crossing the line

This is unfortunate news:

Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson and his wife were leaving dinner at a new pizza joint near their home in Omaha one night last week when a patron began complaining about Nelson’s decisive vote in favor of the Senate’s health care bill.

Other customers started booing. A woman yelled, “Get him the hell out of here!” And the Nelsons and their dining companions beat a hasty retreat.

“It was definitely a scene in there,” said Tom Lewis, a 41-year-old dentist and registered Republican who witnessed the incident. A second witness confirmed the incident to POLITICO.

Mind you, it's not unfortunate because the dissent is getting ugly -- what's unfortunate is that ugly dissent is still newsworthy.  As far as I'm concerned, this should be happening everywhere -- every day -- and not just to Ben Nelson.  And in fact, I suspect this event with Nelson is not the only such scene that's occurred -- just the first we've heard about.  Try to think of it as a bunch of tiny townhall meetings, occurring wherever someone bumps into one of these clowns.

How about the feds investigating an effigy of Obama found hanging from a Plains, Georgia, storefront?  Maybe the answer to the question of whether such obvious dissent should be the subject of investigation is more effigies.  What we need is too many effigies to count.

And if you think the effigy is some kind of headline, just imagine the uproar if they actually arrested the guy and tried to charge him with something.  I suspect that they know exactly who hung the Plains effigy, but they've simply rethought what it would mean to make a federal case of it.

A reader recently accused me of being "disrespectful" to Ted Kennedy.  These people are not nobility.  They're supposed to be public servants.  And as long as things are being presented as if we serve them -- as if they tell us what to do -- then I guess it's going to look a little bit "out of line" to see any of them being put in their place.  And if open dissent does seem out of line, then there's your first clue that it's exactly what's needed.

Comments

[Hank Rearden]

Wait, so a member of the media, a private citizen, gets physically pushed around by "reform" supporters (freedom of press anyone?), and the media is all but silent. Ben Nelson is harmlessly booed out of a restaraunt, and it's "news".

[John Galt]

Well, Nelson's news in the sense that you're not hearing about more of these. It's still not even news in the sense that only the Politico's bringing it up.

Something tells me there'd be more coverage if Republicans were getting booed out of restaurants...