Pointing the fickle finger...

It was a moment that would have made folks like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly or Ann Coulter very proud.
At Monday night's forum on public access at CCRI in Warwick, a man in the audience became indignant when the panel would not address a question on illegal immigration in great detail. When moderator and Daily News executive editor Sheila Mullowney called on the legislative panel to give closing remarks it sent this man over the deep end.
He rose, yelling out his displeasure, saying the panel was more willing to talk about handicapped parking than illegal immigration. (The handicapped parking came up in discussion about making the legislative process more open - which obviously fit more in with the public access theme of the event than illegal immigration.)
The man walked up to the table of legislators (two from each party), shook hands with House Minority Leader Robert A. Watson and put his finger in the face of Senate Majority Leader Teresa Paiva Weed. "And you ..." he yelled at her. The rest was lost. Even Weed and Mullowney, who was sitting next to Weed, couldn't recall what he said.
The man then repeated his disgust, got into a shouting match with another spectator, who told him he was out of line, and finally left the room.
It was a perfect display of what people like Rushbo, O'Reilly and Coulter have spawned. It is now perfectly acceptable to act like a complete buffoon, disrupt an informational forum and publicly castigate lawmakers if they happen to have the temerity to disagree with your point of view or, in this case, not address it.
The first thing that needs to be said is that this man did nothing to help convince anyone 0f the legitimacy of his cause. Bomb throwers very rarely win people over to their way of thinking. The second is that when anyone goes off like this guy did they really weaken the credibility of anything else they may say in the future.
And this isn't limited to the right wing, although they perfected it first. Those on the left also like to attack the messenger personally if they disagree with the message.
I only hope that this is a swing of the pendulum and, eventually, people will tire of the histrionics and demand a debate on ideas and not personalities.