Michele Bachmann had her little rally on Capitol Hill and then, at her urging, the demonstrators stormed the Capitol building with twelve arrests being reported outside Speaker Pelosi’s office alone.

Because that, ladies and gentlemen, is what law and order abiding social conservatives do.

When they’re not shooting abortion doctors. Or engaging in escalating rhetoric that conflates health care with death camps.

Dana Milbank unloads some of the snark he usually reserves for Obama.

They came as directed, about 5,000 tea-party regulars and antiabortion activists, to the West Lawn of the Capitol on Thursday for what Bachmann called a “Super Bowl of Freedom,” sponsored by Republican members of Congress. And what a game it was.

Many of the demonstrators chanted “Weasel Queen,” their pet name for the speaker of the House. Others wore masks of Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.); they were covered in fake blood and carrying dolls representing aborted fetuses, as the Grim Reaper led them in chains to hell.

In the front of the protest, a sign showed President Obama in white coat, his face painted to look like the Joker. The sign, visible to the lawmakers as they looked into the cameras, carried a plea to “Stop Obamunism.” A few steps farther was the guy holding a sign announcing “Obama takes his orders from the Rothchilds” [sic], accusing Obama of being part of a Jewish plot to introduce the antichrist.

But the best of Bachmann’s recruits were a few rows into the crowd, holding aloft a pair of 5-by-8-foot banners proclaiming “National Socialist Healthcare, Dachau, Germany, 1945.” Both banners showed close-up photographs of Holocaust victims, many of them children….

“Who knew a casual comment on TV could generate this?” Rep. Jeb Hensarling (Tex.) exulted as he stood in front of the Dachau banner.

It’s hard to imagine the right going any lower, but Milbank’s not done.

[U]npredictable things tend to happen in the wide-open spaces of the Capitol’s West Front. Minutes into the rally, a breeze toppled the American flag from the stage.

More ominously, a man standing just beyond the TV cameras apparently suffered a heart attack 20 minutes after event began. Medical personnel from the Capitol physician’s office — an entity that could, quite accurately, be labeled government-run health care — rushed over, attaching electrodes to his chest and giving him oxygen and an IV drip.

This turned into an unwanted visual for the speakers, as a D.C. ambulance and firetruck, lights flashing, pulled in just behind the lawmakers. A path was made through the media section, and the patient, attended to by about 10 government medical personnel, was being wheeled away on a stretcher just as House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) stepped to the microphone. “Join us in defeating Pelosi care!” he exhorted. A few members stole a glance at the stretcher. Boehner may have been distracted as well. He told the crowd he would read from the Constitution, then read the “we hold these truths” bit from the Declaration of Independence.

As you’d expect at a political protest, the messages on signs and buttons were provocative: “Waterboard Congress,” “A Commie Is in the House.”

But this protest was unusual because it was an official House GOP event, and because some of the remarks on the stage were as outrageous as those in the crowd. The actor Jon Voight, standing with the lawmakers, said of Obama: “Could it be he has had 20 years of subconscious programming by Reverend Wright to damn America?”

Even the Rev. Stephen Broden, at the microphone to deliver the closing prayer, fumed about “death panels inside this death care,” adding: “It is tyranny! It is socialism!”

The lawmakers set the tone early, when Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.) asked for the Pledge of Allegiance because “it drives the liberals crazy” to hear the “under God” part (his bravado was premature, for he left out the word “indivisible”). The tone continued to the end, when Rep. John Carter (R-Tex.) beckoned to the House office buildings and shouted, “Go get ‘em!”

In my life the only thing I’ve seen anything like this was the defiance from Dixie over desegregation. Nutters leading nutters in a charge of the white brigade into the valley of deathers.

Half a brain, half a brain,
Half a brain onward,
All in the valley of Deathers
Rode the six thousand….

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Jon Stewart on Glenn Beck.

Eight minutes of grind-it-out, unrelenting satire.

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Back in the days of yore, conservatives mocked every new thing with exaggerated affect. Or pissing and moaning as we used to call it.

Opinuendo isn’t greeting instant runoff cheerfully or in good faith, so saeth the Wege.

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Some major flipped out and shot a dozen of his fellow soldiers because he was going to be deployed to Afghanistan.

It’s past time we got the fuck out of Afghanistan.

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eTc:

Krugman

10.2%

Ehrenreich on vaccine

Wingnuts celebrate Phillies’ Series win

Bill Kling’s compensation (check out the commentfest)

Getting closer to a cure for common diarrhea

Mitch Berg shamefully amps up some AP flimflammery to suggest that KY census worker Bill Sparkman tied himself up and committed suicide

Atlantic school says strip searching is NOT OK

Honduras

LA Times gives free article to anonymous fuckwad [almost reads like The Onion]

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You don’t have to like this cartoon, but the point is absolutely correct. We’re getting Wall Street solutions to Wall Street created problems.

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MinnPost’s second birthday party is this Sunday at St. Anthony Main.

It sounded like fun, and then I saw there’s going to be a program.

There will be no program at Wegestock.

Just remember to pass on the brown acid and dress for mud.

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Carl Ballantine, R.I.P.

He was already old when I was young, but I like the crowd he hung out with.