A gas line has been severed at Tom Perriello’s brother’s house, Brian McNeill reports, after teabaggers encouraged people to “drop by” that address and “express their thanks” to Perriello for his healthcare vote. (When Danville Tea Party Leader Nigel Coleman was told that he’d given the wrong address, he dismissed any harm that would result to the man or his family as “collateral damage.”)
Federal, state, and local officials are investigating what’s is believed to be an attempt on the life of Congressman Perriello. Coleman is now claiming to be shocked that this “collateral damage” has resulted. This is the same Coleman who planned to burn Perriello in effigy. Having spent a year and a half suggesting that Perriello should be assassinated, we’re now to believe that he’s shocked—shocked!—that anybody might actually give it a whirl.
Teabaggers are completely ineffective in the political realm. So now they’re left attempting to murder their own congressman. This isn’t a political movement. It’s an assassination conspiracy. It’s terrorism.
I think we’re starting to approach the point where this group needs to be considered for the terrorist watch list.
I do beleive there are laws that could hold him accountable if someone got hurt at his behest. If it could be proven that a member of the teaparty cut the line and used the address from the website, as well as was prompted by the post, coleman could be held liable as a co-conspirator.
Hideous.
Two members of the Lynchburg tea party incite violence against a United States Representative, post the wrong home address, and an act of terrorism is visited upon that wrong address. Should Mr. Mike Troxel and Mr. Nigel Coleman be held as enemy combatants, or should they be allowed a lawyer?
I’m wondering if Ken Boyd, who is running for the 5th District Republican nomination, has any comment on this. Normally I wouldn’t wonder, but Boyd made a special trip to meet with Danville Area Tea Party members in order to impress upon him how truly tea-party-esque he is, and there he was “was welcomed by Nigel Coleman.” Since he’s met the guy who posted Perriello’s brother’s family’s address on his FB page and encouraged people to “drop by” and pledged not to “hold anything back” and referred to the mistaken targeting of the wrong family as “collateral damage,” it seems like maybe it might behoove Ken, as someone who wants to lead the 5th District, to comment on this kind of conduct.
Didn’t see anything on his website, though.
sorry, meant “impress upon them” above, not “impress upon him.”
If it turns out that the damage was deliberate, then whoever did it is responsible. It is a stretch to put blame on Coleman or anyone else. Suggesting that this reflects on other people who happen to share political views is beyond ridiculous.
By your logic, every political whackjob is an agent of all the other people who support (or oppose) the same candidate or office holder.
That’s stupid, and I suspect you know that. But hey — it’s fun when it’s the other side, right? ::eye roll::
You can’t be serious. Let’s reflect on this for a moment.
Coleman—the head of the Danville Tea Party—called for people to harass Perriello at his home, referring to the “damage” that would result. Somebody shows up at the provided address and provides said damage.
And it’s a “stretch” for me to make that connection?
Waldo: I think you can put blame on Coleman, but I think I.Publius is saying that you can’t blame all tea partiers for these couple of shatheads.
It would be like conflating all software engineers with that shathead who flew his plane into the building in Dallas.
Or like conflating all Muslims with the shathead who wanted to blow up his genitals.
Or like conflating all liberals with the shathead who threw a gernade at Dubya.
Or like conflating all Kentuckians with that shathead who wrote “FED” on his chest and hanged himself.
etc.
“One [Some] bad apple[s] don’t spoil the whole bunch.”
I sent Tom Periello another campaign contribution yesterday. We can all do that. Whipping their tails in the election will be the best revenge.
Coleman should be held criminally responsible if this was anything other than an honest accident.
I plan on making my first campaign contribution ever to Rep Perriello, and with my check I am going to enclose a letter that says, “Thank you for your Yes vote on Health Care Reform.”
He did the right thing.
I.Publius is correct that Coleman cannot be held legally responsible (as far as I know, the Patriot Act may have things to say about the matter — oh, Genevieve? You around?) However, I think we should pause to reflect on two things:
1. Imagine what would happen if some random mullah in Afghanistan had published Hamid Karzai’s private daily itinerary after burning him in effigy. What would we call such a person? I’m thinking of a name that starts with “T” and ends with “errorist.”
2. Reflect on the fact — just for a moment — that George W. Bush was the most unpopular President since the end of the Civil War. His poll numbers were worse than frakkin’ Nixon’s, and Nixon was practically forced to resign office. You remember all those acts of violence Democrats threatened against him? Oh yeah, that’s right, we didn’t. We expressed ourselves through civil disobedience and the electoral process. The worst thing Bush faced from his countrymen was an angry mom camping on his lawn in Crawford so that he couldn’t put on his cowboy boots and clear brush in peace.
