What To Do

by tristero

Commenters to my previous post objected that I ended without a prescription for how to counter the thuggery of the Republican party and its goon squads (some of you would say there is no real difference between, say, Senator Charles Grassley and an hysterical deather disrupting a town hall meeting; that is not an opinion I would care to contest).

Well, what needs to be done – and not done – is pretty obvious, I think. Still, Sara Robinson has an excellent how-to on the subject (and makes the point that we are fast approaching a turning point in the permanent establishment of an American fascist state).

The real problem right now is, paradoxicaly, not Republican thugs. They have always acted this way. It is that the Obama People and the rest of the Democrats were caught completely off guard, had no idea Limbaugh would call Obama a Nazi, were flabbergasted to find their meetings disrupted by organized thuggery, and are, rightly, terrified by the presence of rightwing lunatics packing guns at numerous meetings. This was a terrible blunder on Obama’s team’s part.

And it is being compounded. The other day, Howard Dean went on one of the Sunday gasbag fests with creepy Newt Gingrich. The problem was that Howard Dean apparently had absolutely no idea that Gingrich had made a complete turnabout on end of life care from his position just a few months ago. He had to be informed of that ex post facto by Matt Taibbi. Thanks, Matt, you’re great as always. But by the time he posted this, it was too late.

And that brings me to the one thing I would like to add to Sara’s list of how to counter fascist thuggery: we need professionals who have no illusions about what the modern Republican party is and what these town hell thugs represent. For Dean to have walked onto that show against Gingrich and not have realized he had an impressive opportunity to expose his hypocrisy and opportunism, is not only amateurish; it is extremely dangerous.

This is not Dean’s fault, of course. This is the fault of his staff, the Democrats’ staff. And Obama’s.