This will not shock too many people who have followed the antics of counter-demonstrators at Congressional town-hall meetings. It’s the same strategy employed at the Tucson tea-party meeting, without the thrown elbows; maybe they’re just implied. In this video taken just before a town-hall meeting held yesterday by single-payer advocate Rep. Jan Schakowsy (D-IL), a Health Care for America Now (HCAN) organizer instructs his troops on how to disrupt and shout down others so that they “take their cookies and go to bed” (via HA reader Joel P):
In a way, this is a microcosm of the debate over health care. The opponents of ObamaCare want to read through the bill and hold elected officials accountable for its contents. Advocates just want to shout mindless slogans in the hope that everyone will give up and go home. Hey, how’s that working out for you so far?
That also applies to Barack Obama and the leadership in Congress. After dropping a thousand-page bill in the House, Obama wanted it passed within days instead of having Representatives and Senators read the bill and debate its wisdom, supposedly because an emergency made actual debate impossible. The emergency? Congress couldn’t wait to leave the Beltway and meet their constituents (ha!) and Obama was hiding the real deficit numbers that showed his administration screwed up their projections in February.
And who exactly is HCAN?
Where is the money coming from and why is it going to this campaign that does not actually have a specific call to action? The official message from on high is that HCAN is grassroots. Yup $40 million bucks, top down pre-determined pre-compromised message by K-Steet establishment. Nicely done professional Ads. Paid staffers sent out on-message from central office. But we are told its grassroots. So says Ezra Klein. So says David Sirota (who really should know better). Well HCAN is many things. It is a lot of money beng spent with our message that the for-profit private insurance companies are the problem. But grassroots it obviously is not! Sheesh. These are grassroots!
What it really is, is about building mailing lists and fundraising and get-out-the vote for November. It is a $40 million investment in party organizing. Think of it as the Democratic messaging counterpart to the National Rifle Association. In addition, the campaign is going to take advantage of MoveOn.org’s massive data files to reach out to like-minded supporters and officials promised to work in Democratic and Republican districts alike. “We’ll have an organizer in the district of every Blue Dog Democrat,” said HCAN campaign manager Richard Kirsch of the conservative Democrats.
And what right-wing fanatic wrote that? Actually, it’s one of the bloggers for Physicians for a National Health Plan, an organization that wants the US to move to a single-payer system. They resent HCAN for not being ideologically pure enough.
Will Nancy Pelosi call HCAN and its tactics “un-American,” too?
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