Mob Rule!

"We are all outlaws in the eyes of America...

— Jefferson Starship

"We Can Be Together," 1969

I am simply amazed and awed at the Democratic and Presidential response to the uprising of perfectly normal, everyday Americans against the nonsense coming out of Washington. "Nazis," "thugs," "brown shirts," "mob rule," good heavens! All this from a "community organizer" who spent his formative days organizing just such events. I'm not going to link all the hits...just visit Drudge and browse the huge numbers of articles. I will link you to a Peggy Noonan column in WSJ...she's taken a lot of heat for being "soft" on Obama, but this column sums things up pretty neatly:

In his first five months in office, Mr. Obama had racked up big wins—the stimulus, children’s health insurance, House approval of cap-and-trade. But he stayed too long at the hot table. All the Democrats in Washington did. They overinterpreted the meaning of the 2008 election, and didn’t fully take into account how the great recession changed the national mood and atmosphere.

And so the shock on the faces of Congressmen who’ve faced the grillings back home. And really, their shock is the first thing you see in the videos. They had no idea how people were feeling. Their 2008 win left them thinking an election that had been shaped by anti-Bush, anti-Republican, and pro-change feeling was really a mandate without context; they thought that in the middle of a historic recession featuring horrific deficits, they could assume support for the invention of a huge new entitlement carrying huge new costs.

The passions of the protesters, on the other hand, are not a surprise. They hired a man to represent them in Washington. They give him a big office, a huge staff and the power to tell people what to do. They give him a car and a driver, sometimes a security detail, and a special pin showing he’s a congressman. And all they ask in return is that he see to their interests and not terrify them too much. Really, that’s all people ask. Expectations are very low. What the protesters are saying is, “You are terrifying us.”

What has been most unsettling is not the congressmen’s surprise but a hard new tone that emerged this week. The leftosphere and the liberal commentariat charged that the town hall meetings weren’t authentic, the crowds were ginned up by insurance companies, lobbyists and the Republican National Committee. But you can’t get people to leave their homes and go to a meeting with a congressman (of all people) unless they are engaged to the point of passion. And what tends to agitate people most is the idea of loss—loss of money hard earned, loss of autonomy, loss of the few things that work in a great sweeping away of those that don’t.

People are not automatons. They show up only if they care.

What the town-hall meetings represent is a feeling of rebellion, an uprising against change they do not believe in. And the Democratic response has been stunningly crude and aggressive. It has been to attack.

Maximum Barry, our first Thug President, is of course asking people to report any incidences of "disinformation," rat out their fellow citizens, to flag@whitehouse.gov

Hey, he's making a list and checking it twice, gonna find out who's naughty and who...needs reeducation! Chicago politics on a national scale is turning out to be a lot uglier than even I thought it was going to be.