An Open Letter to Online Thugs

Dear knuckle-dragging mouth breathers:

The fact that you're using blogs or facebook to help people harass, intimidate or threaten Members of Congress and their families because they supported a bill doesn't make you media savvy. It makes you cowards who know nothing about the ideals for which our founding fathers fought and died.

Nathan Hale wasn't hanged so you could fax a picture of a noose to a Congressman. George Washington didn't guide a bunch of scared and starving patriots across an icy Delaware River so you could hurl racial slurs at a hero of the civil rights movement. Ethan Allen didn't storm Fort Ticonderoga so you could cut the gas line to someone's house. And Paul Revere didn't risk his neck warning the Minutemen of a British advance so you could disrupt proceedings of the House of Representatives, literally delaying representative democracy in action.

You don't like a bill. I get it. I didn't like a lot of bills that passed under previous Congresses. I worked for a Senator and didn't like a lot of things that got passed there. But this is how representative democracy works. You don't threaten anyone.

But here's a thought: if you can't articulate the details of the bill you apparently oppose, you might want to put the brick down until you can. Complete sentences help. Verbs. They're called verbs.

And to the big-time bloggers, company executives, and MEMBERS OF CONGRESS who tacitly endorse and enable this thuggery: the blood these thugs draw - and believe me, it's just a matter of time before they really hurt someone - will be on your hands. Deep down you know it.

Those electoral gains you keep saying you'll have are disappearing in front of you because you're tolerating this. This is gonna backfire on you. Big time.

But I'd rather you make electoral gains than tolerate this depravity. America deserves better than this.