Nope. I can’t think of one time where a republican Congressperson feared for his or her life because of their beliefs and their support of the war criminals. Funny how that happens. Now we have republican anti-health-care supporters threatening the lives of Democratic Congresspeople, hanging their bodies in effigy, showing up with Swastikas, bringing guns to town hall meetings, using violence, and we ‘ve got right wingers on the radio such as Glenn Beck rallying them on….all because of health care reform!
It really has nothing to do with healthcare and everything to do
with the shifting political and demographic winds that are
marginalizing them and their ideas, and driving them from power.
Andrew Sullivan, a brit, had a great reader comment about it on his
blog: “Your obvious shock and dismay at the sheer angry ignorance
of the health care teabaggers reiterates my largest problem with
your rosy immigrant’s view of America. You have often
underestimated just how poisonously dangerous the American populist
right is. I don’t blame you. You came to America after the rise of
Reagan. Most of your life in America, you have lived under
different Republican presidents who placated these folks with
platitudes and campaign rhetoric. The one period when the populist
right didn’t feel they had a fellow traveler in charge was when
Bill Clinton was elected (thanks to the reactionaries splitting
their votes). You remember, no doubt, the level of crazy Clinton
had to defuse and dodge, and this was a man who had the advantage
of being a Southern bubba who has dealt which such people all his
life. For most of your time in America, this insanity has been
muted by the success of conservative politics. Since you live in
Washington, you probably saw daily the face of the successful
conservative political establishment that milked the populist
right, and by milking them kept their bitterness at a manageable
level. That safety valve was stuffed up by George Bush’s failed
presidency. So now, these people are facing their worst fears;
actual change. A political and demographic re-alignment is
happening before their eyes, and they are reaching back into their
old bag of tricks of intimidation, violence, and apocalyptic
fearmongering. You are British, Andrew. You love this country, and
we love you for it. But you didn’t grow up around these folks, and
you don’t realize what a permanent and potent part of the American
political landscape they are. They have always been with us, the
people who believed in manifest destiny, who delighted in the
slaughter of this land’s original inhabitants, who cheered a nation
into a civil war to support an economic system of slavery that
didn’t even benefit them. They are the people who bashed the unions
and cheered on the anti-sedition laws, who joined the Pinkertons
and the No Nothing Party, who beat up Catholic immigrants and
occasionally torched the black part of town. They rode through the
Southern pine forests at night, they banned non-European
immigration, they burned John Rockefeller Jr. in effigy for
proposing the Grand Tetons National Park. These are the folks who
drove Teddy Roosevelt out of the Republican Party and called his
cousin Franklin a communist, shut their town’s borders to the Okies
and played the protectionist card right up til Pearl Harbor, when
they suddenly had a new foreign enemy to hate. They are with us,
the John Birchers, the anti-flouride and black helicopter nuts, the
squirrly commie-hating hysterics who always loved the loyalty oath,
the forced confession, the auto-de-fe. Those who await with baited
breath the race war, the nuclear holocaust, the cultural jihad, the
second coming, they make up much more of America then you would
care to think. I’m always optimistic about America. We’re a
naturally rich and beautiful place. Every generation we renew
ourselves with a watering of immigrants committed to the American
dream, immigrants like you. But please, Andrew, do not for a second
underestimate the price in blood and tears we’ve always paid here
for progress. I voted for Obama with my fingers crossed, because I
knew that as the populist right lost power, they would become more
extreme, more concentrated, and more violent. As to dismissing them
as only a quarter or so of America, please remember that it only
took a quarter or so of Americans to actively support the
Confederacy.”
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Some right-winger on MSNBC this morning said that for eight years
Bush and Republicans had to confront rowdy leftists who tried to
sabotage their gatherings, even hanging Bush in effigy. Seems to me
one had to get a TICKET issued by Republicans in order to attend
the Republican events. So they were closed events, not
“democratic”! Occasionally somebody would get by the Republican
security guards, even shout out or take off a shirt to reveal a
T-shirt critical of Bush policies AND those persons would be
immediately kicked out of the event by bouncers and Gestapo
security police.
Nope because it has become very obvious that all of the lunatics in
this country are right wingers. A fellow American once said “I
can’t believe nobody has taken a pot shot at Bush yet.” I replied
“That’s because all of the crazy nutjobs are all republicans.” Now
isn’t that the truth!
Remember when a House member was kicked out of one of Bush’s SOTU addresses because she wore a t-shirt that had the number of Iraqi war dead on it?
The Bush Pigs would not allow dissent near them. Hell! To protest George Bush you were put in a cage miles away to do so!
“Nope because it has become very obvious that all of the lunatics
in this country are right wingers.” “Not all conservatives are
stupid, but most stupid people are conservative”-John Stuart Mill.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Unlike every Libtard – Bush ate baby fetuses!