The Town Hall Mobs

Josh Marshall is on a mini crusade against them - and reporters mischaracterizing their tactics:

It now seems clear that 'tea party' movement types, organized by highly-funded corporate backed outfits like "Freedom Works" are putting together a plan to disrupt and shut down as many town hall events as possible. That's entirely different from making sure you've got a lot of activists at events with t-shirts or protesting with pickets outside the venue or making sure one of your activists gets to ask a question. This amounts to a sort of civic vigilanteism.

But watch closely whether reports covering these events recognize the difference.

 And now he jumps on Ambers:

Marc Ambinder seems to think the tea-bagger effort to shut down Democratic town hall meetings is just working from the Dems 2005 anti-Social Security privatization playbook. Really?

I watched those events unfold pretty closely. And what the Dems did in 2005 consisted almost entirely of protest outside town halls and anti-privatization activists trying to get into the meetings to ask questions to pin members of Congress down on their position. What made it so uncomfortable for Republican and some Democratic members of Congress is that they got questions they didn't want to answer.

Did some meetings get heated? Sure. But these weren't organized attempts to shut down the meetings themselves. Does Marc remember what happened four years ago?