Town Brawls

It is hard to know just how dis­rup­tive the protests have been at var­i­ous town hall meet­ings that con­gress­men and women are hav­ing around the coun­try. Some of the video I’ve seen is edit­ed and it isn’t clear whether a town hall meet­ing was allowed to go on or not.

The video of Texas Con­gress­man Dogget­t’s town hall seems to be at the end as he is prepar­ing to leave. The video could eas­i­ly have been pre­ced­ed by a pro­duc­tive town hall meeting.

Still, I sus­pect there have been some town halls that have nev­er got­ten off of the ground due to the dis­rup­tive protests. I think you can see more evi­dence in the video post­ed at TPMDC. I don’t know much about Rachel Mad­dow, and I believe she is guilty of being strong­ly biased to the lib­er­al side of things, but I do think that some of the video she shows counts as protests that dis­rupt the town hall.

Is that a bad thing? It is not as evil as many com­menters are mak­ing it out to be. When the con­gress­man needs a police escort to get safe­ly to his car, that may be over the line a bit. But from what I’ve seen, I’m bet­ting that there have been many such protests in the his­to­ry of this coun­try from many dif­fer­ent sides of the polit­i­cal spectrum.

The tac­tic of shout­ing down the oth­er side in a forum designed for dis­cus­sion is often used by those who have no good argu­ment to make.

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