But on inauguration day in 2009, after replacing a President with polling numbers of about 30% with another President who’d just won 53% of the vote, the number of death threats increased 400%. On the topic of death threats, ten members of Congress (I do not include Perriello) have received credible death threats this week.
None of what I just typed is qualitatively anecdotal; they are quantifiable numbers provided by the United States Secret Service, and they are not in dispute.
So before you go off being self-righteous about being on “the other side” of some perceived hypocrisy, Pubs, let’s keep in mind that statistical evidence is piling up to suggest that the tea baggers and angry conservatives in this country are more than a little too eager to interject violence into the political process. Yes, there may be a case of bad apples going on here, Pubs, but there are far more bad apples in your barrel than just the one.
Excellent idea Chip! I believe I’ll also have to lumber over the hill and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Rep. Perriello during the fall campaign. It appears that one loss was not enough for these people.
An update on Ken Boyd: I emailed him, and he replied that he had “already” issued a press release on the matter. At the time that I emailed him, I checked, and there was no link to a press release on his Ken Boyd for Congress website, but now there is a link. So it’s nice that he has highlighted his press release in this way and made it easier for folks to find.
Blaming all of them is very different than blaming the movement, and I absolutely blame the latter. This is a group that has worked very hard to present congressmen as people whose lives are worthless, and should be killed.
Right here in the Fifth District, we’ve seen many incidents of these dopes showing up waving signs declaring Perriello to be a “terrorist” and a “traitor,” guilty of “treason.” His face is put on faux “wanted” posters. What do we do with terrorists, traitors, and those who commit treason in the United States, once we capture them? We kill them. All of these are crimes for which one can get the death penalty, noteworthy because these are some of the few instances for which the state can kill somebody who has not, themselves, committed murder.
This very guy—the head of the Danville Tea Party, not just some random guy—intended to burn Perriello in effigy last year, and only bailed on the idea when he was widely, publicly berated for those plans. Let’s be explicit here. He wanted to make a model of a congressman, lynch it, and then light it afire, pretending for the benefit of an audience that he is killing Congressman Perriello himself. He planned to symbolically murder Perriello on behalf of a political group that he heads up.
Remember Catherine Crabill? “We have the chance to fight this battle at the ballot box before we have to resort to the bullet box.”
It’s not fair to say that all members of the Tea Party believe that Congressman Perriello should be murdered. Luckily, nobody has said that. But it’s perfectly fair to say that, as a movement, this is a bunch that has explicitly devalued the lives of congressmen, presenting them as people who should meet violent ends. The events of today should surprise nobody who has been paying attention.
“the head of the Danville Tea Party”
Can someone explain something to me? We don’t have tea parties in Philadelphia, really…
How does the Danville Tea Party work? Is it like…an actual organization? Is there a national tea party (a real one, not a bunch of disorganized groups using the same name)? Does it require dues, for example? Weekly meetings? Or is it more like an unofficial bunch of people who meet up randomly to do random, unorganized things? Based on what Sam said earlier, it sounds like there’s not really a unified front.
Is the do-er in this case an official member? I assume the do-er is facebook friends with Coleman, but I don’t understand the scope of the Danville Tea Party’s existence, the scope of Coleman’s duties as leader of it, and what relationship the do-er had to Coleman. Did the do-er consider Coleman to be his leader, and did Coleman consider himself to be the leader of the do-er?
I ask because a, I don’t know, and b, I think it affects the answer to the question of if, and to what extent, Coleman may be liable for the do-er’s actions.
I’m surely not the best person to answer that, Genevieve, but I will take a quick stab at one aspect of your question.
Tea Party folks are very proud that they have no organization to speak of. Each chapter is its own thing, with no hierarchy, no agenda, limited communication between different chapters. There’s no such thing as being a member. Structurally, this is both good and bad for them. The good news is that every time a chapter does something completely insane, other members can say “hey, we’ve got nothing to do with them.” And every time somebody does something dumb, they can say “he wasn’t really a member.” But the bad news is that the lack of hierarchy leads to crap like this. Since nobody can speak for the group’s members, everybody can.
The catch is that, at this point, there’s just nothing that they can do about it. This is a group that consists of a bunch of people who hate government. They’re not about to elect a leader. (Who’d be foolish enough to serve in that role?) So they’re stuck with every ass-hat out there speaking on their behalf, trying to pretend that they’ve got nothing to do with their members who actually follow through on what the group preaches.
