Violence is not a Tool of Democracy
Armed insurrection has a mythic status in the US, with good cause. The emphasis, of course, is on "good cause". We have founding notions about our American revolution as an escape from tyranny and a bid for liberty and the freedom of self-government, all deemed a "good cause".
Residing inside the ivory tower of establishment science as I do, I've seen my share of fringe pseudo-scientists who like to claim legitimacy for their crack-pot claims by noting, e.g., that "they laughed at Einstein, too". Most of us quickly see the logical fallacy of assuming that laughter implies genius except for the poor slobs looking for the legitimacy.
Apparently teabaggers have the same logical inadequacies, assuming that threatening armed insurrection against anything that makes them angry, layers over them the patina of the American Revolution. Alas, it just reveals them as crack-pots.
I might have some ideological tolerance for threats violence made against recognizable tyranny, but I can't abide threats of violence in the name of democracy when they're made against the very democratic process that teabaggers claim to idolize above all else. How else to view such threats than as crazed attempts to shoot themselves in the feet?
I've been amazed in recent months: each time when I think teabagger hyperbole has gone way over the top we find out that it was just a foothill. What craziness comes next? How to ratchet up the rhetoric into something still more out out of proportion to whatever it is that makes them angry?
Speaking of which, does anyone have any idea what makes them so angry? In the attacks directed vaguely in the direction of the "health-care reform" legislation they throw their spears as such a vast army of straw-men criticisms that they don't even come close to scratching the surface of any of the large number of possibly valid criticisms of the legislation. Should we take their angry cries more seriously or less seriously when there's no sensible direction to them.
It was quite a spectacle the teabaggers made this weekend dancing their odd, conservative tarantella in anticipation of the legislative voting — voting by elected representatives being the recognized form our government of the people takes to do its work.
I think the roots of the mob "anger" among the teabaggers fairly revealed itself by the epithets and slurs yelled, apparently uncontrollably, towards legislators doing their work. Unwisely there were a number of opposition-party members who thought it helped their cause to stop the legislation at any cost — why? — by encouraging the teabagger mob.
Despite Republican claims that Democrats, by passing this legislation, have done damage to their party that will take years to repair, I think the Republicans who believe they can control the teabagger mob to their advantage will discover what history has always taught: mobs have a mind of their own, and they don't have a mind, either.