Lawrence O'Donnell talks to the Southern Poverty Law Center's Mark Potok about John Boehner's response to the escalating threats to lawmakers:
House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) Wednesday called disrespectful acts towards members of Congress "unacceptable" and urged health law opponents to speak with their votes instead.
“Violence and threats are unacceptable. That is not the American way," he said on Fox News. "Yes, I know there’s anger, but let’s take that anger and go out and register people to vote, go volunteer on a political campaign, and let’s do it the right way.”
Potok called John Boehner a "day late and a dollar short" and had some questions for the Minority Leader.
Potok: I would like to know where the so-called responsible leaders of the party were, you know, when Sarah Palin claimed that the President was setting up death panels to murder our grandparents. I’d like to know where they were when Congresswoman Michele Bachmann was suggesting that the President was setting up political re-education camps to turn our children into Marxist robots. You know, I’d like to know where they were when Steve King was suggesting that a person who flew a plane into an IRS building in Austin was essentially justified or had the IRS been eliminated this would never have been a problem.
I mean I just think we have heard an enormous amount of vitriol, defamatory, conspiracy theories and propaganda from people who are in a position to lead and to know better. So it just seems to me these people very largely have been trying to ride the tiger of this populist rebellion and in doing that they’ve come more and more to look like that tiger.
Potok also pointed out how troubling the date of April 19th is for the upcoming "Second Amendment March".
What may be most noteworthy about the march, however, is its date — April 19. That is the date of the first shots fired at Lexington in the Revolutionary War. And it is also the anniversary of the fiery end of the government siege in Waco and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
