Also as an aside, and as a Brit, please could the Republicans pissing all over the NHS with outright falsehoods, please stop. Not that Rush Limbaugh reads much of the Straight Dope, I’d imagine, but I can’t let it go uncommented on from this side of the Atlantic.
Speaking of the 60’s, this is what I suppose irritates me about the latest round of Tea-Baggers. If you criticize them for their protestations, they’ll be the first to whip some hippy-judo on you and claim that they’re just employing the same 1st Amendment protected right to protest … yada yada yada … as the left employs.
On the surface, I can buy that. I’m all for protests. The difference is, in most of your really good 60’s protests, getting arrested was part of the process. If you went to a Stop the War rally and you didn’t get arrested, you weren’t doing it right.
I’m just saying, if you’re going to loudly, belligerently, obnoxiously protest something … hike up the skirt and be willing to be taken in over it. But could you imagine the shit-storm we’d be assailed with by Fox ‘News’ if some of these TeaBaggers got hauled out of a town hall meeting in handcuffs?
I think you’re onto something, Jack. The point of getting arrested during a protest was to raise awareness in a very vivid and outrageous way. The idea was to say “Look at these protesters being arrested! The government is awful and wrong for doing this!” It’s the same situation today. I bet you the people screaming their fool heads off at the town halls want to be arrested. FOX wants to be able to shit their pants at Obama’s totalitarian abuse of power.
I’m willing to bet a lot of these disrupters were protesters back in the 60s. If they were 20-something in the 60s, they’d be in their 60s and 70s today, and that’s consistent with the videos I’ve seen of the town hall disruptions; all older folk at least 50 years old and easily above that.
Well, I don’t think that’s a matter of generational culture, it’s just that they have more time for this sort of thing than younger folks do. You’ll also see a lot of q-tips at city council meetings (based on my past experience as a local newspaper reporter).
Young PC liberals on college campuses invented the modern day “shout downs” where no conservative voice is allowed to speak. Remember the Minute Men? Liberals have become the new facists. If you can’t take it, don’t dish it out. Turn about is fair play. The pot calling the kettle black. If you live in a glass house, don’t throw rocks.
That’s what they ALL do. All protestors shout essentially meaningless platitudes to make their point as salient as possible, even when it’s obviously not. Just because the tactics used by left wingers are now being adopted by the right wingers, doesn’t make either of them right. Nutjobs are nutjobs and free speech is free speech.
If you’re calling for an arrest of someone under the ‘disorderly conduct’ laws for speaking out at public meetings, you’re broaching that are of the law under which H.L. Gates was hauled into the Cambridge gray bar bed and breakfast. Although it would be neat to have it both ways, it ain’t possible.
Frankly, the republicans are desperate, it’s showing, because they’re taking a classic democrat stance against that with which they do not agree. It may work, it may not, but this is little more that boisterous civil disobedience, at least for now.
Its just about the only power they got right now, and even that is a fake out, they don’t really control these people, they just provoke them and hope it works out.
I think you forgot something about sauce and geese.
But seriously, you seem to be saying that it’s perfectly OK to use a tactic that you yourself apparently deem objectionable and counterproductive, simply because your opponents have used that tactic, correct?
And speaking of tactics that seemed to be the norm that aren’t now … why aren’t these TeaBaggers in government authorized Free Speech Zones like the fascist liberals had to be in during Iraq war protests?
Get used to it. Republicans have been pissing on Canada and it’s health care system for decades. So long that most of us have passed through indignation, beyond outrage, and into weary cynicism and wry amusement. Reality-based arguments have never changed their minds and never will.