you Google “Bush town hall meetings” you’ll pull up a number of articles, many from 2005, about how resstricted and scripted those meetings were.
malraux
I can remember groups like StormFront going out to intentionally provoke responses from anti-war protests.
freelancer
That sounds like a great idea. I’m sure nothing bad will happen, like say you inadvertantly scoring on your own goal…
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=impersonating+a+federal+agent&aq=1&aqi=g4
Zifnab
@Chris DOwd:
That’s not true. The NYT broke the wiretapping story. The WaPo broke torture (I may have that backwards). The McClauchey News Service was aggressive in on-the-ground war reporting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Reporting on the economy in the run up to the ’08 election was relentless and simply pointing out the rising tide of economic despair was bad for the GOP.
Was the media “liberal”? Not even remotely close. Were the repeated sex scandals and war scandals and legal scandals bad for the GOP? Absolutely. The wingnuts despaired at bad news and decided to lynch the messenger. But don’t confuse the media soft balling of scandal after crisis after disaster as rendering the news ineffectual.
joes527
@General Winfield Stuck:
The attempts to shut down the WTO conferences is the closest I can think of. That was pretty organized. Sure it wasn’t mainstream, and it didn’t have FoxNews flogging it, but there was planning, preparation, and several all out attempts to disrupt the conferences.
Call the WTO protesters DFH’s if you want. But it DID happen, and the goal WAS to stop the conference.
Sidslang
It always amuses me that wingers willfully forget all of the destructive stuff that happened during the Bush years but will never forgive the liberal response to it. In their world, the wars, Katrina, the housing bubble, and the litany of domestic policy disasters pale in comparison to the moral outrage of college kids saying mean things ’bout Dubya. The thought process is pretty simple: conservatives are always right, liberals are always wrong. Still, the level of doublethink required to remain a Republican in America today is mind-boggling…
srv
@The Grand Panjandrum:
Well, I’m sure you’d rather see some manly big-dick Democrats, but the vast majority of them (99%) couldn’t be bothered to show up outside during Bush years.
Of course, I’m sure all the fingernails broken on keyboards were appreciated.
General Winfield Stuck
@joes527:
I call them Anarchists and Nihlists. They are NOT DFH’s dude/ They are mostly rich privileged kids with too much time on their hands looking to destroy something. And I don’t consider them democrats or liberals and surely not progressives, at all.
And beside the context here is mainstream congressional and presnit political events, and whether as the wingnuts claim, dems were just as bad. I say NO.
cleek
those were all from Berkeley. i don’t Bush ever visited.
there are plenty of news reports of people being arrested or throw out of Bush town halls, though.
DougJ asked a question, and i answered it. i’m sorry if that doesn’t fall within what you think the thread should be about.
DFH no. 6
monkeyboy, dude, I like your style.
I’d love to put your idea into action myself, ‘cept my congresscritter, Harry MItchell (D-ino, Scottsdale) apparently isn’t planning one of these townhall soirees.
Too bad — there are certainly plenty of teabaggers here in McCainland who would be more than happy to do their brownshirt part.
Blue Dog that he is, Harry’s saving grace is that he replaced El Rushbo’s long-lost twin, the bloated blowhard J.D. Hayworth (who I believe is currently receiving wingnut welfare as a local 5th-rate radio hatemonger).
Oh, and cleek most certainly strains at a gnat and swallows a camel, as some righteous rabbi supposedly put it a couple millenia ago.
Crusty Dem
@Zifnab:
Supergoogle has failed you. That’s a lot of burning effigies, but I clicked through and couldn’t find one from inside US borders (impressive collection though, Pakistan, Iraq, Brazil, UK, etc). I think this one is from an LA antiwar protest (http://www.lailalalami.com/blog-old/archives/antiwar/bush_effigy.jpg), but it’s obviously not a hanging/burning effigy.
I’d be shocked if there wasn’t some example of someone in the US hanging Bush in effigy, but I’d also be shocked if Bush ever saw anyone one.
freelancer
@Cole: Update on your Gym Shooter:
http://mediamatters.org/blog/200908050018
I don’t think it’s politically motivated, just a Psycho loser who couldn’t hack it.
someguy
I don’t recall anybody being disrespectful of Bush or over the line in any way. I do remember a few peaceful protests here and there but nothing of the sort of vile attacks the Repukes are imagining.
Bruce Webb
@Zifnab:
I sampled most of the images that actually had an effigy on fire and everyone was from a foreign country, a couple from countries where we were actively dropping bombs on villages.
There is no doubt that lots of people in Iraq and Afghanistan and other places around the world were more than peeved at Bush. But random images from Hyderabad and elsewhere don’t actually address the question John asks.
SGEW
@joes527:
Important distinction: the World Trade Organization is not a democratically elected body. That was one of the key points of the protests. For what that’s worth.
Zifnab
@ChrisB: And it was great in a photo-op, but – let’s face it – it was useless in local public relations. Who got to go to this event? Bush supporters? Which undecided and swing voters were influenced by a President they weren’t allowed to meet? How many were turned away or never even invited?
The whole purpose of a town hall meeting is to gauge popular sentiment and gather public input to refine your policy and your method. The town halls were pretty on paper, but they didn’t accomplish their goals. The AARP ran laps around the Bush Administration and, with the help of wiser heads on the Dem side, crushed the proposition.
Now the Dems are going home to do what they are intending to do – visit with their constituents, refine their message and their policy, and appease their supporters. When you’ve got opposition operatives breaking into a friendly sphere and pissing on everyone in the crowd, how does that make the opposition look? You think Lloyd Doggett left his meeting without dozens of real health care advocates who were drowned out sending him their support? You think on-the-fence politically minded locals enjoyed having a rare face-to-face with their Congressman spoiled? I don’t.
This isn’t the way Republicans gained power in ’80 or in ’94. They did it in churches and in school boards and in clubs and social groups by being friendly and likable to their neighbors. You don’t get elected to office by acting like a loud, obnoxious asshole. Lloyd Doggett’s seat isn’t at risk. No one watched that clusterfuck and walked away any more sympathetic to the anti-health care folks than they started. These publicity stunts are always full of fail.
El Cid
@freelancer: Did this guy use the word “show”, as in “I’ll show them”? Just something I always look to see in these murderous outbursts.
General Winfield Stuck
Fair enough.
Yes, but for what. Some were for wearing a Kerry t shirt sitting quietly, or with a dem bumper sticker, others for an individual asking a tough question, and rarely a Code Pinker or two standing up with a “get out of Iraq banner” . No comparison for what we are seeing today from the right. None, nada, zilch. And even suggesting it is absurd/
cleek
there are a couple at the link i posted above (here). they’re about 1/2 way down the page. but again, that’s Berkeley, which isn’t really mainstream liberalism. (and no, i doubt Bush saw those in person)
The Grand Panjandrum
@srv:
And now I have a hangnail. It’s very painful and I think I’m going to go to mom’s basement and pout for a while.
Mike G
@joes527:
Important distinction: the World Trade Organization is not a democratically elected body.
