Yesterday's protest in front of the U.S. Capitol, organized by Rep. Michele Bachmann, had the usual cast of tea-party extremists. But this time, they were openly assembled by GOP leaders as an official House Republican event. Republican members of Congress stoked the crowd's extremism and gave them their seal of approval.

Dana Milbank described the scene:

In the front of the protest, a sign showed President Obama in white coat, his face painted to look like the Joker. The sign, visible to the lawmakers as they looked into the cameras, carried a plea to "Stop Obamunism." A few steps farther was the guy holding a sign announcing "Obama takes his orders from the Rothchilds" [sic], accusing Obama of being part of a Jewish plot to introduce the antichrist.

But the best of Bachmann's recruits were a few rows into the crowd, holding aloft a pair of 5-by-8-foot banners proclaiming "National Socialist Healthcare, Dachau, Germany, 1945." Both banners showed close-up photographs of Holocaust victims, many of them children.

Not just their extremism and frothing-at-the-mouth hatred of Barack Obama was on display. The crowd's hypocrisy was also on full display. Again from Milbank's column:

[A] man standing just beyond the TV cameras apparently suffered a heart attack 20 minutes after event began. Medical personnel from the Capitol physician's office -- an entity that could, quite accurately, be labeled government-run health care -- rushed over, attaching electrodes to his chest and giving him oxygen and an IV drip. ...

By the time it was over, medics had administered government-run health care to at least five people in the crowd who were stricken as they denounced government-run health care. But Bachmann overlooked this irony as she said farewell to her recruits.

"You," she said, "are the most beautiful sight any of us freedom fighters have seen for a long time."

Talk about hypocrisy - and not just about government-run health care. They say they're "freedom fighters." Whatever principle it is that motivates these extremists, it sure isn't freedom.

Where were they when President Bush claimed that simply by declaring an American citizen an "enemy combatant" - a decision unreviewable by a court or any other entity - he could have that person arrested without a warrant and imprisoned for life without access to a lawyer or an impartial judge?

Where were they when Americans were arrested at Bush events simply for wearing John Kerry tee-shirts and having anti-war bumper stickers? Or when President Bush planned a Total Information Awareness program, in which the federal government would regularly monitor our credit card purchases, our travel, our telephone records, and other everyday activities? Or when President Bush's warrantless wiretapping program was executed in flagrant violation of the law, to say nothing of the Bill of Rights?

Where were they? These "freedom fighters" did nothing.

Perhaps some enterprising journalist will ask people who attended yesterday's staged event where they were when freedom was genuinely threatened during the course of the Bush presidency.

Of course, journalists don't need to ask where the people who organized the event were while Bush was engaged in a war against America’s civil liberties: They were helping him.