He hooked an arm around the kid and tried to spin him. This is not something that would be worth the cops’ time except to tell the kids to quit bothering people on the street.
That’s the problem these days. Adults are no longer allowed to sort out punk kids the way they need to be sorted out.
It was unwise in my opinion, but I’m hard put to call it “wrong.” It just doesn’t rise to a level serious enough to give it any moral quality.
As a US Representative, with the ability to create legislation that affects everybody in all 50 states, everybody is one of his constituents, if not one of the people that can vote for him.
You’ve got a problem with calling what was done to the kid an attack, but you’re okay calling asking a Congressman a question on a public street with a camera present harassment?
Yeah, what would be important is that it is the Congressman that is okay after what happened. Grabbing someone you don’t know and holding onto him after he tells you to let you go is no big deal, but let’s make sure he is the one that is okay after doing it because he might not have been able to handle the trauma. You’re a little kooky.
You’re a lot kooky.
Right. But they may have been sexual predators. Got it.
This is precisely where I’m coming from. I simply gave a little background on the man. (He is not a lawyer, by the way – someone upthread had asked – but was in retail before running for county commissioner, state legislator, superintendent of public instruction, and then congressman.)
Definition of constituent from dictionary.net, but call it semantics if you like:
CONSTITUENT. He who gives authority to another to act for him. 1 Bouv. Inst. n. 893. 2. The constituent is bound with whatever his attorney does by virtue of his authority. The electors of a member of the legislature are his constituents, to whom he is responsible for his legislative acts.
Source: Bouvier’s Law Dictionary, Revised 6th Ed (1856)
If only we knew this was the extent of what actually happened. If only those two poor “students”, who just happened to have two cameras running, had pressed charges, or at the very least hadn’t hidden their names and faces on their own “student project”.
But they didn’t, so I guess we’ll just have to give the benefit of the doubt to congressman, won’t we?
That’s not what “constituent” means. Constituents are only the people he represents, not the people he can affect.
And there is no requirement that he answer questions even to constituents.
I am stunned that people can justify an adult male to physically manhandle a kid who asked him a question. I thought politicians developed a thick skin because journalists stick cameras and mics in their face all the time. If he abused everyone who got in his face, he would have trouble being elected.His actions were inexcusable.
Thank ghod! Finally, somebody who has facts about the situation.
So tell us-how did you find out that one of these “students” was a kid? Would you happen to have his name, or at least his age?
Really?
Well, it’s been several years since I practiced criminal law, but I do have some experience in the field.
On what basis do you doubt it? What experience do you rely upon to suggest that what I’m saying isn’t true?
So is age or academic status the key factor in deciding if it is ok to manhandle someone?
I agree with Bricker that in the grand scheme of things it’s not that big of a deal, but it was still wrong. Why you seem to think that the motives of the 2 somehow alleviate the congressman of blame is puzzling.
Those guys greeting Etheridge - he grudgingly said hello. They asked how he was doing - he sourly said good. They asked “Do you fully support the Obama agenda”, and he went ballistic.
There are any number of clips of the encounter on Youtube and looking at enough of them shows that there was never any opportunity for anything “inflammatory” or “provoking” to take place. And this observation is bolstered by the fact that Etheridge just kept repeating his “Tell me who you are” mantra rather than referring to or responding to whatever so-called provocation his apologists want to suggest was edited out.
It would also be much to Etheridge’s benefit to explain whatever provocation took place if it actually had, as simply admitting he reacted badly and then letting the incident lie there like dead fish is gonna stink up not only his re-election chances but his image and reputation considerably.
It doesn’t matter if those guys were students and it doesn’t matter if they were young and it doesn’t matter if their faces were obscured and it doesn’t matter if they were conservatives. People have a right to ask politicians how they stand on the issues and Obama’s agenda is most certainly an issue.
The guy simply pegged them as what our rather amateurish president likes to refer to as “teabaggers” and went off accordingly. And like Etheridge himself has said, he was wrong to do so.
I would say it’s a mystery to me why so many posters like Czarcasm continue to behave as though the questioners were in the wrong, if only it was. 
How do you know they don’t? We don’t know everything they did to provoke the guy.
I also don’t think the actions shown on the are are significant or important enough to be called “wrong.” He neither hurt anybody, nor tried to hurt anybody, so it’s hard to see how his actions can rise to the level of moral “wrongness.” It was just too inconsequential to morally matter.
They probably WERE teabaggers, so Etheridge had them pegged correctly and treated them exactly the way they wanted to be treated.
In fact we don’t know they did anything to provoke the guy. Unless “provoking” now means saying hello to an elected official in public, holding a camera, and asking a question that was worded negatively, but which was probably nothing Etheridge hadn’t heard before. It’s possible they did something to provoke the guy; knowing that these two jerks were trying to get me would probably have annoyed me, too. But we don’t actually know what they did anything.
So resolved it’s ultimately a “fuhgeddabout it” thing.
How is referring to a group by the name they chose “amateurish”? If he was referring to them as anything else (democrat party as opposed to Democratic Party), you’d be howling like a broke-dick dog and faunching at the bit to have him roundly condemned by Limbaugh, Hannity and Beck.
And I might point out, given that this is the Straight Dope and all, that there is no evidence whatsoever that those guys did anything to provoke Etheridge beyond being clean-cut, wearing jackets and ties (and so obviously conservative and therefore the enemy) and asking him if he ‘fully’ supported the Obama agenda.
Hell, Dan Rather and Sam Donaldson and the gone-but-not-lamented Helen Thomas made careers out of being a hell of alot more obnoxious than that and no one to my knowledge ever grabbed at any of them.
