The gangster tactics being used at Town Halls in the last half of July and this month against the Obama health care plan are strangely reminiscent of the tactics used in Miami in the 2000 election year recount debacle, helping to lead to the victory of George W. Bush over Al Gore.
Republican and conservative activists, many of them working for Congress members, created impossible conditions to have a organized recount of the contested vote in Miami-Dade County and Broward County, Florida after the Election of 2000.  Mob action is the best way to describe it, but it was not a genuine audience of outraged voters, but a strategy to make it impossible to do a fair recount.
Now, Republican and conservative advocates, and corporate lobbyists against any change in health care in this country, are doing everything they can to disrupt town hall meetings, and inciting ordinary Americans who don’t understand that they are being manipulated by these interests, to assist in creating chaos and anarchy, and preventing a fair discussion and analysis based upon facts, and not rumors and hysteria.
We cannot allow such tactics to hijack true health care reform, which is desperately needed. To hear someone at one of these meetings, whether a "real" critic or a "planted" individual, state that she does not care if anyone else has health care coverage, is extremely selfish and despicable. This is the ultimate outcome of the "me" attitude cultivated during the Reagan years, and still present in the second Bush administration.Â
Those who see the Obama Presidency as an opportunity to return to the "we" mentality, present in the New Deal and Great Society years, MUST work to fight this ugly, disgraceful promotion of selfishness and greed, which has for too long dominated the public debate in this country!