And how many protestors got into the WTO meeting hall and shouted down the delegates to shut down discussions? I seem to recall miles of fencing and an army of riot cops keeping the peasants far-distant from any of the pampered participants.
cleek
sure.
please note that i didn’t suggest they were the same.
linda
107,000 results for ‘bush, hung in effigy’…
and every single one of them refers to stories about obama being hung in effigy. the only time ‘bush’ and ‘hung in effigy’ come up together is for this:
“Ok, not that Bush. This was Hunter Bush, 21, of Lexington, Kentucky who was arrested with Joe Fischer, 22, a UK student, for hanging an effigy of Barack Obama from a tree. The charge was for disorderly conduct, though it is unclear why these men were arrested while a recent example of hanging Palin was not made into a criminal matter.”
joes527
@General Winfield Stuck:
The WTO protesters were reasonably seen as being against the government of the time.
Looked at through the “either you are with us or with the terrorists” filter, this makes them Democrats. Yeah, I know, totally unfair, but laying all the wackos that show up at Tea Parties at the Republican’s door is probably not 100% fair either.
I agree that the WTO protests are not exactly like what is happening today. Like I said in my original post, it is just the closest parallel I can think of.
Zifnab
@Bruce Webb: Fair enough. How’s this?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/The%20kiss%20float%20(2).jpg
or this?
http://www.salem-news.com/articles/april222008/iran_float_4-22-08.php
I mean, they’re not technically on fire…
but you can’t honestly tell me “There has never been a plaster cast mockery of the 43rd President created and paraded about in public” without raising some eyebrows.
I’ve got half a dozen episodes of anti-Bush Robot Chicken that are just as good as any burning flag or goofy head on a pike.
Bubblegum Tate
@Zifnab:
Precisely. There was even an amazing Daily Show segment in which Frank Luntz broke down extactly how to stage a
town hallPotemkin village.“There he’s got an African-American, there he’s got an Asian, there’s your female–it’s one of everybody he’s got!”
CalD
If I never hanged George W. Bush in effigy myself it’s only because I never seemed to have the materials at hand when I was thinking about it. I’d be surprised of no one else did it.
But the Bushies were also pretty famous for stage-managing their “town hall” events though, right down to the point of thoughtfully providing questions for the pre-screened, ideologically friendly audiences to spontaneously ask. The most famous case I can think of being the one with a group of soldiers in Iraq where they screwed up the order they were supposed to ask the questions in and got the Bush all tangled up in his script.
In the few cases where people with dissenting views did manage to bluff their way past the screeners and actually get into an event, they were typically hauled off to jail in short order — only to have the bogus charges dropped later in most cases as I recall. Wouldn’t surprise me if there were still some false arrest charges pending against the secret service and/or various host city PDs over some of those incidents.
Asinistra
I remember the Dixie Chicks making a most mildly unladylike criticism of W. and suddenly finding themselves in a shitstorm of cancelled concerts, burned CDs, and death-threats. These goons never play fair with the truth.
random asshole
@SpotWeld:
Have we already forgotten the PUMAs?
joes527
@Mike G:
The plan was to clog the streets and prevent anyone from reaching the meetings. A different tactic, but the same idea. Shut down discussion.
I agree that WTO != Bush or Obama, or congress critters. But it is a case of folks that conservatives see as “the other side” organizing to try to prevent discussion from even occurring.
neil
In order for that to happen, George Bush would have had to allowed his critics anywhere within a five block radius where that little coward was speaking. If George Bush ever faced a crown like Doggett faced, he’d pee himself.
asiangrrlMN
Fuck them and their false equivalence. Of course there are loonies on the left. The difference, as so many have pointed out, is that the Democratic Party did not embrace said nuttiness or endorse it in any way. Plus, the left fringe truly is grassroots, whereas this rightwing bullshit is as manufactured as their values. You see Boehner and other Congress people crowing over the tactics. It’s rank bullshit.
By the way, cleek is just providing the pics that DougJ said he was looking for. I am glad s/he did. I didn’t know that shit went on, and it’s good to know what the fringe on MY side is doing. No, it’s not equivalent, but that’s not what DougJ was asking.
neil
That was supposed to be “crowd”….back to work, neil.
General Winfield Stuck
@joes527:
By and large, this is looking more like a mainstream GOP movement every day. I see an increasing numbers of T.E.A. (Taxed Enough Already) yard signs going up in local neighborhoods every day. The mainstream wingnut blogs, newspapers and FNC RW Pravda devotes more and more time to it.
Just because mainstream republicans have gone wacko doesn’t mean they still aren’t mainstream republicans.
Hell, even MSNBC is branding it “An Uprising”, a term I never heard even in the darkest days of Vietnam protesting and all the 60’s chaos.
** I’m not arguing with you Joe527. This whole thing has got my back up, though not yet to the degree of the Bush years as presnit. But it’s getting there. I had almost quit cussing so much, but nolo more.
Bruce Webb
“And because of this, The Dixie Chicks were embraced and beloved. Since then, they have gone on to great success and are now embraced by freedom lovers, rednecks and traditional country music fans throughout the nation.
Hell, they even won a bunch of Grammy’s in 2007.”
Dude you seriously forgot to add the snark tags. The Dixie Chicks were thoroughly demonized by the Right and were out of music for some years, years in which they sat back and had a bunch of kids. And this was the way Natalie responded when the Chicks got back to making music (bolding mine) :
http://www.lyricstop.com/n/notreadytomakenice-dixiechicks.html
Forgive, sounds good
Forget, I’m not sure I could
They say time heals everything
But I’m still waiting
I’m through with doubt
There’s nothing left for me to figure out
I’ve paid a price
And I’ll keep paying
I’m not ready to make nice
I’m not ready to back down
I’m still mad as hell and
I don’t have time to go round and round and round
It’s too late to make it right
I probably wouldn’t if I could
‘Cause I’m mad as hell
Can’t bring myself to do what it is you think I should
I know you said
Can’t you just get over it
It turned my whole world around
And I kind of like it
I made my bed and I sleep like a baby
With no regrets and I don’t mind sayin’
It’s a sad sad story when a mother will teach her
Daughter that she ought to hate a perfect stranger
And how in the world can the words that I said
Send somebody so over the edge
That they’d write me a letter
Sayin’ that I better shut up and sing
Or my life will be over
I’m not ready to make nice
I’m not ready to back down
I’m still mad as hell and
I don’t have time to go round and round and round
It’s too late to make it right
I probably wouldn’t if I could
‘Cause I’m mad as hell
Can’t bring myself to do what it is you think I should
I’m not ready to make nice
I’m not ready to back down
I’m still mad as hell and
I don’t have time to go round and round and round
It’s too late to make it right
I probably wouldn’t if I could
‘Cause I’m mad as hell
Can’t bring myself to do what it is you think I should
Forgive, sounds good
Forget, I’m not sure I could
They say time heals everything
But I’m still waiting
While this song topped out at no. 4 on the US charts and no. 6 on the US pop charts, it only hit no. 36 on the US Country charts and at that was their highest rated single on the Country charts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie_Chicks_discography
I just hope you were snarking, the idea that the Right just embraced the Chicks is ridiculous on its face.
