McCaskill staffer Bob Burns was suspended for daring to call Tea Party activists “brownshirts” for their disruption of congressional town hall meetings last summer.
That’s incredibly weak. Certainly, nobody believes that the Tea Party set are literally Nazis, although certain Tea Party leaders have no qualms with race-baiting and linking to white supremacists. But they certainly use brownshirt tactics shutting down meetings of people they disagree with by disruption.
I suppose to be just as accurate, Burns could have compared the Tea Party disrupters to factions of the American Left in the 1920s and ’30s who would shut down their own conventions with organized disruption, stretching out the conflict until they got their way. The conservatives who captured the Young Republicans in the late 1950s and the early Draft Goldwater movement copied those tactics, which you see live in on the strategy memo disseminated among rightwing opponents of health care reform.
I don’t know why McCaskill thinks she can appease these people. They hate Democrats and they won’t be satisfied until she votes 100% with the Republican Party.
…of their behavior from all those town halls last August:
Senator Claire McCaskill (D) – health care town hall – Jefferson City
Senator Claire McCaskill (D): open forum in Hillsboro – photos
I know McCaskill has a tough job trying to win as a Democrat in Missouri, but she frequently goes way over the top in trying to appease the tea party. A perfect example is the Hillsboro town hall last year. She was doing great: she listened to their questions and responded even though they were booing, interrupting, screaming, etc. But then she blew it a few days later by apologizing, saying she thought she sounded “condescending!” The tea partiers were acting like spoiled four-year-olds, and McCaskill apologizes for telling them not to interrupt her? There”s just no benefit in doing that, as they only see it as a validation of their victimhood complex.