The Neo-Know-Nothings

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/4760/dick_armey_and_the_neo-know-nothings/

Sunday August 16 8:38 pm

I knew nothing about the Know-Nothings until the Neo-Know-Nothings began disrupting healthcare town hall meetings all across the country. Now I know the Know-Nothings were an anti-Catholic political party that flourished briefly back in the 1840s and 50s, split apart on the slavery issue, renamed itself “The American Party,” and eventually morphed into the modern-day Republican Party. Somehow, I just knew it all along.

Can you imagine what life in the United States would have been like without Flannery O’Connor, and Eugene O’Neill? Jack, Bobby and Teddy? Stephen Colbert, Conan O”Brien, and The Boston Police Department?

It’s the kind of no-Irish-need-apply life envisioned by the Know-Nothings, a mid-19th century white, protestant secret society like the Ku Klux Klan, whose members were sworn to answer, “I know nothing,” if asked about their organization.

According to Wikipedia (who else can we trust), their movement was a reaction to the potato-famine refugees from the Emerald Isle who made up one-third of all immigrants coming to the United States between 1820 and 1860 (the Greening of America?).

The Know-Nothings specialized in burning down Catholic churches and using bully-boy tactics to elect mayors in several big cities and even governors in a few states. Remember The Gangs of New York, with Daniel Day Lewis playing a fictionalized version of Know-Nothing leader William Poole?

Flash forward to the year 2000 and the “Brooks Brothers Riot” at the Miami-Dade polling headquarters, where cadres of goony Congressional staffers organized by House Majority Leader Dick Armey physically disrupted the Gore-Bush vote recount. Then connect the dots to August 2009, when mobs organized by Armey’s fake grassroots organization, FreedomWorks, started tearing up healthcare town hall meetings hosted by members of Congress.

FULL story at link.

[opihimoimoi]

1. Its amazing them Pub/GOP got away with this shit for all these years

but, our voters out there are slowly getting the picture...never trust them Pubs whern they trying to use the Scare Card...all, if not most, is bullshit...

The people is waking up to the Pub Scam of Fooling ....so they can keep up Ruling....thus they lost to Obama the half white kid who could...and did....win a Presidential Race....

[izquierdista]

2. Nazis have always known nothing