Erick Erickson is right, this is profoundly disturbing:
In Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe or Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela or in Thailand or in former Eastern Bloc countries it would not be unheard of for union goons to show up on a man’s doorstep to intimidate the man into submitting to the thugocracy’s will. It is not supposed to happen here.
A couple of weeks ago, Barack Obama told Wall Street that he, personally *he*, was all that stood between them and pitchforks. Well, Obama’s SEIU buddies decided to break out the pitchforks.
500 SEIU goons showed up on the front porch of a house belonging to a Bank of America Executive. The man’s 14 year old son was home alone and, fearing for his life, barricaded himself into a bathroom.
Yeah, you read that right. The man in question, Greg Baer, is one of the senior corporate lawyers for BoA. He’s also a Democrat, but like animals, some Democrats are more equal than others.
Here is what is so stark and troubling about this incident: the media was not invited. The SEIU brought along a Huffington Post blogger to shoot some propaganda, but otherwise the media was not invited. Why not? Because this was an act of sheer intimidation. It wasn’t a publicity stunt. Had a journalist, Nina Easton, not lived next door we may never have known this happened.
Friends, this is not supposed to happen in America. More troubling, the former head of the SEIU, Andy Stern, was Barack Obama’s most frequent visitor to the White House last year. Patrick Gaspard, the guy who was in charge of the SEIU before Stern, is now Barack Obama’s political director. Gaspard’s brother is a lobbyist for ACORN.
The SEIU spent last summer beating up conservatives at congressional town hall meetings about health care. Now the SEIU is sending busloads of goons to the front porches of bank executives to intimidate them and their families.
Two years ago, a lot of us on the Right were looking at Senator Obama and saying, “Look at who this man hangs out with, and look at how they operate”—and the response from the Left was outrage that we would try to “play politics” with something so obviously irrelevant. But as this shows, it wasn’t irrelevant. Barack Obama is a product of a political system that sees intimidation as a useful tool in its arsenal for getting its way, and he associates closely with people who think intimidation is a perfectly appropriate tactic to try to get their way; why would anyone be surprised by this? I won’t say I predicted it, but honestly, I should have.
If it isn’t surprising, though, it’s still cause for deep concern, as Erickson points out:
When it becomes fair game to attack and intimidate private citizens and their families to advance a public policy, we cross over from an orderly civil democracy to something decidedly third world.
Had these been tea parties instead of SEIU activists, this would be the front page story of the New York Times.