The Veil Has Been Pulled Back

As I noted at the time over at my blog, when the Tea Party Express came to Boston, a great number of the people who attended the rally were doing so ironically, some of whom came with satirical signs similar to the one Lauren Valle was carrying, myself included.  I met someone who was carrying such a sign, who I saw later on, without it, looking a bit desheveled.  He told me that he'd been jumped, and his sign stolen and destroyed.

I really wish I'd taken notes, because I recognize that it sounds thin when I say it like that.  The point is, I wasn't surprised at all by today's news that MoveOn.org's Lauren Valle was attacked by a crowd of Rand Paul supporters, one of whom brought her to the ground so that another could stomp on her head.

Apparently Don't Tread On Me only applies to people who have the slogan emblazoned upon them somewhere.

It now emerges that one of the attackers-- the one whose foot on Lauren Valle's head caused a concussion, who was described by the Rand Paul campaign as a "volunteer" with whom they'd cut connections-- is in fact Burboun County Coordinator Tim Profitt.

There are any number of things I could say here.  That this sort of behavior is coming from a campaign that's been hostile to women's rights.  That these are the supporters for a candidate who in college tied a woman up, forced her to take a bong hit, and demanded that she praise the Aqua Buddha.

But fuck that.  Those are cheap shots in comparison to what's actually going on here.

This is the movement that's supporting a Senate hopeful from Alaska whose private security guards illegally arrested a reporter who had the nerve to go so far as ask the candidate a question.  They've backed a candidate for Governor in New York who essentially threatened the assassination of a journalist for the New York Post.  And a candidate for Senate in Nevada who referred to "2nd Amendment Remedies" to conservative angst in the age of Obama.  And a candidate for the US House in Texas who openly advocated violent insurrection against the lawful government of the United States.  Whose supporters appear in droves wearing slogans and insignia that either imply or directly advocate violence in the absence of the complete dismantling of the Obama Administration, and the New Deal with it.

The real story here is that this hasn't happened several times already.

No.  I'm not saying that all Teabaggers are violent radicals.  But they're all more than comfortable amongst violent radicals.  They gather alongside people calling for a watering of the tree of liberty, the slogan infamously found on the garb of domestic terrorists including Timothy McVeigh.

Do they think that the people they're associating with aren't serious?  Do they think the people who call for a new civil war are kidding when they're doing so while openly carrying firearms?

This isn't guilt by association.  This is guilt by promotion.  When Rand Paul won his primary, he declared that he had a message from the Tea Party, without so much as mentioning the state he was nominated to represent.  These are his people.  Today, he and his campaign weakly pushed back against violence as a part of the political process, but he's been with these people since the word go.  And this outburst of violence doesn't represent a departure from the character of their movement  It's what the Tea Party movement has always been about.  It's just that now the threat of violence that has always been present has gone beyond the merely metaphorical.

And everyone who ever treated these assholes like a legit political movement owns a small piece of this incident.