I can take a stab at your question, Genevieve. Back in 2008, I had an operating theory that the presidential candidate best-positioned to enlarge the tent of the Republican Party was actually Ron Paul. All the other candidates only appealed to the usual suspects, whereas Ron Paul was offering something… different.
Oh, let me apologize right now if this somehow brings out the Ron Paul trolls. I assume they’re not looking anymore, but just in case….
So anyway, my theory is that the tea baggers are reinvented Ron Paul acolytes in search of a banner. Along with post-Bush anti-establishment conservatives, they make up the bulk of the “movement,” such as it is. They’re bad at organizing (and Waldo’s right that they wear this as a badge of pride; they don’t want to risk being co-opted by the GOP). They are, however, pretty good at viral networking, which means that rather than developing clearly-organized committees, they develop franchises. These decentralized franchises are each colloquially described by those of us who like mapping organizations as an individual tea party — such as the Danville tea party, where Coleman is apparently somewhere along the hub of their wheel.
Basically, I think what we’re looking at is what would have happened if the Democratic Party had ostracized Howard Dean after the ’04 primaries. There was a lot of energy among the Deaniacs that may not have won him the nomination, but it was nevertheless fascinating and exciting. So we made him the chair of the DNC and brought the Deaniacs into the fold. The GOP’s utter scorn for everything Ron Paul, by contrast, has resulted in disorganization and decentralization among a group of people who sort of know in the back of their mind that the conservative establishment actually does look down on them (hence their fear of being co-opted).
But some of the elements of the message persist from their Ron Paul days, with the volume turned up by Glenn Beck: a rigorously-applied reverence for the Constitution which would make even Justice Scalia cringe (because unlike most tea baggers, he’s read the damned thing), and the notion that the American way of life is under attack because the government is somehow not observing the intentions of the Founding Fathers who drafted that document. Even if they do think that Thomas Jefferson wrote it.
We’ll know more about the specific network of the Danville Tea Party within the next few weeks or so. What with the open technology that the tea baggers use for their viral networking, the FBI should be able to map it fairly quickly in order to compile a list of likely suspects for the attempted murder of Bo Perriello and his family.
If they have been egged on by repubican congressman, then are we looking at depraved indifference ???
I have a friend in Springfield who had her A/C coolant line cut. It was clearly deliberate, clearly way outside of anyone’s way (inside the fenced back yard of her town house). The only thing the police could come up with was the possibility that she’d offended someone as an active Democratic canvasser and outspoken critic the delegate from her district – Albo.
I used to joke about being an anarchist who could not belong to any party as that would be considered the opposite of anarchy; but it was just a joke folks… I did not then commit harmful crimes.
I applauded the harmless action of the folks who put a giant condom on Senator Jess Helms’ Arlington home as a publicity stunt because they were very careful to do no harm and to clean up afterwards. The perpetrators of hateful, harmful, illegal acts need to be prosecuted quickly and publicly; but I do not think that it is easy to prove that leadership willingly incited this violent and vandalism…
Sam, I have to take one small issue with what you wrote:
That’s not entirely true. For a taste:
http://michellemalkin.com/category/unhinged/assassination-chic/
Or for a more down-home approach:
http://michellemalkin.com/2009/12/08/tomato-man-another-addition-to-the-unhinged-mugshot-collection/
With a lot of overlap (but more illustrative):
http://michellemalkin.com/2008/10/12/crush-the-obamedia-narrative-look-whos-gripped-by-insane-rage/
This kind of stuff needs to stop on both sides of the aisle, and all across the political spectrum. It’s hideous and should not be tolerated.
Yeah, the idea that liberals never made any threats on Bush is ridiculous. I won’t defend those assholes. But then, there seems to be a lot more support in the senate for the right-wing domestic terrorists than there has been for those on the left, which is one of the frightening aspects of all this.
Here’s the thing, Mike and Ben: while Michelle Malkin wants to cite pink signs waved by individuals held up at a rally (and I freely admit those people are nutters worth watching, and condemn their actions), that’s really just more of Michelle’s schtick: to wit, she attempts to create a preponderance of anecdotes and then call it a preponderance of evidence. The Secret Service’s statistics, by contrast, are far from anecdotal. They paint an unambiguous picture of a subculture of violence centered around the notion of attacking President Barack Obama.
