Teabaggers Break Out the Brown Shirts

by Pa rock
Citizen Journalist

America has always been blessed with more than its share of political crazies, but, even so, they seem to be out in more abundance this year than ever before!   There's Christine "Chronically Unemployed Witch Wanabe" O'Donnell in Delaware, Rand "Aqua Buddha" Paul in Kentucky, Meg "Spend a Billion" Whitman in California, a wrestling promoter running for Senate from Connecticut, people who don't believe in evolution, people who think that a little girl raped by her father should be forced by law to carry his child to term, and even people who think that medical doctors should trade their services for chickens!  The stupid has gotten so deep that the press seems to have started regarding it as normal.

Yesterday there was a shocking story out of Alaska, but the majority of the Internet press seems to have been inoculated against outrageous political (and in this case - criminal) behavior.

Alaska teabagger and GOP Senate candidate Joe Miller was speaking at Central Junior Highs School in Anchorage (a very public location) when he was confronted by Tony Hopfinger, the editor of the Alaska Dispatch, an Internet publication that Miller apparently felt was partial to write-in candidate (and incumbent Senator) Lisa Murkowski.   Hopfinger was trying to ask candidate Miller some questions when Miller's private guards (goons) stepped in and told him that if he did not quit asking questions he would be arrested for tresspassing at the "private" event.  When Hopfinger persisted in his First Amendment right, he was manhandled by the private guards and handcuffed.

Handcuffed.

Handcuffed by a group of private security guards at a public political event!

When the real police arrived, the editor was promptly released.

Is that what America is becoming - some sort of feudal police state joke where anyone with his own little army can exert phony police power over those who irritate him.  Are we entering an era of the all-powerful rent-a-cops?  Is this part of the Bush-Blackwater legacy?

Yes, there apparently were criminals at the political event in Alaska today, but the editor of the Alaska Dispatch was not one of them.  He was well within his Constitutional rights to be at a political event being held in a highly public place asking questions.  The criminals were the ones who put him in shackles - and their boss who condoned the action.  If Joe Miller is a typical example of the teabagger mentality, we could be in for some truly awful times.  Brown shirts may be making a comeback!