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The ObamaCare Revolution Wages War on American Democracy

Posted: 08 Aug 2009 07:06 PM PDT

The Town Hall meeting has long been a hallowed symbol of
American democracy, as embodied in the famous Norman Rockwell painting,
"Freedom of Speech" that shows a man, surrounded by his neighbors, rising
to speak his mind. It is an image and idea that states forthrightly that
government belongs to the people, and that it is governed by the people,
not simply in some abstract national vote, but at the local level. That is
why the Town Hall is a far more sacred and enduring definition of American
democracy than the White House, the the Capitol Building, and even perhaps
the Constitution, because it defines the American system of government as
based on public participation from the bottom up.

The Obama
administration has cynically tried to hijack the Town Hall by transforming
into a one way series of meetings, in which enthusiastic carefully chosen
citizens voice their approval of his proposed policies. That is not an
American Town Hall, it is a Soviet party meeting. In a Town Hall meeting,
citizens question their elected representatives. At a party meeting, they
give them their wholehearted approval. But it is a part of a pattern for
the Obama administration, which works to put an All-American stamp on its
un-American program.

Obama began the process with a one hour ABC
network special "Town Hall" with no Republican opposition allowed.
Naturally enough the Obama Administration's Director
of Communications for the White House Office of Health Reform (a
position that never existed before) is herself a former ABC news
correspondent. Meanwhile to close the circle, ABC's own new Senior Medical
Editor was an Obama donor.

Then the AARP, which had replaced its CEO with
Barry Rand, a staunch
Obama supporter, who had donated over 10,000 dollars to Obama,
replacing Bill Novelli, who as a former McCain donor would have been
considered unreliable. Unsurprisingly the AARP leadership, beginning with
Barry Rand, came out for ObamaCare. By contrast many
of the AARP's core membership were unhappy with the organization's
sellout.

The real trouble came with the regional Town Hall
meetings, where citizens oddly
enough showed up to question their elected representatives. And they
didn't want to "do this thing fast", as Senator Specter proposed. Instead
of the manufactured consensus they had been counting on, e Democratic
congressmen were suddenly facing real opposition from the public. And the
acrimonious Town Hall meetings in which politicians tried unsuccessfully
to silence voters, were a reflection of the American public's negative
reaction to ObamaCare.

When the Drudge Report ran a video of Obama at
an SEIU union meeting talking about phasing out employee health care
coverage entirely, the White House fired back by putting out its former
ABC News correspondent to claim that it was taken out of context. The
White House however had no rebuttal video to offer when Jon Stewart,
usually a reliable ally of the administration on anything progressive,
played Obama's own statements, and said, “Wow.
That Communist sounded a lot like our President.”

Instead the
White House focused on the regional Town Halls. The multilevel strategy
was to denounce anyone who dissented from the Obama administration's line
as either planted Republican lobbyists, or violent mobs of racists. On the
one hand you had House Majority leader Nancy Pelosi claiming that Town
Hall the
protesters were carrying Swastikas, a blatantly false charge. On the
other hand you had Senator Barbara Boxer claiming that the protesters were
obviously high level Republican plants because
they were too well dressed to be real. The bizarre image this conjures
up of men and women in suits forming angry swastika wielding mobs would be
bizarre to anyone but the most die hard Obama kool aid
drinkers.

Unlike the Tea Party protests, the media had trouble
ignoring the dissent anymore. Instead they followed the White House line
by describing them as "mobs", "extremists" and suggesting they were racist
based on the flimsiest of pretexts, including posters of Obama done in the
style of the Joker. Washington Post columnists began
channeling the ghost of Joe McCarthy when he denounced the "Republican
leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers" who "by poisoning the political well, they've
given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They've become
political terrorists." Well clearly if you're not loyal to Obama
"and the Obama for which he stands, one nation under Obama", and all
that... you must be a political terrorists.

The same
Democrats who had been hypersensitive about any perceived statement by
Bush critical of their loyalty, shrieking repeatedly, "Don't question our
patriotism", at the drop of a hat jumped into line to denounce anyone
questioning their leadership as mobs of extremists and political
terrorists. The next stage wasn't far behind. The beat
down.

Obama's comments about the end of employer based health
insurance was at an SEIU meeting. That of course was no coincidence. The
SEIU is America's biggest health care union and its most radical union as
well. The SEIU left behind the AFL-CIO. They're considered extremist even
by union standards. And they're considered thuggish. How thuggish? So
thuggish that their violence was actually condemned by the President of
the AFL-CIO. After the violence at the Detroit Labor Notes conference last
year, AFL-CIO President John
Sweeney said, "There is no justification—none—for the violent attack
orchestrated by SEIU at the Labor Notes conference."

AFL-CIO is no
shrinking violet union. It has a storied history of mobsters, ugly mugs
and thugs. And to boot, John Sweeney himself was a former SEIU President
who had tried to moderate the extreme path on which Andy Stern had taken
the SEIU. That was because the SEIU was not simply
thuggish and corrupt toward its members and businesses. It was that of
course, but it was also remorselessly aggressive toward other unions as
well. Stern had led the SEIU walkout of the AFL-CIO, finding it not
aggressive enough for his taste. The SEIU's own feuds with UNITE and CNA,
the California Nurses Union.

