Chris Reichert  is sorry, truly and deeply sorry.  Mortified even. 

A few days ago he was exercising his First Amendment Rights at one of those Tea Party events that have become as routine as shattered NCAA brackets.  This particular shebang was outside the Columbus, Ohio offices of Rep. Mary Jo Kilroy (D-OH15) shortly before the Health Care vote.  But Reichert and his pals were not the only concerned citizens on hand.  Sizeable numbers of enthusiastic supporters of reform were also on hand.  Some yelling back and forth ensued, not much of it polite.

60 year old Robert A. Letcher, with Parkinson’s disease, wasn’t doing much yelling.  But he did sit down directly indirectly in front of a large gaggle of Tea baggers holding a sign explaining that he had the disease and needed health care.  This infuriated the other side.  Video captures a large man leaning over Lectcher screaming at him that “If you’re looking for a hand out you came to the wrong end of town.  You have to work for what you get here.”  Suddenly Reichert, spiffy in a crisp white shirt and tie emerges from the crowd and starts throwing dollar bills at the man, mocking him as a beggar.  As someone else yells “Communist!” he realizes there are cameras rolling he quickly recedes back into the crowd.

But not fast enough.  Video of the incident was soon on local and national TV and went viral over the internet.  It became a symbol of how vitriolic and—to use the gentle words of tsk-tsking anchors—how “uncivil” the health care debate had become.

Of course it did not take too long for Reichert’s identity to be revealed.

At first he denied he was the man in the video.  "I wanted this to go away, but it won't and I'm paying the consequences,"

In the cold light of day Reichert told a Columbus Dispatch reporter, "I snapped. I absolutely snapped and I can't explain it any other way…He's got every right to do what he did and some may say I did too, but what I did was shameful. Reichert said. "I haven't slept since that day.” 

Ya know, I believe this guy.  Oh, sure his politics suck.  But on any given day he is probably a nice, hard working family man.  Probably goes to church, contributes to charity, help’s old ladies across the street.  Under normal circumstances he would never taunt an obviously disabled man. 

He says he “snapped.”  What happened is that he became a classic victim of mob mentality.  As the rage built around him, he felt it rising in his own gut.  He felt empowered.  He felt righteous.  The vitriol of the mob flowed through him.  He was its instrument.  Now he’s sorry, truly sorry. 

So, I suspect, were a lot of members of lynch mobs in the past.  That’s what makes the cynical campaign of hate being whipped up by the Republican Party—and yes that once Grand Old Party now owns it—as well as by Tea Party ideologues and fringe loonies, so dangerous.  They are unleashing a mob made up by a lot regular guys like Chris Reichert.  And they cannot control the raging beasts it produces.  Inevitably someday soon at one of these hate fests some poor mope is going to do something far worse than throw dollar bills at a sick man.