I posted this to the UCPAToday blog earlier today:...

The latest round in rightwing "Tea Parties" took place earlier today in Washington, D.C., as thousands gathered by the Capitol to stage yet another "teabagging" event, sponsored by the reactionary corporatist "Americans for Prosperity" group and egged on by Republican Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann.

Bachmann, best known for calling for investigations of other members of Congress for "anti-Americanism" and calling on reactionaries to be "armed and ready" to confront the Democrats over health care, called on the teabaggers descending on Washington to "scare" her colleagues on Capitol Hill into killing the proposed health care "reform" currently making its way through both houses.

The event was billed as a "press conference," attended by prominent GOP officials, such as House Majority Leader John Boehner, as well as AFP head Tim Phillips and washed-up actor Jon Voight.

The rally surrounding the "press conference" was what has become standard fare for this far-right movement. The crowd of mostly older white protesters (many of whom probably already collect that oh-so-"socialist" Social Security and have "government-run" Medicare) carried their usual signs depicting Obama as a Marxist and a Nazi, all at the same time. (These people don't care about accuracy -- it's all about what will strike fear the best.)

One large banner at the rally, visible to all who were there, compared health care reform to the Holocaust. It showed a pile of corpses with the caption, "National Socialist Health Care: Dachau, Germany - 1945." Not one of the Republicans who headlined the teabagger "press conference" has commented on that banner.

After their rally on the steps of the Capitol, Bachmann led the teabaggers on a little outing through the Congressional offices. According to eyewitnesses, hundreds of teabaggers swarmed through the halls of the Hart Senate Building and Cannon House Building, seeking out offices of Democratic representatives and senators, and, in some cases, disrupting the work of Congressional staff.

Twelve rightwing protesters were arrested at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's district office in the Cannon Bldg. The dozen disruptors are members of the fascistic anti-abortion terrorist group Operation Rescue. They refused to leave Pelosi's office, tore up and threw around pages of the health care reform bill, and tried to intimidate staff. (Talking Points Memo has video of the assault.)

The increasingly violent and far-right character of the "Tea Parties" should give not only working people but all democratic-minded people a reason to pause.

Since the beginning of their campaign to kill health care reform, the far right has resorted to individual acts of violence and threats of large-scale violent action, all in an effort to alter the agenda of the Obama White House and Democratic-led Congress. From the "town hall" disruptions in August to armed displays at presidential events to today's attack on Pelosi's offices in Washington, the reactionary corporatist right has made it clear that they use violent authoritarian means to stop any move away from the trajectory of the George W. Bush regime -- even when that move is only a matter of degrees.

For these elements, there is no line between reform and revolution. One will elicit as sharp a reply as the other. The question then becomes: Why settle for reforms when the response of the corporatists will be similar, if not the same?

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