Bruce Webb
@Zifnab:
Well I got a dead link and a picture of a guy riding a bomb with cowboy boots with what looks like a Mylar balloon with an actual photo of GWB on it. Not a hint of violence to it. If that is the best you can come up with I think I have to rate this ‘FAIL’
White House Department of Law (fmrly Jim-Bob)
No, but I do recall this: http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/04/24/secret_service_eyes_volunteer_who_tossed_3_from_bush_event/
And free speech zones — http://www.reason.com/news/show/33381.html. Also.
Paul L.
@geg6:
So why does the progressive blog Crooks and Liars positively cite Truther Jesse Ventura?
RememberNovember
I recall one incident of a a voter hanging Cheney in effigy, not Bush. As for the Hitler comment- that’s no secret everybody called him that!
ChrisB
@Zifnab: I’ll add that Bush and Rove didn’t feel the need to reach out to the other side or even the undecided except for certain specifically targeted groups. They felt they had their 50.1% and if they could get their supporters out, they’d win.
Except they didn’t have 50.1% after 2004. (Nor did they have it in 2000.)
The current protesters are certainly acting like jerks and they look like jerks on TV. The question is, will normal people’s distatste for their tactics and complete lack of (and antipathy to) reasoned argument outweigh whatever fear they inspire in Blue Dog Democrats and the few moderate Republicans who are left.
General Winfield Stuck
noted
Comrade Kevin
@Paul L.: I’m not sure what you thought you were posting, but that link of yours returns zero results.
Svensker
What difference does it make if Bush was burned in effigy by Lefties, or not? Who cares?
I don’t care if people burn Obama in effigy, or not, either.
What does bother me is people going to town hall meetings with their Representatives, and other people coming in to purposefully disrupt the meeting. I have no problem with attendees being passionate about their positions, but I want to hear and evaluate their positions, not have to listen to shouting for the sake of shouting. If their positions are so great and so logical and so damn patriotic, then let’s hear the damn positions. And then let’s talk about them. Just don’t try to intimidate or silence other people in the meeting.
Buncha Brownshirts, these Republicans.
Also, cry babies.
srv
@asiangrrlMN:
xyzzy
@linda:
Wow! Two hours from DougJ’s post to your comment, 107,000 web pages examined… that’s almost 15 pages a second that you were reading!
(To quote Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, “I keed! I keed!”)
Zifnab
@Bruce Webb: Seriously, I’m not sure what you’re hoping to prove on this line. No photographic evidence of a burning Bush effigy means… what exactly? That between 2000 and 2008, Bush was universally adored and no one domestically wished him any ill will?
Go through YouTube and search for George Bush. You’ll get a host of Truther conspiracy theories, blooper reels, and protest videos.
The Oklahoma guy might be wrong in fact. Perhaps there is no one in the 50 states that ever lifted a model likeness the President up by a rope and lite it on fire. So what? There were no shortage of anti-Bush protesters on my college campus from the day he got “elected”. There was no limit to anti-Bush sentiment in liberal states and communities by 2004. We saw two landslide elections hinge on anti-Bush anti-GOP rhetoric.
In sentiment, Mr. Oklahoma was right on. There were lots of people – particularly people of a liberal mindset – that absolutely despised the sitting President. That my links don’t satisfy you doesn’t change his staggeringly low approval numbers. That the textbook definition of “Burned in Effigy” was not meet by photographic standards, doesn’t mean people didn’t publicly proclaim their hatred of the 43rd President early and often.
I mean, what is your point exactly? Other than to say, “Well, this guy from Oklahoma can’t prove an effigy hanging took place, ergo I don’t know what his problem is?”
JakeInDk
I wish you’d given a few more lines of context. I thought that Mr Pershing did a good job of gently dismissing Oklahoma City’s argument and pointing out the difference between the types of attacks. Props to Mr Pershing for taking the questioner seriously and giving a response gauged to the questioner.
General Winfield Stuck
@srv:
Yea yea yea, heard it all before from you. Still a crock of concern troll shit.
Bob In Pacifica
I heard a rumor about millions of people all across the United States protesting against the invasion of Iraq. But it wasn’t reported in the press so I guess that didn’t happen.
Thomas Levenson
I got the same sh*t at my place when I dared to raise the connection in tactics between Teabaggers now and those conspiring to destroy the German Republic in the last days of Weimar. It’s all “you guys did it first: you are the real liberal fascists (Nazis….)
If it comes out of their mouths it must be true. Really, the task for the next x years is to hold the line against these folks long enough to demonstrate that there really is an alternative to GOP economic, social and moral (see, e.g. waterboarding) destruction of what I used to think might someday become a city on a hill.
Just Some Fuckhead
It’s entirely possible the chat participant was being sarcastic in an effort to disrupt the Wapo chat. And ya know what we do with sarcastic disrupters? We light their asses up with a BB gun.
TimmyB
@ cleek
The pictures you provide do not show that George W. Bush was met with shrieking leftist protestors shouting “Hitler!” and hanging him in effigy.
No one is claiming that the left never organized protests against Bush. Instead, the right is claiming that the left shouted down Bush and hanged him in effigy at Bush events.
That claim is simply a lie. You would need to photoshop Bush into the pictures of protestors to support the claim.
Chris DOwd
Zifnab
I guess “ineffectual” is a matter of perspective. Bush completed his 8 years and has left office. The GOP half of the two party fraud is “out of power” after suffering what passes for a “crushing defeat” in this country- a swing of more or less 6 or 7 percent of senate and house seats.
Obama defends the Bush administration’ss worst crimes and continues them- even expanding current wars.
Bush is a respected elder statesman now. What scandals are you talking about? Wire taps? The result of that? Amnesty for all involved. Torture? They got the guys who did it- at Abu Gharib- remember? There are no scandals.
The same invisible bland wall street and fed reserve guys who told Bush what to do tell Obama what to do as well. Nothing has changed.
The “mainstream” press- with rare exception- in this country is no check upon governmnet/corporate wrongdoing whatsoever.
joes527
@Thomas Levenson:
Sounds like you did it to yourself.
Once someone decides to call their opponent a Nazi, the rest of the conversation can be reduced to:
10 PRINT “You’re the Nazi.”
20 PRINT “No. You’re the Nazi.”
30 GOTO 10
It really doesn’t matter who is involved or what they are talking about. The outcome is always the same.
Goodwin’s law is there for a reason.
FlipYrWhig
There’s nothing wrong with going to a meeting, taking your turn at the mic, and asking pointed, obnoxious, and just plain outright stupid questions. Even the birth-certificate-in-a-baggie lady was registering her discontent in a legitimate way. Going to a meeting and just yelling shit is another matter entirely. It was stupid when Code Pink did it, it was stupid when a few people did it during McCain’s RNC speech (a story I was _amazed_ didn’t blow up into something huge), and it’s stupid now.
