August Is the Cruelest Month

By GAIL COLLINS
NYT

Protesters are following members of Congress around this summer, disrupting their constituent meetings and shrieking about socialized medicine. They claim to be following the great American tradition of dissent. This must refer to the time back in colonial days when our founding fathers disguised themselves as Indians and broke up a public hearing on a plan for national health care, which involved regulating the price of leeches.

If nothing else, they’re certainly scaring the heck out of the vacationing legislators. In the state of Washington, Representative Brian Baird announced that rather than risk an “ambush,” he was canceling his traditional get-togethers with constituents and replacing them with “telephone town halls.” Voters will get an automated call asking them to press various buttons if they want to ask their congressman a question. His local newspaper, The Columbian, reported that, meanwhile, Baird would be “sitting at his own telephone at an as-yet-undisclosed location” listening and choosing which queries he wanted to answer.

This does not actually seem like a good plan. True, some of the protesters have been rowdy, but not to such an extent that the nation’s elected officials need to hide behind telephone trees. Here in New York, the guy who plays the sexy vampire in the “Twilight” movies has been shooting a film, and he appears to be facing far more daily danger of death-by-mob-hysteria than any member of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure.

(More here.)