Please Tase Them, Bro!

It never ceases to amaze me at how, in the space of about a week, we've seen the most eminent African American scholar alive today arrested for trying to enter his own home yet have played wearied witness to countless screaming dittoheads disrupting Town Hall meetings on health care presided over by United States Congressmen with complete impunity.

There are two reasons to go out for anything: To see and to be seen. Those who go to these Town Hall meetings to ask reasonable, legitimate questions, behaving themselves with dignity and respect for their elected officials are there to see.

Then there are the Astroturfers, those harbingers of corporately-generated outrage who have nothing to add to the public discourse but incoherent screeching and shoving. Such miscreants are there merely to be seen. Their intent and that of their handlers in the health care field is to fool the mainstream media into fooling us into thinking that they not only represent a legitimate counterpoint to the Democrats' health care proposals but that they constitute a majority because they have the most decibels.

Sadly, it's working. Fox "News's" and CNN's coverage has been lazy and even biased, refusing to dig beneath the surface of the red Astroturf that smells of tea parties and faux vote recount protests to even ask if these screaming idiots even live in the district. One local Fox news reporter covering Congressman Gene Green's Town Hall in Texas discovered that most of them didn't but sadly that's been the exception, not the rule.

So if Prof. Gates can get arrested and charged simply for trying to enter his house and not cooperating with stupid, racial-profiling cops, if a Florida college student can get tased just for asking John Kerry why he didn't do more to protest the 2004 election results then these tea party holdovers are certainly worthy of an occasional night stick upside the head and taser to the family jewels for essentially sabotaging Town Hall meetings hosted by our elected officials.

Or they ought to be locked out as in the video above taken in Tampa. They need to be told to bring something substantive to the debate, wait your turn and if you can't behave in the presence of grownups, then you sit at the little table (or the vestibule).