DBrown
@General Winfield Stuck: Remember the Florida recount in 2000 when Al Gore won the election and Florida but the repub-a-thugs stopped it? The Repub-a-thug mob that stormed the government offices that held State officials trying to perform their duty. These thugs where paid whores and organized by the repub-a-thug party and these animals attacked the place in mass – no cops stopped these pigs for some strange reason. Then the Junta overthrew the American Republic and installed the brain dead asshole bushwhack and butt fucked cheney.
vacuumslayer
@Hunter Gathers: That sounds AWESOME.
Paul L.
@Comrade Kevin:
Crooks and Liars search is broken.
Try the google search for Jesse Ventura on Crooks and Liars.
Chris DOwd
The “Teabaggers” as Nazis? Please. So Nazi protests involved standing around designated cordoned off “protest areas” wearing designer windbreakers and sipping 4 dollar cups of coffee while the cops tell them that they can’t do their protest because they don’t have the right EPA waiver to dispose of large amounts of tea in a public place?
I imagined the Nazis being a bit more feisty.
The “Teabag” protests, if anything, show how utterly pathetic our political culture has become- how astroturf- how devoid of any real passion or focus.
That “protest” couldn’t have been more establishment.
Julia Grey
So I’m scratching my head here.
Is this guy saying it’s okay for the teabaggers to disrupt town hall meetings with their loud protests because it was NOT okay for leftists to do similar things under Bush?
Nope. Still not getting it.
Apparently it’s also okay to hang elected Democratic officials in effigy because it wasn’t okay to hang Republican elected officials in effigy.
It’s a mystery, my friends.
Hammy
Did anyone mention the hundreds, maybe thousands, of Americans who were locked up at the Gitmo-on-the-Hudson holding cells during the 2004 GOP convention in NYC? Almost all of those people had their charges dropped.
srv
@DBrown: Protests don’t affect change. But plenty of people here will assiduously document the latest Republican transgressions, while an itsy, bitsy fraction of wingnuts go out and affect change.
Does anyone know if there is such a thing as a Medicare or Tricare form for terminating coverage? I was going to suggest these be printed out and handed to various protestors at the next town hall cycle.
General Winfield Stuck
I think they are affecting change too. They are cementing previous notions in the publics mind that republicans are batshit insane screaming lunatics with no alternative and an obsession that the president isn’t an American citizen.
That’s change I can believe in.
Pete Gaffney
I did this in Downtown Crossing in Boston in 2000. It was awesome.
Woody
In a word: No…
JenJen
Well, let’s go to the best source possible on these kinds of matters: Our Lady of Perpetual Outrage:
http://michellemalkin.com/2009/08/04/this-is-what-mob-rule-looks-like/
Not an effigy in the bunch!
tc125231
@The Moar You Know: Le mot juste.
inkadu
People are really answering two questions in this thread:
1) Do lefties do this kind of thing?
and
2) Does society treat left protests differently than right protests?
Anyway.
bartkid
>Did this actually happen or is it just some new winger talking point?
It’s another data point in proving that cheeto dust is a hallucinogen.
tc125231
@joes527: Yeah, but do you remember the “Proverb for Paranoids” in Gravity’s Rainbow?
–It’s not paranoid to think people are out to get you, if they are.
Have you ever noticed that there are NO circumstances under which the right admits losing because most people didn’t like them, or their ideas?
No, there always has to be a “plot”….
tc125231
@joes527: Yeah, but do you remember the “Proverb for Paranoids” in Gravity’s Rainbow?
–It’s not paranoid to think people are out to get you, if they are.
Have you ever noticed that there are NO circumstances under which the right admits losing because most people didn’t like them, or their ideas?
No, there always has to be a “plot”….
tc125231
@General Winfield Stuck: I sure hope that you are right. If you’re not, we are in for real trouble.
GregB
I remember a national shitfit over one person who made a video and posted it at Moveon.org.
-G
P.S. According to Pickles Bush, George was never hung.
Catsy
Why are people bringing up the anarchist disruption in the WTO riots as if it were somehow an example of The Left being just as bad to the Bush Administration as The Right is now to Democrats?
The WTO riots were in 1999. Perpetrated largely by out-of-state anarchists who think Che Guevara was too moderate.
You might remember that Bill Clinton was president at the time.
Candidate Bush had thrown his hat in the ring less than six months before.
You are an idiot.
fargo
What, exactly, would have been wrong with hanging Bush in effigy and shouting “HItler”?
The left has been remarkably passive ( not “civil,” passive ), which is why it is not taken seriously and why it should not be.
Singularity
In the lingo of gamers:
Screenshot or it didn’t happen.
joes527
@Catsy:
Who ever claimed that?
Project much?
Zifnab
@Chris DOwd:
:-p Yes yes. All the politicians are the same. George Bush and Barack Obama fell out of the same plaster mold run by the singular all-agreeing group of moneyed interests that run the world. Elections are a sham. It’s all for naught.
Meanwhile, you’ve got a lot of people spending a lot of money and manpower to crush a non-profit government health care program. And you’ve got Congressmen talking about tax increases for the first time in a decade. I’ve seen more progressive legislation – from the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to the new Hate Crimes Bill to the Climate Change Legislation coming out of the Waxman Committee – in the last six months than I’ve seen in eight years under Bush.
If a handful of mega-rich people control everything and it’s all one very expensive democratic farce, at the very least it appears that not all the mega-rich people agree where the country should be headed and elections do appear to have some impact on public policy.
If the country didn’t go from Reaganist to Socialist inside your mandatory 2 year window, I don’t know what to tell you. Political sea changes take a little time.
Zifnab
@Chris DOwd:
:-p Yes yes. All the politicians are the same. George Bush and Barack Obama fell out of the same plaster mold run by the singular all-agreeing group of moneyed interests that run the world. Elections are a sham. It’s all for naught.
Meanwhile, you’ve got a lot of people spending a lot of money and manpower to crush a non-profit government health care program. And you’ve got Congressmen talking about tax increases for the first time in a decade. I’ve seen more progressive legislation – from the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to the new Hate Crimes Bill to the Climate Change Legislation coming out of the Waxman Committee – in the last six months than I’ve seen in eight years under Bush.
If a handful of mega-rich people control everything and it’s all one very expensive democratic farce, at the very least it appears that not all the mega-rich people agree where the country should be headed and elections do appear to have some impact on public policy.
If the country didn’t go from Reaganist to So ciali st inside your mandatory 2 year window, I don’t know what to tell you. Political sea changes take a little time.
Bender
I don’t recall Doug asking if the effigies were at a Bush speech. Let’s check.
Nope, no mention of where the effigies were hung. Doug’s just asking if Bush was hanged if effigy by angry lefties. Clearly, the answer to that question is yes. The pictures prove it.
Separately, in the conversation at WaPo yesterday, some anonymous commenter wrote in saying that stuff like this happened at Bush events all the time. While that’s certainly not true, it’s just a commenter to a web-chat. BJers post stupid shit all the time, too. I don’t think that all lefties would like to be tarred by the semi-coherent screeds of fringe BJ posters.
