Is This What Politics Has Come To?

Political rhetoric can get very heated. However, the American political system has been pretty good about keeping the anger at just rhetoric, and not actual violence. Sure, we have an Aaron Burr in our history, and the canning of Charles Sumner, but by and large, American politics has avoided outright violence.

We have historically been able to avoid political events like this (from India):





Or like this (from Taiwan):





But I don't feel as secure about our ability to continue to have heated debate whithout violence entering the picture. The Ann Coulter's of the world have escalated the political rhetoric to the point where I believe we are at serious risk of seeing increases incidents of political violence.

This brings me to events that happened today in Virginia. I was not there. All I know is what I have read and seen in the video. But what I saw were staffers for Senator George Allen accoust a man who was attempting to speak to, perhaps yell at the Senator. The video clearly shows one Allen staffer trying to put the man in a headlock and another Allen staffer wrestling the man to the ground. In case you haven't seen it, here is the video.




This is completely unacceptable. Political violence must niot be accepted. No matter what words were spoken to Senator Allen, no matter how bad these staffers wanted to silence this man, using violence to achieve their political ends is not acceptable. I don't know what the end result will be, but in my mind, if we are going to prevent our political discourse from devolving into an actual shoving match, instead of the historic verbal shoving match, the people seen on this video must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

It does not matter whether the assailant was a democrat or a republican. If you can not win an election without resorting to violence, than you simply don't deserve to win the election. If we don't put an end to this type of political violence now, this is our future (actual political violence from Ukraine: