Just Don't Bring Up The Environment And Your Golden

Assuming you haven't been living under a rock for the past few weeks, you've probably caught wind of the brouhaha that has been the health care protests. Essentially, town hall meetings all over the country are being disrupted by loud protesters who are touting claims of "death councils" and painting swastikas on public buildings. Unfortunately, this is now the cynosure of the national coverage, rather than the points being made on the other side of the debate, and today I realized why.

Conservatives, I don't know how to say this, so I'm just going to come right out with it: you guys suck at protests.

It's not your fault. While protesting has been a hallmark of the American experience since the Boston Tea Party, for the last sixty or seventy years all the really good protest topics seem to have fallen on the liberals side. War protests. Equality protests. Workers' rights protests. The fact is, you guys are totally out of training for this sort of thing.

Now you guys are out of power, and naturally you turn to this established tradition to be heard. You wanted to be heard on the issues of taxes, a perfectly justifiable concern given the agenda of the new President, but a lack of research meant that you allowed the term "teabagging" to be associated with the protests, thus turning a protest movement into an off-color joke. Now you want to stem health care reform, but any real protest is being drowned out by people equating Obama with Hitler, which just makes you all look like kooks. Between this and leaving trails that show some protesters being shills for insurance companies or Republicans (or as it's being referred to now, "Astroturfed"), the protests are losing all of their meaning.

Do the liberals do the same thing? Of course they do - it would be naive to think otherwise. They're just better at it.

So, how do you solve the problem? It's simple - you guys need some hippies. Seriously, who knows more about protests that hippies? Now this is going to be no small task, what with the difficulty in finding conservative hippies, but I'm sure you guys can put your heads together and come up with something. If nothing else, you can offer them lots of money for consulting, or if that fails to sway them offer to build a Whole Foods near them or maybe start a patchouli farm. They eat that stuff up.

So there you go. Get yourself some expert advice, and try this thing again. I'm sure with a little coaching, you guys could be putting together protests that actually sway opinions instead of just supplying MSNBC and Fox News with soundbites and annoying the rest of us. You can do it, you guys! Now get out there and try again.

Oh, and if you follow my advice and get the hippies, stick to your own food unless they bring brownies, but by all means, try the brownies.