The thing I find interesting is that the commenter and Pershing allude to a chat yesterday was some Obama supporter was evidently whining that yelling at congressional town halls should be illegal! Talk about your “free speech zones” now!
See what I said about anonymous commenters saying stupid shit? Or should we immediately deem this anti-First Amendment sentiment as “the new moonbat talking point?”
Pre-emptive: To the hundreds of eighth-grade intellects here, I’ll save you the trouble. “Yeah, comenterz say stupid shit all the time — espeshally YOU! LOLOLOL! PIE!”
JackieBinAZ
i remember how the Dixie Chicks nearly destroyed civilization with their outrageous remarks.
General Winfield Stuck
@tc125231:
Even if I am right, I would say we’re still in for trouble. These fools going ape on us are getting past caring for elections and all that namby pamby democracy stuff. Politics by other means may be what they are headed for, and if so, we will have to meet them on the field they choose.
General Winfield Stuck
exhibit A.
Skippy-san
Most of the pictures referenced are from organized demonstrations that never got anywhere near a hall with Bush or any other politician in it. They were actually pretty similar to the T-parties, save for the fact that most Teabaggers don’t go topless. (Thanks be to God for that!).
There is a big difference between shouting down a speaker in a closed civil forum and having an outside demonstration that requires a permit to have anyway. I would think people would recognize that.
Neither Bush nor Obama ever sees a crowd that has not been carefully pre-screened. Congressmen don’t have that luxury-nor do you want them to.
Guifer
And what does the fact that President Obama gets over 30 death threats each day, a 400 percent increase from what bush junior received, say about those on the right?
Grrrowler
Liberals were not allowed to criticize Bush. Doing so made them traitors.
Conservatives are, in their minds, obligated to criticize Obama. Not doing so makes them traitors.
Chris DOwd
Oh- “progressive legislation”. Gee- more federal government power in the hands of oligarchs. I think you are under the impression that I think “health care reform” is a good idea. Sorry- not a federal government lover.
Yes yes- our elections our vital lively events with a wide parameter of “debate” between our two, count them- two parties. I think Obama and McCain really got down to their differences when they said “i agree” about a million times in their powder puff “debates”.
If McCain had been elected he would have done more or less what Obama is doing with the difference being one of temperament and tone and he would have had his own particular band of parasites he would have taken care of.
I’m sorry- our political system is rotted- to the core. The parties are empty hollow structures with no power. They all but mimic debate at this point. The “debate” window gets tinier and tinier every year. Our vote is worh less and less each election (and is the worst voter to rep ratio in the world- after India)
I’m not sure giving carte blanche to the federal government to run health care is a sign that Obama is “differenet” in the slightest. We all know this was coming- Bush signaled it himself with his drug plan. Basically our politics revolves around just waiting for everything to become a national issue with two approved viewpoints.
Yes- by all means- lets give our torture loving government power over healthcare- in the whole country! Let’s give the government that gives undiscolsed trillions to their buddies- more responsibility in our lives. Such a wonderful government- such a caring government . . . they care about me!
The fact of the matter is that the last administration broke such fundamental core concepts of our political (not to mention moral) culture that to talk of Obama’s “progressive policy” smorgasbord while he defends the last administration and even compounds their sins on so many levels is well . . . not seeing the trees through the fog.
Obama is firmly defending every power Bush garnered to himself and the office of the Presidenc- dangerous power- and is even seeking to expand it. But he is passing some pork you like so it is all good. Got it.
Interrobang
I think a lot of people are missing the point. The right-wing townhall protests are corporately organised; there’s big money involved in rounding those people up, busing them in, and making sure they’ve got their marketing-approved scripted talking points in place and don’t froth too far off message.
Also, where the fuck are you people getting the idea that everyone protesting the WTO was an anarchist?! I was in those circles at the time — are anticorporate protestors and anarchists somehow the same thing to you? Does no one but me remember that corporations and corporations’ violation of the law (and national sovereignty) were the major things the left was protesting in North America in the late 1990s?! We weren’t just out fucking shit up in Seattle and Montreal; we got the MAI and the FTAA shot down. If you don’t remember the MAI or even ever knew what it was, STFU about the WTO protestors. (And no, we weren’t “DFHs.” We were punks. Punks are meaner — and cleaner.)
Shit, man, I’m long-term hard-core anticorporate, right down to hating the WTO because it’s an unelected body that gives corporations precedence over national sovereignty, but I’m a long way from an anarchist. In fact, the main reason I don’t like transnational corporations and their charming little proxy the WTO is that they overrule democratically-enacted laws nationally and internationall. Which was always the main complaint. Some “anarchism.”
That “the WTO protestors were all trustafarians and anarchists” crap is pure MSM bullshit spin (based largely on an exaggerated CNN report about four members of the Black Bloc, as I recall), and it’d behoove people around here to a) know better and b) knock it the fuck off.
monkeyboy
@freelancer:
As long as I don’t claim to work for the Federal Emergency Managent Agency I don’t see that I can be accused of impersonating a FEMA agent. Maybe the front of my windbreaker should have in small type
Forced
Eternal
Marxist
Assimilation
Is there such a thing as a federal FEMA agent in the first place?
SGEW
@Chris DOwd:
This is staggeringly disingenuous.
Unless you also believe that there was no substantive difference between George W. Bush and Al Gore. In that case, you are staggeringly simple minded.
[browses through linked articles]
Oh, never mind. You are staggeringly simple minded. Have fun with your gold and silver “investments,” shithead.
bvac
Fixed.
Chris DOwd
And by the way- I am not adverse to some form of government provided universal health care. In fact- I’m open to all manner of “progressive” ideas. I just don’t want such things run by the most unresponsive, distant, and all but impossible to influence on any real individual level – government.
I live in Mass. We passed a universal health care bill. Of course it has problems- but I would much prefer to deal with a state bureaucracy than a federal one when it comes to my health. But we can barely finance that progressive agenda because of . . . what can’t be spoken. . . our federal tax burden. Our state gives more to the feds than we get back. And now we are supposed to let shadowy fed powers and interests run our healthcare?
What else can the feds do better than my state government since you obviously think they can run health care better? Oh right- they kill people on the other side of the globe with a wholly unnecessary trillion dollar a year military and empire of bases much better than my poor benighted stupid state government (which also- to the best of my knowledge hasn’t attempted to legalize torture or invade small weakling countries on the other side of the globe on the most absurd and transparent of pretexts.)
I mean on what planet is that “progressive”?
This isn’t Germany or France. This is a polyglot nation of over 300 million. It is INSANE to impose a federal policy on something like healthcare on such a population size.