I’m leaving out all the bullshit anecdotal stuff from this past weekend about alleged racial epithets and spitting and what not and focusing on the hard numbers: a 400% increase in the number of death threats against a sitting U.S President whose poll numbers have jumped right back up to 50%, over a President who had been stuck at around 30% for a couple years.
Make no mistake: neither man deserves or deserved assassination because using violence as a tool for political communication is precisely what separates us from Somalia or Afghanistan. But that sort of exponential increase in overt violent threats is more than a little fucked up, don’t you think?
Very fucked up, if I may use your phrase.
(Speaking of which, Waldo, what are the rules for cursing here? I don’t know how you want us to speak, and there doesn’t seem to be any moderation policy.)
A quick correction: I meant to say “there seems to be a lot more support in the house“, not the senate.
That aside, well put Sam. I don’t mean to draw an equivalency between the nuttiness on the far left and the nuttiness on the far right, as I think they’re quite different and have significantly different levels of support from elected officials on each side. It’s more that I think it does us liberals no favors to pretend the nuts on the left don’t exist.
“So now they’re left attempting to murder their own congressman.”
Let’s be realistic. The news unlike your exaggeration is reporting that the line on the gas grill was cut. Not exactly attempted murder. Indeed, so stupid that it defines logic..but, What exactly was this supposed to accomplish? Other than keeping this story going? I think this stinks of inside job from the left. After all we are all still waiting for the video/audio of the supposed insults to barney frank and others. I think we’ll be waiting a long time.
Speaking of waiting for audio/video:
Breitbart offers $10,000 for audio/visual evidence.
Thanks, Waldo & Sam. That’s about what I thought was the case, which may make it harder to say that Coleman would be liable.
Cut your grill gas line. Turn on the gas. About a minute later, turn on the gas knob on your grill, and then drop a match in there. Let us know how that goes.
Wow.
Just…wow. Just like that 1963 Birmingham church bombing, right?
Also, you’re still spelling “Reardon” wrong.
For Sam and anyone else who claims that domestic terrorism is going up because of right wing kooks, here’s a little factoid:
Currently, there are nine people on the FBI’s most wanted domestic terrorism list. ALL of them come from left wing groups that are accepted under the Democrat umbrella, such as ALF, ELF, Earth First, the Black Liberation Army, and the May 19th Communist Organization.
The fact is that leftists associated with the Democrats have been practicing and preaching violence since the 1960s. Remember Maxine Waters from just a few years ago: “No justice, no peace!”
Sorry guys, but your nut jobs outnumber ours 10-1. And I didn’t see much outrage here or elsewhere from liberal bloggers when left wing kooks threatened violence or engaged in it to promote their agendas. Your present teeth gnashing rings a little hollow.
You can see the FBI list at http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/fugitives/dt/fug_dt.htm
Um. What? Bank robbert Norberto Gonzalez-Claudio is “from left wing groups that are accepted under the Democrat [sic] umbrella”? And that’s…why? Because he’s Latino? And in what way is the Animal Liberation Front or the Earth Liberation Front “accepted under the Democratic umbrella”? Accepted by whom? The Black Liberation qualifies for your list because…they’re black?
No. Just, no.
I have a question for you rightwing leaning folks. What attracts you to “leadership” like Eric Cantor, Mitch McConnell and John Boehner? Because when the shit hits the fan you are going to be sharing a fightin’ hole with them, and the tea bagger crowd. Really.
No one other than Sam has mentioned non-elected influence on the teabaggers, such as Glenn Beck.
The 912 Project. We Surround you. Etc, ad nauseum.
He is by far the worst, with Rush Fathead a close second. High profile media figures figure in this by publicizing these events (in Beck’s case, with a lot of help from Fox ‘News’ and corporation)and talking in no uncertain terms about what the perceived problem is and what the solution is.
In both Fathead and Beck’s case, racism plays a big part, along with outright schizophrenic rants enraging their listeners to do something. Something stupid.
It’s not only Boehner, Bachman, and Nuegeberger. Rupert Murdoch and his minions are a big part of it.
To be fair, the leaders of the Democratic Party in Congress have nothing to do with me being a Democrat. I imagine the same is true for most Republicans.
Without good party leadership your party affiliation is nothing but a political horoscope. Your talent and political agenda lost in a dispersed chaos of personalities.
Pelosi stayed disciplined and delivered. Obama stayed disciplined and delivered.
Boehner, Cantor, and McConnell ceded the agenda to Rush, Beck and Fox News. They are feckless, ineffective and lazy. Why would any sensible Republican ever follow them anywhere again?