From TPM:
Marc Ambinder seems to think the tea-bagger effort to shut down Democratic town hall meetings is just working from the Dems 2005 anti-Social Security privatization playbook.
Really?
I watched those events unfold pretty closely. And what the Dems did in 2005 consisted almost entirely of protest outside town halls and anti-privatization activists trying to get into the meetings to ask questions to pin members of Congress down on their position. What made it so uncomfortable for Republican and some Democratic members of Congress is that they got questions they didn't want to answer.
Did some meetings get heated? Sure. But these weren't organized attempts to shut down the meetings themselves.
Does Marc remember what happened four years ago?
We're going to see more and more of this in the press. The idea that Obama' push for health care reform is just like Bush's push to privatize Social Security (see the AP for a perfect example), and that the opposition to Obama is just like the opposition to Bush.
Neither is accurate.