I will say the Dems are more honset. The GOPERS seem to prefer letting our de facto state run health insurance companies offer us up the worst of both worlds- private prices with socialized quality of care- while the Dems are a bit more honest- and just want the whole shabang (with loopholes for the superrich and themselves of course) to be government run outright and cut out the skim.
rs
My son was living in Marquette, Mi. back in 2004 when Bush made a campaign visit to the football dome there. After waiting over an hour in line at the local Republican Party storefront where tickets were distributed, he waited just as long in line at the fieldhouse the day of the event. He swore to me he had no intentions other than to see a president, even one he felt belonged in the Hague rather than Marquette. While waiting to enter, he was chatting and laughing as he passed by friends who were not in line, but demonstrating against the wars. He was witnessed doing this “by guys in suits and sunglasses” who approached, asked to see his ticket, and when he produced it to them tore it up and told him he needed a ticket to enter (Secret Service humor, I guess). When he protested, he was informed if he continued to make a disturbance he would be arrested. He left the line, went to his car, got his guitar, and returned to the fieldhouse where he and the crowd sang anti-war songs.
Pretty much exactly the way we see things happening at the congressional townhalls.
I could probably be motivated to get up off my ass and get in some faces at the townhalls if the Obama and the Democrats hadn’t told single-payer advocates like myself to essentially fuckoff. It’s their own damn fault for confusing the issue so hopelessly in their quest for bi-partisanship and, of course, pleasing their masters from insurance, pharmaceuticals, and everyone else who profits from the status quo.
DBrown
@srv: You lost me@Chris DOwd: Yes – the exact same; can you sing bomb, bomb Iran? Right, the same. Stay in Iraq for hundred years if needed; exact same.
Get real. Look at the EPA under bushwhack and repub-a-thugs in general and as far as health care, McInsane would have just used taxing our benifits to fix the problem; right, the same.
A lot of fools said the same about Gore and bush ass wipe and look at the thousands of dead American kids and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi’s (woman and children by the tens of thousands); yeah, the same.
Get your head out of the sand and try and follow the real world before you post such utter BS.
Chris DOwd
You can nit pick your little 2 percent policy differences all you want.
Obama is expanding the war in Afghanistan (he already has got a couple million Pakistannis living in refugee camps as a direct result of his policies). His “withdrawal” from Iraq is a chimera and a fraud. 2012? Right. What do you want to bet that over a 100,000 troops are still in Iraq in 2012? His Iran policy is based upon the same foundation of lies as it was under Bush. He has increased “defense spending”. He has no intention of negotiating with Iran in good faith. He has defended all Bush era power grabs and outright criminal violations and has, in some cases, offered up even more absurd “legal” rationales for them. And he has done basically everything wall street has told him to do. The Republican “oppossiton” to his “Stimulus” was only because it was Obama’s. They would have passed a monstrosity just as reckless differing slightly only in which groups of Federal hangers on and parasites got the goodies.
SGEW
Is there a single libertarian out there on the internets who isn’t huffing the toxic fumes of false equivalence? It’s kind of sad, really.
Zifnab
@rs:
Public Option is as close to single payer as you can reasonably ask for. Single Payer isn’t passing. That’s just the political reality.
That said, public option gives us a clean shot at single payer in the future, if we make it a solid program. Assuming mandated insurance, public option becomes the single biggest insurance provider overnight, covering 47 million uninsured individuals. It likely supplements or replaces the SCHIP program, which will add tens of millions more. If you can’t get an insurance program right when you’ve got one in six Americans on the rolls, I don’t imagine your Single Payer program is going to be much better.
I know that when it does go live, I’ll be hard pressed to keep my old plan. If public option is better than what I’ve got, that’s what makes me happy.
Chris DOwd
Yes- Obama is a radical depature from Bush. I am sure- Obama, like every president before him since FDR- will leave office having strengthened the hand of the federal government even more with his own legacy of ABC agencies and one or two new mega burueacracies.
So differenct from Bush. I am sure that excites what passes for a “left” in this country.
Is there a “progressive” out there who actually has had an original thought since Stalin’s last 5 year plan?
The fact of the matter is that most “Progressives” are just shills for federal oligarchy and centralization of power and the dis-empowerment of communities and local government and of real people.
You know- maybe if “progressives” concentrated on getting their agendas passed on local levels – on running manageable sized programs- you wouldn’t sound like dinosaurs. But that just isn’t grand enough is it?
DBrown
@Chris DOwd: Stalin? I see we are a bit over the top here (or are ten to twenty million dead at his hand some how compares even to bush’s 200,000 – 400,000 dead Iraqi’s? As for Iraqi’s killed under Obama, very few are dead.) As for Afganistan, as I remember, they are the country that protect the 9-11 hijackers and whether far to them or not, it was their gov that did it; yet, what are the total dealths? A few hundred, or even a thousand? Or are the Taliban our friends now?
A country of 307 million people in fifty states and many points of view do not need that many and different health plans. As for collective responsiblity for health care across state lines, what is wrong with that?
liberal
@Chris DOwd:
What’s so great about local government?
Sure, there are many functions of gov’t that best reside there, but you clearly know little about the history of government abuses at the local level.
rs
@Zifnab: I understand the political reality of money. However, excluding single-payer advocates from the debate altogether is as execrable as the faux-demonstrations at the congressional townhalls. And the so-called “Public Option”, as I understand it, is capped at a very low percentage of total participants.
HR 676, “Medicare For All” is an easy concept for most people to get their head around. Had it’s proponents been given an opportunity to make their case, you may very well have seen real grassroot counter-demonstrations. As it stands now, much as I would enjoy inviting one of the ignorant old teabaggers to burn their Medicare card, I wouldn’t want my attendance to be mistaken as support for the clusterfuck the Democrats have created.
El Cid
@Interrobang: Thanks for that. The WTO meetings are where decisions are made, they are not democratic fora of discussion.
Chris DOwd
When American “progressives” actually “act locally” – like we did in Massachusetts when we passed our our universal health care program- they can win.
People are not so afraid of “Socialistic” remedies coming from their government- when that government is closer to them. It is when “progressives” start calling for humungo one sized fits all federal “solution” to everything that scares the hell out of people- normal non ideological people.
The same state that passed a universal health care program is now evenly split on an Obama vs Romney presidential race!
AMericans don’t hate progressive ideas- they just rightly don’t trust them when run by the most distant layer of government. This isn’t a ‘Right/left” thing either. It is a common sense thing.
liberal
@Chris DOwd:
LOL! What planet are you living on?
In every single locality I’ve lived in—every single one—the government was in the pockets of the land developers.
El Cid
@liberal: Exactly. There’s nothing inherently more democratic by something being local than something being at the federal level.
Our property development patterns would be much, much better if we were among the many countries with national development regulations than simply allowing the local growth coalitions to dominate most of local politics by playing off one locality against another.
“Local” government may be as likely to be cellular autocracy as federal programs may be large-scale bureaucratic.
liberal
@Bender:
He didn’t ask that directly, but the item he quotes refers to “Does no one on the left recall eight years under George W. Bush when everywhere he went there were shrieking leftist protestors …” [emphasis added], so it’s a reasonable interpretation of Doug’s question.
liberal
@El Cid:
…if we
(a) Taxed land value extremely heavily;
(b) Didn’t have zoning ordnances whose main effect is to keep density low.
rs
@liberal: There’s probably a black person or two somewhere in the South who would agree with you.
