Redemption for the "Don't Taze Me, Bro" Guy:
You remember it, right? University of Florida student Andrew Meyer waited in line to speak at a John Kerry forum in Gainesville in September 2007. When he got up to the microphone, he spoke even though questioning at his mike had been cut off, brandishing a copy of the Greg Palast book, Armed Madhouse (a work that ought to be the historical epitaph of the Bush administration). He tried to articulate a question about whether the 2004 election was stolen and about impeachment. As the crowd tried to shout him down and cops surrounded him, he lost focus and threw in a question about whether Kerry was in the Yale Skull and Bones Society with Bush. Kerry said all along that he was willing to listen and answer the questions. The cops and event organizers didn't care. And the rest was YouTube and taser history. He was arrested for resisting arrest and disturbing the peace.

On September 18, 2007, on his Fox "news" show, Bill O'Reilly said, "It's not pleasant, but that idiot, he wanted this to happen. He wanted the cops to do it. He wanted to disrupt the forum. And to me, I think he should be prosecuted...Well, what about disrupting the peace? You know, this is what -- look, the guy goes in there. He's totally inappropriate in every way, Jeanine [Pirro]. There isn't one appropriate thing the man did. He wants to disrupt the forum. Security has an obligation not to allow the forum to be disrupted."

Sean Hannity offered on September 20, "This guy disrupted the event. He disturbed the peace." On CNN Headline, Glenn Beck mocked his shouts of pain. To be sure, many conservatives were also outraged at the police, including Michael "The New Yorker Says I'm Human Now" Savage.

Meyer, who was being deliberately provocative, later issued an apology and the charges were dropped. What he was asking, though, was not from an extreme leftist point of view (except the Skull and Bones shit, perhaps).

Today, as Beck and the rest can't praise the town hall protesters enough, members of Congress are forced to respond to people shouting that they are supporting Nazi policies or are going to euthanize the elderly, things that have absolutely no grounding in anything we might refer to as "reality." No one has been removed by the law for yelling out of turn and taking focus away from the people at the microphones. The Rude Pundit witnessed this even at the mostly polite town hall he attended; at one point, a man in the crowd was yelling back at Congressman Steven Rothman, and Rothman broke the established protocol of the event to address what he said. It barely needs to be said that conservative pundits are not condemning any of these people as disruptive nutcases. No, these are good Americans who have the right to free speech.

The Rude Pundit doesn't give a fuck about Andrew Meyer, the person. He's kind of a douchebag, even if we agree on a few things. But someone owes Meyer a goddamn public apology. Because if one of these "Tree of Liberty" t-shirt-wearing and NRA hat-sporting idiot motherfuckers was dragged out of the room while screaming about Obama as Hitler and then tazed multiple times to calm him down, you can bet there would be a fucking riot. You can bet that some of those dickless retards stroking their sidearms like substitute cocks would be locked and loaded, thinking it was go time.

By the way, courageous man that he is, O'Reilly also said this that same evening: "I won't go to colleges anymore. I mean, I used to go and give speeches at colleges. I very rarely do that anymore because guys like this, we saw it at Columbia, all right, they are so crazy. And they are there to disrupt the proceedings."