Krugman: The Town Hall Mob

There’s a famous Norman Rockwell painting titled “Freedom of Speech,” depicting an idealized American town meeting. The painting, part of a series illustrating F.D.R.’s “Four Freedoms,” shows an ordinary citizen expressing an unpopular opinion. His neighbors obviously don’t like what he’s saying, but they’re letting him speak his mind.

That’s a far cry from what has been happening at recent town halls, where angry protesters — some of them, with no apparent sense of irony, shouting “This is America!” — have been drowning out, and in some cases threatening, members of Congress trying to talk about health reform.

Some commentators have tried to play down the mob aspect of these scenes, likening the campaign against health reform to the campaign against Social Security privatization back in 2005. But there’s no comparison. I’ve gone through many news reports from 2005, and while anti-privatization activists were sometimes raucous and rude, I can’t find any examples of congressmen shouted down, congressmen hanged in effigy, congressmen surrounded and followed by taunting crowds.

And I can’t find any counterpart to the death threats at least one congressman has received.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/07/opinion/07krugman.html

America, and it means we do listen to both sides, and we LET people have their say. Free Speech doesn't just mean the speech of the loudest. I know the answer, so this is rhetorical, but don't they get how UN-American their shout downs are??

The fringe right is thinking they can intimidate or scare congress. That is not something new, they learned it from fear of terrorism thing, and fear of communism red scare, and fear of everything else used to intimidate people into submission.

One more question.

How many advertisements in future congressional races will show the true face of the fringe right.

is shouting back...but I know that only fuels the flames, and pretty soon, everyone is operating only on their lizard brains and nothing gets accomplished.

Why didn't the Democrats, who control Congress, put a health care reform bill on president Obama's desk before the August break?

Stop whining about brainless Fox News droids and focus on pressuring Democrats to do their fucking job on this issue.

It's now or never people.

...came, not in 2005 from the progressives, but in 1994 from the wingnuts. I remember a visit by Hillary Clinton (at the time the author of health-care reform) to Seattle, in which she was not only heckled, but her limo leaving the event was pursued by a rock-throwing mob chanting "Kill the bitch!"

"This is America," indeed. :puke:

Is telling because the older you are the more racist you are. Just a demographic fact. Also the largest demographic group that voted for John mcCain was whites over 65.

Krugman: "But right now Mr. Obama’s backers seem to lack all conviction, perhaps because the prosaic reality of his administration isn’t living up to their dreams of transformation. Meanwhile, the angry right is filled with a passionate intensity."


Yeats: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity."



THE SECOND COMING
William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

thanks for picking that up & posting

"Fantasy" is one of the most powerful forces in the human mind. In fantasy, we can achieve perfection without any of the messy middle steps between the diminished A and the perfect Z. It's being demonstrated on all sides right now. Many of the dems are discouraged that Obama has to be pragmatic, using step-by-step, imperfect collaborations and negotiations rather than riding in and cleaning up the town, smiting the enemy and winning over the barbarians. Those who oppose Obama for whatever reasons are floating on the cloud of "what if," without having to think about how imperfect ANY course of action is. That's why you hear no particulars from the GOP. It would interfere with the bliss of the fantasy and take the wind out of many of their ardent, deluded supporters.

I'm incredibly impressed with our president, who, in the midst of all this, simply soldiers on. I pray those corporations and special interests who are using the fantasies of the average people (including the terrified ones, which I won't go into here) to their own ends are exposed so repeatedly and loudly that the fantasies are robbed of their power.