Chris DOwd
All things have their times. Has the Federal government been a source for “positive” change? Sure. African Americans and most others would surely point to the “Civil Rights” era as an example.
But on balance Federal corruption has a far more sinister history than that of our State governments.
Off the cuff from the recent local history: The Boston FBI branch spent 30 years protecting a serial killer Irish mob boss so a succession of agents and US attorneys could earn the big cases and get the career building headlines against a rump joke of a “Mafia”.
My state government doesn’t have over 100 suspicious deaths or admitted murders do to “enhanced interrogation techniques” made suddenly legal by lawyers working for beacon hill.
My state government, to the best of my knowledge, didn’t run a wide ranging boundless wire tapping program for years on its citizens.
It has invaded anyone since the Pequot war 300 plus years ago.
Oh- and we managed to free the slaves of Massachusetts without killing half a million people in a war and reducing half the country to a smoldering ruin.
We didn’t make a nuke bomb- and if we did- we wouldn’t feel the need to half 50’000 of them. We wouldn’t be spending more than the whole world combined on a “defense” we don’t need either.
As far as I know Boston doesn’t run assassination schools in SOuth America for merc killers to do the bidding our our local business elite.
Did the Massachusetts State Government fund and authorize a medical study in which hundreds of black men were allowed to die – after suffering horribly for years- from venereal diseases?
Hey- whatever way you slice it- all the worst local abuses by the worst state governments wouldn’t produce a corpse pile capable of escaping the shadow of the Fed Gov’s dead body mountain.
rs
I haven’t read, heard, or met any progressive who endorse those crimes of the federal government.
cj
I have a to say yes it happened to Bush, but clearly for different reasons. Bush went to Iraq against the people’s wishes. Iraq was not a war the American people were behind.
The people that are going after Obama are only mad because their party lost. For god sakes President Obama is trying to pass health care for those same people that are against him. He getting troops out of Iraq and take them back to unfinished war Bush left behind-Afghanistan.
It is a clear difference between the anger you see now than then.
The anger mob we see today are hired (or misinformed) people that corporations put together.
While back then it was people mobilizing people (who were on the same level as themselves. Not big corporations).
Chris DOwd
That’s not really the point if you endorse them or not. The fact of the matter is that most of those crimes are only possible because of the distant removed nature of the Federal Government. The worst wars and most vile atrocities have been committed by the “mega states” of the 20th century.
And our federal government is now at the point where the rule of law is all but a joke. We burn local pols, with far less power, at the stake for minor corruptions while our Federal government literally tolerates torture and murder- as written legal policy- and a smarmy well connected insider financial elite all but walks out of the treasury with trillions . . .
It is time for a new progressive movement. A move towards localism and communitarian.
El Cid
@liberal: Right, but an essential element is the ability to play one locality off against each other — i.e., ‘if you don’t approve all these new sewer lines and water lines and roads / give us all this free land and local tax breaks etc., then we’ll just go 2 miles down the road to Next Door County and build our super-shit there.’
ez
a bush effigy w/a pinnochio nose was evidently placed in Dupont Circle & protesters were invited to throw shoes at it according to:
http://andrewyu-jenwang.blogspot.com/search?q=bush+effigy+dupont
Chris DOwd
So the solution- is to have a distant federal government apply rules for land development so that a far tinier (and mostly never local) circle of elites can profit from their access to power?
That’s a recipe for a McDonald’s and Starbucks on every major intersection in the country if I ever saw one.
Makewi
Sure it happened, but that was ok because Bush was like, the devil and stuff. It also happened to Palin, which is also fine because she, being a Republican, deserved it.
It wasn’t ok then anymore than it was ok now, although in every case it was free speech, and should be protected. Not that it will be in this case, seeing as those who did it were arrested.
cj scares me a little.
Makewi
BTW – I’m reporting all of you to the WH for fishy behavior!
For the motherland!!!
Zifnab
@liberal:
That won’t work in the US for a couple of reasons. Firstly, there’s a lot of land in America. Acres and acres of it. If you crank up the tax rate in one city, you’d just have everyone flood out into the adjacent township.
That’s what happened down in Houston during the 80s and 90s with the march into the suburbs. The original appeal of The Woodlands and Sugar Land were their incredibly low business and property taxes. Hell, the entire appeal of the state of Texas after GW became Governor was rock bottom taxes.
So what you’re really asking for is some kind of national property tax, and that’s not happening – politically – any time soon.
Secondly, real estate is a big business. A lot of money changes hands with people buying and selling homes and businesses. If you crank up the price of owning real estate, you dry that market up. Prices on property (and the corresponding commissions) plummet. Home ownership declines, dragging on banks. People won’t let that happen. There’s too much money sloshing around the system.
Finally, it’s too late. Had this been an idea in 1776, maybe it would have sold. But in 1776, we had more land than we have now, and the whole goal was to develop it en mass post haste. As it stands, the government wants people to develop the land, as land development drives the economy. We’re too rooted in construction and expansion to give up the habit now. Besides, how many farmers would have a fucking fit if you tried to tax their 400 acres of soy beans on a per acre charge?
This idea might work in an area like Hawaii or Japan, where land is already at a premium and you want the government to step in to fuel concentrated development. But in Florida or Montana or California? No way.
cj
@Makewi: Hey, what did I do? :P
Bender
Yeah, Chimpy McHitlerburton’s fascist “free speech zones” were EVIL! No way Hopey McChangealot, the Transparent Unicorn, would ever do such uhhhhhhhh…..
Never mind!
Ohhhhh, Obama’s free speech zone was for safety. And they take the matter of free speech seriously.
Bender
I guess you have to blockquote tag each paragraph now? Anyway, all but that last line are from the article in The Progressive.
General Winfield Stuck
@Makewi:
Talking point fail..
mary b
Everybody and anybody who tried to protest Bush and his policies were carted off to a fenced in area, the size of an animal cage, called free speech zones. It was usually 2-3 miles away from where ever Bush’s event was held. If somehow, someone got closer, they were then arrested for disturbing the peace.
If Bush were President now, all the Town Hall meetings would be heavily screened by invitation only. Just like when he was President.
Sickening, isn’t it?
Big E
wasn’t there a guy who was near Cheney in NOLA, gave him the middle finger salute and maybe said ‘F**K You’… arrested for ‘threatening ‘ Cheney?
so much for ‘free speech’
Big E
re: Chris DOwd
‘Is there a “progressive” out there who actually has had an original thought since Stalin’s last 5 year plan?
The fact of the matter is that most “Progressives” are just shills for federal oligarchy and centralization of power and the dis-empowerment of communities and local government and of real people.’
Dewde, you left out Hitler, Lenin, fascist, totalitarian, marxist et al.
c’mon now… at least get all the usual inane references in yer post,..
altho’ I enjoyed the Palin ‘real people’ tribute’…
Tim in SF
Hold on a minute.
1. a lot of those are joke signs. They are meant to be funny or ironic. It’s Berkeley and San Francisco, after all, and we have a sense of humor, even in our desperation.
2. a lot of the captions are assumptions. Like, the woman with the red shirt and yellow star – he labels her as a communist. Hardly fair. Did he even ask her?
3. I’m not in any of these pictures, but I might as well be. The “Protester taking a break in the parade following the March 20, 2004 rally ” — that guy’s name is Rob. He was my roommate in 2000 and into 2001. In the photo he’s wearing the shirt that I gave him when I moved out (in 9/01) and cleaned out my closet. How’s that for a coincidence?
4. The nude guys are being used to show how extreme and awful the left is. But those guys show up at EVERY event. They’re almost as prolific as Frank Chu.
Julia Grey
the Dems are a bit more honest- and just want the whole shabang (with loopholes for the superrich and themselves of course) to be government run outright and cut out the skim.
Well, absent the skim, at least it’ll be less expensive.
Mark
Revisionist history: last refuge of a charlatan.
cj
The point is today’s outrage is fake (corporation made up outrage) done by uninformed group of people(waling against their better interest), where as, the outrage towards the Bush Admin was done by well informed people that decided to get together with other groups to protest(not by corporations).
Also people weren’t making up lies or trying to scare people to get their message across unlike what is happening nowadays.
rs
@Chris DOwd: You make good points regarding the insularity of government the further it’s removed from the governed. At the same time, even considering the corporate near-ownership of the federal government, it’s only the federal government that has the financial resources and multiple power centers that allow it to occasionally challenge the corpocracy (like the tobacco industry, for instance) when they overplay the five aces they permanently hold.
Regarding healthcare specifically, the best argument for federal single-payer is Medicare, which is able to control some costs due to the sheer size of the program. Add another 250 million Americans and they can negotiate some sweet discounts. Not to mention that, being a federal program, it allows US citizens- old ones, anyway- the freedom to move anywhere within all 50 states and find a provider without losing their coverage. That isn’t possible with individual state run programs like the one you mention in Massachusetts.
jjcomet
Notice, of course, that Mr. “local government is better” is from Massachusetts – a state demonized for years by the right wing as the home of godless liberalism. So I guess *progressive* local government works OK. If you lived in Texas, as I do, you’d realize that much (if not most) local government is often far, far more fucked up and corrupt than the federal government could ever hope to be. The smaller world in which it operates, with fewer true power centers, fewer eyes on what’s happening behind the scenes, and fewer opportunities for effective checks and balances, makes the field rife for abuse. Lemme guess, Chris – you’re not a student of government, eh?
Anne Laurie
P.S. I also remember, during the 2004 Republican Convention in NYC, Megan McArdle suggesting the anti-Bush protestors “should be beaten with two-by-fours” because the heavy security presence around the ever-diminishing ‘free speech’ protest pens was “a real inconvenience, and also depressing to witness”. And when her BFFs Yglesias & Klein called her out, first she pretended she “didn’t know what a 2×4 was, actually” and then went the “Gosh, you liberals have no sense of humor!” route.
No link, because I refuse to read through more of McArdle’s wordswill. Google it if you must.
JR
“Asylum Seeker” at the blog “Madman’s Paradise” posted a pretty comprehensive collection of the really outrageous crap that actual Leftist protesters had during America’s lost decade.
The important distinction to keep in mind is that our crazies weren’t accepted by Democratic leaders, weren’t celebrated by Democratic party groups, and weren’t really doing the whole “Bush = Hitler” thing en masse in April of 2000.
PaulB
Not to mention, JR, that no Democratic Congresscritter was a member of the crazies, no major pundit or media star was a member of the crazies, and the crazies were not given a national media platform from which to continue to spout their craziness.
Wile E. Quixote
@The Moar That You Know
Indeed, those were the years where I was number one in People magazine’s 50 most beautiful people in the world. What I wouldn’t give to be young, beautiful and sexy again and in a liberal mob burning George W. Bush in effigy.
Chris DOwd
RS,
Yes, on occasion, the federal government can act as a check on corporate power. But the history of the federal government power and corporate power go hand in hand.
The historical “progressive movement” of the turn of the century was about power consolidation for the benefit of corporate power (actually it goes back to Lincoln).
The “Defense” industry is just the most blatant and obvious example of this symbiotic relationship. In the last quarter century however we have seen the rise of the financial industry as the main owners of the Federal Government.
This countrty has had a national socialist industrial policy in the form of “defense spending” since world war two and it is now out of all control.
When it comes to healthcare I look to smaller. Some of the European models of state run health care work (or perform adequately) becuase they are for millions of people- not billions.
I would much rather prefer a well funded comprehensive and responsive Massachusetts run universal health care system than one run by the federal government. The benefit of being able to move outside of the Commonwealth to some benighted state like Ohio doesn’t interest me or would it most people.
How about this- Massachusetts (New England) opts out of the federal “defense grid” and we keep our health care system and the taxes we send to DC for those purposes. That would solve our funding problems on a whole host of vital services now being cut while the Feds spend money on idiocy.
This state is now cutting teachers and policemen and even putting onerous burdens on homeless families in shelters while the Feds “re-invest” our tax dollars on studies on high speed trains and other pet projects!
We can spend our money much better than DC.
Chris DOwd
JJ,
Sorry you live in Texas. Move to Mass.
Chris DOwd
RS,
In the years after the Civil War- we saw another revolution in this country. A silent revolution. For decades state law after state law- that sought just to regulate industry and corporations were struck down by the Supreme Court (using a highly deranged reading of the 14th amendment).
The State of New York wanted to mandate a 10 hour work day for loom operators? Nope- the Feds said it was “unconstitutional”. The State of Georgia wanted to regulate sweat shops? Nope. “Unconstitutional.”
State government were far ahead in passing social legislation than the feds. Things we take for granted today- like the 8 hour work day- were all local initiatives at first violently opposed- for decades- by the Federal government and the corporate interests that much rather preferred to have one central government to corrupt than 50.
There is this notion among progressives that the Feds (no matter what dark evil they commit) are some enlightened force for good in the world fighting the ignorance and vile bigotry of local trogs.
It is a largely a myth.
I trust, or at least can watch closer, my neighbors than I can some distant government that is clearly irredeemable at this point.
rs
@Chris DOwd: You stand tall in battle versus straw men. No one here has exhibited the naivety you attribute to progressives. Government at all levels is a tool, sometimes for good, just as often for bad.
On the other hand, with your advice to jj to move to Massachusetts, one can’t help but think that all your previous high-minded bullshit about “localism and communitarian” is just that.
Chris DOwd
IF he so can’t stand his local environ- he should move. However- wishing for federal supermen to come in and take over everything and make it better is just wishful thinking.
Frankly, I don’t see why Massachusetts should be in the Union whatsoever. The rest of the country is benighted drag on us.
Jaquestraw
where is your PROOF that these people are coordinated planned organized mobs.Maybe they really are just fed up regular folk who are just opposed to the plans the government has in store for them.