Vandals Attack Dem Offices Nationwide
TPM Muckraker
Justin Elliott | March 23, 2010, 1:00PM
Vandals smashed doors and windows at four Democratic offices around the country in the days surrounding the landmark House health care vote Sunday night, and a right-wing blogger in Alabama is taking credit for starting a so-called “window war.”
Here are the reports we’ve seen from around the country on the mini-epidemic of brick-throwing:
- Early on the morning of March 19, someone threw a brick through the window of Rep. Louise Slaughter’s office in Niagara Falls, New York, doing $350 of damage, the Buffalo News reported. Slaughter (D-NY) briefly attracted the ire of conservatives over the “Slaughter Solution,” a procedural maneuver that was considered (but, ultimately, not used) to pass health reform.
- Also in Slaughter’s district, a brick was thrown through the glass doors of the Monroe County Democratic Committee office in Rochester, NY, over the weekend, the Democrat and Chronicle reported. A note attached to the brick bore the Barry Goldwater quote, “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice,” a spokesman for the committee told the newspaper.
- In the early hours of the morning on Monday just after the House health care vote, someone smashed the glass front door of the Tucson office of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), the Arizona Daily Star reported. “The perpetrator likely had to hop the gated fence to get access to the door, since it’s not viewable from the parking lot,” the paper reported.
- On Friday night or Saturday morning, a brick bearing unspecified “anti-Obama and anti-health care messages” was thrown through a floor-to-ceiling window at the Sedgwick County Democratic Party headquarters in Wichita, Kansas, CNN and the Kansas City Start reported.
Pinson, Alabama-based blogger Mike Vanderboegh has been tracking the breaking of windows at Dem offices after issuing a call Friday: “To all modern Sons of Liberty: THIS is your time. Break their windows. Break them NOW.”
It’s far from clear whether Vanderboegh’s call to arms has anything to do with the incidents around the country.
The Kansas City Star identifies Vanderboegh as a former leader of the Alabama Constitutional Militia.
His blog, Sipsey Street Irregulars, identifies with the so-called “Three Percenter” doctrine: “During the American Revolution, the active forces in the field against the King’s tyranny never amounted to more than 3% of the colonists.”
The March 19 post says:
They will send the Internal Revenue Service and other federal police to do this in thousands of small Wacos, if that is what it takes to force us to submit. This arrogant elite pretends that this oppression is for our own good, while everyone else understands that this is about their selfish, insatiable appetite for control over our liberty, our money, our property and our lives.
They will be caught… BAD BOYS!
OH. MY. GOD.
Being “one of the “elite’” about whom they comment, I’m certain of the fact that within my knowledge of how things work that my logic is stronger than their anger is smart; and, therefore, I can say that any plans that we “elitists” come up with to further the cause of “taking away their liberties” in the name of providing a base standard by which we should all live by at-a-minimum, will probably just boggle their minds at the execution of said plans. However, I guess it’s already done that once… so I digress, slightly.
Yet, to further the argument on the lines that it is being drawn, it’s apparent that they’re not clear of the fact that in order to wage a war, you have to be smart enough to come with a plan to execute that war in the first place.
Throwing brick and rocks through windows is just a good way to get yourself held liable for damages (which, I suppose helps increase tax revenue in localized areas…) and most likely labelled a “zealot” or worse… a “anti-social deviant” who strives to disrupt the better good of the citizens who are working within their right to support a political party that they feel best represents them, or their political ideals.
Ultimately, however, I can’t wait for these jerks to find a nice short plank- from which they are welcome to fall to their overdue awakening and sobriety.
I can imagine what would happen if the windows of Republican offices were broken. Lindsey Graham & Joe Lieberman come to mind. The perpetraiter would probably tased after being brought down with rubber bullets, then tortured untill admitting to be a terrorist.
These people meet the definition of terrorists – they are trying to strike fear in a large segment of the American population, a majority in fact, which disagreed with them and voted accordingly in our last. legal elections for national offices. They are not funny, they are performing deliberate illegal acts intended to intimidate those with whom they disagree. They deserve appropriate prosecution under the laws of our country.
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A Pogrom or call it Kristallnacht, that’s how it always starts!! That’ll be the End of Democracy.