gopmorrah!

when the gop base can no longer be distinguished from the fringe, eventually one might get centered and grounded enough to realize there's no longer any point in reaching out to them. once one sees that, one digs in one's heels and stands up to them!

the town hall mobs grew out of the tea party crowd (originally organized, as i understand it, by fox news), whose tactics are based on the even smaller mobs that chanted "stop the recount" in florida in 2000 and succeeded by shaking up the folk trying to do that recount.

this time around, the mobs are as big as a few hundred rather than a few dozen, but remember, the town hall meetings are held in congressional districts with something like 690,000 residents in each one, so the mobs are a tiny minority.

generally speaking, their strategy consists of character assassination, scare tactics, and straw man arguments, with an unhealthy dose of projection and denial thrown in for bad measure, along with anything else that they think will work. i sometimes refer to it as "fear & smear" for short, but that doesn't really cover it.

oh, and btw, the number of the word

fox=666!