Minority rules

Rachel Maddow spent the first 15 minutes of her show last night gently mocking the right wing idiots who plot massive demonstrations to "take back the country" and find a couple of dozen die hards in attendance.  Today, for instance, some group has vowed that somewhere between 10 and 30 million people will descend on Washington and refuse to leave until the President is jailed and Congress disbanded.  I doubt the business infrastructure in D.C. stocked up to handle the influx, because the 50 or 60 people who do show up will probably be well supplied with pop tarts and Gatorade.  The point of these demonstrations is to show the power of the tiny minority who seem to be driving the right wing and by extension the Republican party.  They make announcements and show up at Bundy's ranch in Nevada in camo with their assault rifles, but these nut-jobs are given encouragement by craven politicians who fear the supposed electoral power of the tea party.  Their power is all out of proportion to their numbers.  It is a mirror of Nixon's "silent majority" of the 1970s.  At that time, a small activist left wing drove the debate regarding the government's policy but was ignored at election time.  Now, the fringe on the right is driving the Republican into desperate contortions to please them.  With the new social media, the public megaphone is many times more powerful than what the Chicago 7 had to work with.   The new, not so silent majority of people of good will need to respond at the ballot box and deal a fatal blow to the gun nuts and bigots who have camouflaged their hateful ideology with appeals to "constitutional" solutions which are thinly disguised dog whistles to the ignorant and intolerant.  We are better than that.