How The Right Turned The Heath Care Town Halls Into Media Circuses And Teabagger Sessions

Chuckie the Clown (R-IA)- $2,031,729 from the Medical Industrial Complex

Today the right trotted out its chief political tactician to trill a reprise of his one-note opus: to distort the opponent's message, hit him where he's strongest and project all your own failures onto him. Karl Rove accused Obama of waging an unending political war-- the far right's strategy since the ratification of the 16th Amendment to the Constitution in 1913 thwarted conservatives and corporate shills on the Supreme Court from protecting income from taxation. No one living knows better than Rove about a White House "response to critics [that] has been inappropriate or unpresidential."

It's not just sociopaths in tri-corner hats with teabags hanging from them who are howling at the TV cameras about ObamaCare and socialism who are perverting the meaning of participatory democracy. And it isn't just right-wing propagandists like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh either. Even cowardly conservative senators, afraid of being primaried by the lunatic fringe, are now spreading the lies about Obama wanting to kill your granny.

Take the reaction to the town-hall meetings taking place across the country. Many people are worried about their health care and a few are responding in unacceptable ways. But Democrats are portraying the opposition as an "angry mob" using, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer wrote in a USA Today op-ed, "un-American" tactics. Mr. Obama's "Organizing for America," a political group founded by the president to mobilize supporters, dismisses critics as tools of "insurance companies... stirring up fear with false rumors," without presenting a shred of evidence to back up the charge.

The leaders of the angry mob are reveling in this and have learned their lessons well. They are the victims of Hoyer and Pelosi and Obama-Hitler and the dupes with the tri-corner hats insist no insurance companies are paying them to walk around telling and screaming. No doubt. They say they're just ordinary Americans and they resent being called "tools" and "angry mobs." They love being victims though; that's their natural comfort zone. Harry Reid's frustration-laden comments about evil-mongers plays right into their hands. Are, as he claimed, "lies, innuendo and rumor," being used to drown out rational debate? Well, of course; that's the whole fucking idea. But the dupes in the tri-corner hats don't know that. They don't know they're being used by the insurance CEOs-- who they will tell you they actually hate! Brian Baird's (D-WA) town hall meeting was disrupted by a gang of teabaggers whose goal was simple: disruption. He gave them a bonus when he said they were “lynch mob mentality” and exhibiting quasi "Brownshirt tactics." Now they can whine about how they're being victimized by elites. And, of course, this is manna from Heaven for the mass media-- and not just for the GOP's own Fox News but also for relatively legitimate media like CNBC, which was caught yesterday trying to drum up a riot with some of the teabagger groups for their TV cameras. And now they can whine that the fascist secret police are arresting them for exercizing their constitutional rights.

I mentioned the other day that when the Pasadena Patriots tried drowning out Adam Schiff at his town hall meeting and keeping him from conducting a dialogue with thousands of his constituents, most of whom were not teabagging imbeciles, one of their favorite chants was the nationally popular, "Read the bill." Schiff had, of course, and they hadn't-- although they're all carrying around a ridiculous teabagger version of the bill that insists ACORN and the SEIU will get to decide who lives and who dies under ObamaCare. Another congressman who has read every single word of the bill is New York's Eric Massa, who has been conducting hugely successful, teabagger-proof town halls all over his upstate New York district. His GOP opponent next year, right-wing nut and Corning Mayor Tom Reed, an anti-health care zealot, admitted that he would rather not waste his time actually reading the health insurance reform bill before deciding that he’s against it. Rachel Maddow summed up much of the national farce on her show last night: