Steve Pearlstein is right, the teabagger healthcare townhall protests, Republican politicians, and conservative media figures like Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh are political terrorists. Plain and simple.

The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they’ve given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They’ve become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems.

Watching video from townhalls last night in Tampa and St. Louis, or early this week in Connecticut, it is crystal clear that the teabaggers only strategy is to disrupt events and silence opposition. They have no substantive idea. They have no proposals of their own. They simply don’t want this problem to be solved and are resorting to increasingly violent and threatening means to further their opposition.