American Left keeps resorting to mob rule

The truth is, I’m stumped on the best way to approach this week’s column topic.

I am aware of the Charlottesville, Va., protests, the groups involved, the senseless death of a young woman, and of others near her who were seriously injured. But I have not been, nor will I be, digging deep into the Virginia mayhem details. The narrative, the underlying story, is old. Today’s participants, seen most recently in Virginia, are more violent, and dangerous than when I first experienced the drama.

The American political Left has decided goals it can’t accomplish through legal governing and the rule of law are fair game for forcing those goals using mob rule. Compounding that, we have a mainstream media sympathetic to this use of mob rule.

For me, the story starts in 1991 when, as a new Maine State House legislative staffer, I first experienced the use of mob rule. The majority party Democrats and minority party Republicans in the Maine Legislature, and the Republican Governor, were at a standstill over how to resolve two separate, vital issues:

1. Saving Maine’s collapsing workers compensation insurance system, and
2. Agreeing on details of a two-year state budget with new, higher taxes.

Traditionally, Maine’s state budgets passed when two-thirds of the Senate and House members agreed. And in 1991, the Democrat majority needed only a small number of Republicans — seven members, I believe — to vote with them for the higher tax state budget to pass.

But Republicans wanted resolution first on workers compensation. They believed if the budget passed first, Democrat legislators would not agree to fixing workers comp.

So the normal business of the Legislature paused for eight days, while a bipartisan committee of Senate and House members, and the Governor’s office, were meeting to find a solution.

During those eight days, Democrats and their special interest friends flooded the State House, inside and outside, with organized protesters opposing the Republicans. For eight days, around the clock, Republican legislators had protesters in their faces, screaming. Republican elected officials, while walking to their Senate and House chamber seats were forced to walk gauntlets of strangers taunting, shouting, shoving, and spitting on them.

Two elderly GOP House Members — Bud Savage and Kay Lebowitz — fell ill and required medical help.

Craig A. Poulin, who later became Maine State Police Chief, was, in 1991, the Governor’s bodyguard. Years later Mr. Poulin told me those eight days in the State House were the scariest he had experienced. Fortunately, none of the protesters in-your-face tactics sparked a fistfight, which could easily have happened, escalating into a full scale riot.

Maine is still feeling the escalating aftershock of that Eight Days War. Meanwhile, Democrats and their allies resorting to increasing violence when governing isn’t going their way, continues to play out. “Avoiding government shutdown,” often when no one is advocating government shutdown, is a common excuse for organizing demonstrations.

Much of the mainstream media report with no sense of history or political objectivity, routinely giving the Left’s actions a pass, while sticking to this narrative:Right = bad, Left = good. Facts be damned.

The Left is doing everything possible — not to disagree with, or to debate with — but to destroy President Trump: Treat everything the President does and says as vile. Give him no quarter. Concede nothing. When he speaks, condemn his words. When he doesn’t speak, condemn his silence. When he speaks the right words, condemn his tone or his timing.

Time spent responding to the Left’s charges and demands is time wasted. Call the Left’s motives what they are: disruption and destruction for selfish political gain.

Scott K. Fish has served as a communications staffer for Maine Senate and House Republican caucuses, and was communications director for Senate President Kevin Raye. He founded and edited AsMaineGoes.com and served as director of communications/public relations for Maine’s Department of Corrections until 2015. He is now using his communications skills to serve clients in the private sector.