Town Hall Goons Become Face of GOP

If the GOP hands you wingnuts, you make wingnut-aide.

Sam Stein, Huffington Post:

The White House and allied Democrats are ramping up efforts to make belligerent anti-Obama town hall crowds -- and the media outlets that feed their resentment -- the face of opposition to the president's health care agenda, aides tell the Huffington Post.

On Tuesday morning, the White House's new media team released a 3-minute video hitting back at "falsehoods" and "misstatements" about the president's plans. Notably, the clip highlighted the popular conservative site, the Drudge Report, for posting an old and spliced video clip claiming that the president wanted to eliminate private insurance.

[...]

As detailed by White House officials and aides at allied groups, the goal going into the August recess is not to be intimidated by the angry protesters laying siege to town hall meetings or the information pushed by unfriendly websites, but rather to turn that anger and material into a rallying point for proponents of reform.

You can check out the White House's efforts here.

"They [the anti-Obama crowds] don't care about health care," one dem insider told Stein. "They care about destroying the president."

"The obvious comparison -- one DNC aides are actively pushing -- is to the crowds that came to define rallies for Sen. John McCain, (R-Arizona) and Sarah Palin during the late stages of the 2008 presidential campaign," he reports. "Those audiences, which openly questioned Obama's patriotism and citizenship, may have riled up the conservative base. But they also turned off moderate voters."

Another obvious comparison -- which I coincidentally made earlier today -- is to the "tea party" protests that were marked by the typical wingnut racism and hysteria. It's really not much of stretch to expect the same from these people -- seeing how they're mostly the same nuts. And they're making the same damned mistake of being publicly hateful and lunatic.

"[As the protests were just beginning,] officials at the DNC were sending around an article titled 'The danger in the right's anger,'" the report tells us. "The piece pointed to angry town hall crowd that had protested Rep. Lloyd Doggett, (D-Texas) over the weekend and, particularly a man hoisting a sign with Nazi SS lettering." In another incident, Rep. Frank Kratovil was hung in effigy by a teabagger moonlighting as a health care reform foe.

"If this is the face of anti-health care reform protest," Politico's Glenn Thrush wrote at the time, "the GOP has a serious problem." Once again, unleashing the nuts for political gain turns out to be a real bad idea.