Showing posts with label tea baggers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tea baggers. Show all posts

Saturday, December 14, 2013

Jefferson, Washington and Separation of Church and State

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

There may be millions of people in the United States who do not share our founders' reverance for what Thomas Jefferson called the "wall of seperation" between church and state. Many throughout the ranks of the religious right wing, for example, are eager to court bigots and fanatics, promising them a "theocracy" in exhange for their "souls". The following excerpt is typical of a "movement" to create an American Theocracy:
If conservatives are smart, we will make the GOP a relic of the past, and will go to the polls and vote the "Jesus Christ" line...Search out the spiritual life of every candidate, and eliminate those who do not follow the one true God.Long before November, we should have all of the members of our churches and their families commit to EVERYONE voting... Done properly, the turnout should be about 10% liberal and 90% conservative/Christian/ Tea-Party/etc. It would speak very loudly to have this kind of turnout.

--John Stone, comment left on "The Batavian"

Now George Washington is reputed to have been a "man of faith". But many others were not. As many if not more are described as "deists", better described as a philosophical view of a supreme being as opposed to an organized religion.

The bottom line is this: nowhere may be found any reference to "God" or deities of any sort in the Constitution. The fact of the matter is that our founders were prominently and most often not very religious. Some were Deists, some may have been atheists, and some probably did not care. That there is no clause in the Constitution that bases our nation on an "establishment of religion" is to be expected.

The single most effective challenge to would be theocrats is Thomas Jefferson's famous letter to the Danbury (Connecticut) Baptists:
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man & his god, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state.

--Thomas Jefferson, Letter to the Danbury Baptists


Monday, May 24, 2010

Doug Drenkow: Tea Party Hypocrisy Exposed

by Guest Author, Communications Consultant Doug Drenkow

So let me get this straight. Tea Party darling and Kentucky Republican Senate candidate Rand Paul says that even though the government should not discriminate on the basis of race in public accommodations, it's "unconstitutional" for the government to stop business from discriminating on the basis of race (etc.) in its private business dealings.

I have just one question: Did President Lincoln step out of constitutional bounds with the Emancipation Proclamation? Here I'd just heard the argument from the "states rights" crowd, that the Northern states were infringing on the power of the Southern states to make their own laws.

But according to Paul and the Tea Partyers, it's even more basic than that: Apparently the government has no right to make any law that "infringes" upon the "rights" of any business or individual to do as it, he, or she pleases, the consequences to any other individuals be damned. The "marketplace" will presumably sort it all out.

News flash: It didn't. With their abominable practice having grown over the centuries into a quite "respectable" institution, the slaveowners didn't set their slaves free in the 1800s -- and innumerable department stores (etc.) didn't open their "whites only" lunch counters (etc.) to African-Americans in the 1900s -- until the federal government made them do so.

Although Rand Paul, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and the rest of the Tea Partyers are usually identified with the Right -- most by far do vote Republican -- they're actually far, far to the Left: What's "Libertarian" to some -- those left unrestrained by any meaningful laws -- is Anarchy to the rest of us -- their victims.

Ironically, insidiously, as the Tea Partyers rail against Wall Street bailouts, it is their very own philosophy that left big business far too unregulated for far too long, with catastrophic consequences for the rest of us.

--Doug Drenkow
_____________________
My two cents: The 'Tea Party' movement is neither an 'aberration' nor a grass roots 'movement'. I have alleged that it was 'cooked up' by a GOP-dependent political consulting firm and decided upon after numerous studies, analyses and focus-group sessions. It's all 'top down', the very anti-thesis of 'grass roots'.

This movement has no interest in representing the real concerns of real people. It's raison d'etre is the preservation of the welfare state and by that I mean the 'corporate welfare' state. It is also dedicated to, defined by an equal commitment to the 'warfare' state from which only the Military/Industrial Complex benefits. In fact, there is no 'aberration' so absurd, so nonsensical, so horrible in its effects, that it could not, does not follow inexorably from the right wing raison d'etre, itself best likened unto a puss filled boil crying out desperately to be lanced! The U.S. has tended toward 'fascism' since WWII where it tasted war and liked it.

The tea bagger movement owes its very existence to Fox News which it adores and depends upon for misinformation, i.e. anything designed to reinforce or encourage their prejudices. It is the 'top down' product of the corporate/fascist establishment and mentality that brought you 'corporate personhood', in fact, 'corporate privilege'/people enslavement!

The tea bagger movement is a by-product of the blind eye given Halliburton-BP, the corporate authors of disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. This is the mind-set behind the Reagan 'tax cut' of 1982 which began the transfer of wealth upward so that now just one percent of the population owns more than 95 percent of the rest of us combined.

