Are the rabid political mobs organized or spontaneous?

Rick Perlstein reports on the birthers, the anti-tax tea-partiers, the hecklers and the gun toting participants as they have appeared in American history.

The quiver on the lips of the man pushing the wheelchair, the crazed risk of carrying a pistol around a president -- too heartfelt to be an act. The lockstep strangeness of the mad lies on the protesters' signs -- too uniform to be spontaneous. They are both. If you don't understand that any moment of genuine political change always produces both, you can't understand America, where the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy, and where elites exploit the crazy for their own narrow interests.

This nation, based on liberal change, is run by wealthy elites who fear liberal change for fear of what it will do to their narrow interests.The "Crazy" is traditional American.

What America has is a pool of not very well educated individuals - much of the conservative population - who have been trained to fear their own government unless it is organizing an army to fight overseas. America also has a number of wealthy conservative individuals who fund groups and hire extremely well educated individuals to organize the activities of the conservative population primarily to protect their own wealth and streams of income.

The results can be seen in the August Congressional townhall meetings. The health insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies have tapped into the conservative political machine to defend their current power to suck irrationally high profits from ill Americans, a process made much easier as long as their is a sizable pool of uninsured Americans that everyone else is afraid of being forced into.

So if you thing that the current made-for-TV and video political events are spontaneous, yes they are to some extent. But they are focused as a result of long planning and hard work but those who will lose if universal health care is passed.