Sit Down and Shut Up

With the end of the Bush administration, I had really hoped the days of just spouting outright lies and nonsensical streams of consciousness were over. I was wrong. The news about mobs for hire at health care Town Halls is everywhere now, but not surprisingly, Rachel Maddow has a really good run down of just what exactly is going on:

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The 2000 election was the first presidential election I was able eligible to vote in. I was in college, and by the time my classes were done for the day, the election had already been called, so I dejectedly cast my ballot that would never be counted.

Then, in the 2004 campaign, I worked 17 hour days, seven days a week, for six months hoping that this time we would have an election decided by an informed electorate who had their ballots counted. Again, we did not. And again, it seemed no one really did anything about it.

But, to the point: I thought I was an informed citizen, I worked in electoral politics and in the progressive media, and yet, I never once heard about the mobs for hire that had stopped the Florida recount.

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Make sure you watch the section where she identifies every single person in the "mob" as a Republican staffer. Strangely it makes me feel a little better to know that people didn't do that because they were idiots, but because they were paid to be idiotic.

It really is about time that we stop letting this crap slide. It is time that we started teaching people how to think rationally, and not allow for this kind of behavior. Not only is it ignorant, it is threatening to the people in attendance and members of Congress. It is time we take people like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh an Bill O'Reilly off the air once and for all.