from truthdig:
Thugs on the RightPosted on Oct 21, 2010
By Joe Conason
What do the tea party ideologues mean when they speak of liberty and freedom and the Constitution that they supposedly revere? Sometimes they are described as libertarians, but the behavior of their leading candidates betrays an authoritarian streak just beneath all the sonorous rhetoric.
The latest example is Joe Miller, the Republican Senate candidate from Alaska, whose private guards roughed up, handcuffed and detained an online journalist covering one of his campaign events last week. The Miller goons seized Alaska Dispatch blogger Tony Hopfinger as he tried to ask the candidate a question at a forum in a public school—which they later described dishonestly as a “private event”—and pushed around a couple of other reporters as they captured the incident on video.
Such hostility to the press was warranted on the part of Miller, who turns out to have much to hide. The mistreatment of the journalists in Alaska was part of a Miller strategy that included refusing to discuss his career as a judge and his personal background. That strategy ultimately led to the brutalization of Hopfinger, for insistent inquiries about the candidate’s record as a public employee in Fairbanks’ North Star Borough—where he misused computers in partisan politicking. Miller has also been loath to explain why he accepted the kind of government assistance—including farm subsidies, Medicaid and unemployment insurance—that he is so eager to deny to everyone else.
Carl Paladino likes to push journalists around, too, as he demonstrated during a widely publicized confrontation with a New York Post reporter. Rather than rely on hired thugs, the Republican candidate for governor of New York is a thug himself. ......(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/thugs_on_the_right_20101021/ 
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