The CNA is itself no shrinking violet,
a solidly left wing organization with a taste for election tampering. The
SEIU however had become the dominant American health care union by
focusing its unionizing further down the ladder, and then working their
way up to the nurses. While the CNA fought for an individual nurses union,
the CEIU wanted one union to rule them all. The resulting battle saw
regular SEIU violence, so much so that
CNA actually applied for a restraining order against Andy Stern and
SEIU union members, to "cease and desist the stalking of, use of violence
against, and harassment of officers, directors, and staff of the
California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing
Committee."

Under the restraining order, "SEIU and Stern are
prohibited from stalking, threatening, or following CNA/NNOC leaders staff
at work, in hospitals, clinics, and offices, at their homes. They are also
barred from following their cars or harassing them with mail or phone
calls... The order was prompted by a campaign of stalking and harassment
by Stern's SEIU over the past week in which SEIU teams have targeted
CNA/NNOC leaders in nursing stations, harassed them at home, and followed
cars."

This was preceded by a covert campaign by the SEIU to
take over the CNA with a front organization, as well as a frontal
assault at the Detroit Labor Notes conference, in which 800 SEIU members
charged the stage, resulting in injuries and possibly one death outside.
The CNA and SEIU have since then come together on their support for Single
Payer healthcare, which is essentially a euphemism for health care
nationalization.

So there could have been no surprise at the White
House, when the first wave of SEIU assaults on Town Hall meetings resulted
in arrests. Obama's email dispatch followed by AFL-CIO President John
Sweeney's dispatch targeting 50
high priority districts, were window dressing on the real dirty work
that would be done by the SEIU union thugs.

The SEIU had been
Obama's major backers, kicking
in 61 million dollars, and getting two cabinet appointments of their
choice, the Health Secretary and the Labor Secretary. They were tied to
Obama as power brokers even
back in the Blagojevich era. Their appearance at the Town Halls
quickly turned ugly, with barred doors, violence and arrests. Side doors
were set up to pack the Town Halls with union members.

The following is a description of one SEIU attack,

"Kenneth was approached by an SEIU representative as
Kenneth was handing out “Don’t Tread on Me” flags to other
conservatives. The SEIU representative demanded to know why a black man
was handing out these flags. The SEIU member used a racial slur against
Kenneth, then punched him in the face. Kenneth fell to the ground.
Another SEIU member yelled racial epithets at Kenneth as he kicked him
in the head and back. Kenneth was also brutally attacked by one other
male SEIU member and an unidentified woman. The three men were clearly
SEIU members, as they were wearing T-shirts with the SEIU logo. Kenneth
was beaten badly. One assailant fled on foot; three others were
arrested. Kenneth was admitted to St. John’s Mercy Medical Center
emergency room, where he was treated for his numerous
injuries."

The media is naturally spinning this story as violence
that people at the Town Halls critical of Obama's program are responsible
for. Just as they covered for the SEIU during its attacks on CAN. But the
facts are there for everyone to see. The SEIU has a well known history of
thuggery and intimidation. Congressmen like Carnahan who provided a
special section for them and packed his meetings with SEIU members, had
every reason to expect exactly this sort of outcome. And Obama cannot
claim to be uninvolved with the SEIU either.

The Town Hall dissenters have often
been elderly people, and therefore more vulnerable to SEIU thuggery.
Obama made his
own anti-democratic agenda quite clear when he stated that, "I don't want the folks who created the mess to
do a lot of talking. I want them to get out of the way so we can clean up
the mess," Obama said to loud cheers. Well his SEIU goons have been
getting people who disagree with him out of the way. And then beating and
kicking while they're lying on the sidewalk, because theyr'e still not out
of the way enough.

Packing Town Halls with members of a violent left wing union,
in order to keep dissenting views out, and engaging in violent attacks
against against them if they don't keep out, is an assault on the most
sacred symbol of American democracy. It's a tactic gleaned from a
Bolshevik playbook, with violence used to suppress dissent in the name of
the organized "working class". The violence of Obama's SEIU goons in the
name of the ObamaCare revolution is nothing more and nothing less than the
Obama Administration showing its real face.

From calling
for people to pass along any emails critical of ObamaCare to the White
House, that is reminiscent of Soviet era informants
programs (note that Democrats post 9/11 hysterically denounced a Bush
White House plan to have postal workers and other local employees pass
along tips about anyone suspected of planning terrorism as Orwellian, to
hijacking Town Hall meetings to turn them into a bullhorn for Obama's
agenda-- it has become increasingly obvious that when democracy isn't
going Obama's way, then rather than listen and go along, he's chosen to
try and suppress it instead. If Obama and the Democrats have to choose
between Democracy and ObamaCare, they've made their choice clear.
Meanwhile the American people have made their choice clear as well in
polls and town hall meetings. Which side will win, will determine whether
America will be a free nation or not.