Saturday night, the headquarters of the Alaska Democratic Party in Anchorage was vandalized. A window was smashed. I was able to grab a minute with Democratic Party Chair Patti Higgins to talk about what had happened.
A right wing blogger, and former leader of the Alabama Constitutional Militia, posted on a blog Friday, specifically advocating the breaking of glass. And it appears that in response to the rhetoric that is flying, glass is being broken.
"To all modern Sons of Liberty: THIS is your time. Break their windows. Break them NOW."
These were the words of Mike Vanderboegh, a 57-year-old former militiaman from Alabama, who took to his blog urging people who opposed the historic health-care reform legislation -- he calls it "Nancy Pelosi's Intolerable Act" -- to throw bricks through the windows of Democratic offices nationwide.
"So, if you wish to send a message that Pelosi and her party [that they] cannot fail to hear, break their windows," Vanderboegh wrote on the blog, Sipsey Street Irregulars. "Break them NOW. Break them and run to break again. Break them under cover of night. Break them in broad daylight. Break them and await arrest in willful, principled civil disobedience. Break them with rocks. Break them with slingshots. Break them with baseball bats. But BREAK THEM."
Vanderboegh told The Kansas City Star that the action was meant to "get everyone's attention."
"What I was trying to get across was that people do not understand how on the edge of civil conflict this country is," he said.
So just to remove all doubt about that, and illustrate the point about how easy it is to incite violence, let's break some windows. Nice. The vandals didn't have the decency to hang around and wait for arrest, as Vanderboegh suggested.