The tea baggers are enemies of Democracy and our republic. The tea baggers are liars, bigots and hypocrites to a person. Now --we're hooked on war despite the fact that with each passing year, fewer and fewer actually benefit from it. Millions just get a vicarious and perverted thrill via the media. The boardroom perverts, however, are closer to it, benefit financially from it with profits exponentially proportional to deaths. One can almost hear the war mongers cackling among themselves in glass-steel towers, plotting new adventures, new murders, new atrocities.

Limp dicked in every other way, it is their last orgasm before dying. I wish to hell they would get on with the 'dying' part and leave good people alone to live out full and meaningful lives, free of war, lies, bullshit, and oil spills.Down with tea baggers and other traitors to the Constitution, free speech and Democracy.
--Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

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Wednesday, April 14, 2010

The Right Wing is 'Trawling for Assassins'!

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Radical right wingers --tea baggers et al --are accused of 'trawling for assassins. It's but one of several outrages now associated with the disingenuous, bigoted 'tea bagger movement'. The idea of 'assassinating' a President because he is both black and Democratic threatens to finish off America as a nation of noble ideals. Earlier the self-absorbed right wing --thinking themselves rich --allowed themselves to be used by a GOP party machine. They were fooled. To them, I say that like the rest of us, you have awakened as a cockroach unless you were one already.

A nation in which about one half of the population openly pines for the murder of the only fairly elected president in some 9 years may be finished. It's hard to see any redemption following from that crooked, malevolent mentality. The writing is on the wall. The American ideals most us grew up with are on life-support!

It was all by design and began with the Presidency of Ronald Reagan about whom GOP-types swooned: "He made us feel good about ourselves!"
Not only have the Wall Street Journal and the hosts of Fox News been issuing their usual dark mutterings, but a new slogan has began appearing on bumper stickers, t-shirts, and even teddy bears: "Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8."

That psalm reads, “Let his days be few; and let another take his office. Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow."

Maddow seemed mainly amused by the teddy bears, but when she turned for comment to former right-wing evangelical leader Frank Schaeffer, he emphasized that in a religious context "it means something more threatening."

"The situation that I find genuinely frightening right now," Schaeffer explained, "is that you have a ramping up of biblical language ... and what it's coalescing into is branding Obama ... as 'not us.' ... Now he joins the ranks of the unjust kings of ancient Israel ... who should be slaughtered, if not by God then by just men."

--Former evangelist: Religious right is ‘trawling for assassins’
'Missing America' is about mourning the loss of ideals --freedom, equality, Democracy, inherent rights, self-evident truths, the promise that this government, this nation, unlike the monarchies of Europe, recognized in its founding document that the people are sovereign. Alas! None of that means shit to about to the congenital psychopathic idiots who have never bothered to read the U.S. Constitution but are, nevertheless, experts!
Now that the GOP has been transformed by the rise of the South, the trauma of terrorism and George W. Bush's conviction that God wanted him to be president, a deeper conclusion can be drawn: The Republican Party has become the first religious party in U.S. history.

We have had small-scale theocracies in North America before -- in Puritan New England and later in Mormon Utah. Today, a leading power such as the United States approaches theocracy when it meets the conditions currently on display: an elected leader who believes himself to speak for the Almighty, a ruling political party that represents religious true believers, the certainty of many Republican voters that government should be guided by religion and, on top of it all, a White House that adopts agendas seemingly animated by biblical worldviews.

--Kevin Phillips, How the GOP Became God's Own Party, Sunday, April 2, 2006

The GOP, especially the top tier, that ruling one percent, was never interested in American ideals but those it could exploit politically, those with which it might seize more wealth and power. These often 'super' patriots never loved 'America' but for its utilitarian value, most prominently the awesome military with which it might seize the resources of other nations, most recently Afghanistan for the pipeline to the Persian Gulf and Iraq for the oil. Dick Cheney's 'energy task force' met prior to 911 in order to carve the oil fields of Iraq. Somewhere on my hard drive is the map on which the fields are literally assigned the conspirators --Exxon et al!

When did we lose our grip? I often recall the moment, in Houston's Jones Hall, at the height of the Watergate Scandal, I covered a news conference by then President Richard Nixon. Dan Rather of CBS News approached the microphone to ask his two questions of Nixon. When he introduced himself at the microphone, there was thunderous applause.

"Are you running for something," Nixon asked!

"No, Mr President" Rather responded, "Are you?"

In that moment, a division within the media was made clear to me. The so-called 'media executives', boardroom types, owners et al were in Nixon's corner if not his pocket. Rather, rather, represented the 'working' press, dogged, interested in the getting to the truth about how 'Watergate' represented a clear and present danger to the 'Republic'. There really was such a 'media' in those days. Nixon's Vice President, Spiro T. Agnew called them "nattering nabobs of negativism"!

But we overcame and rose above Watergate. It was an old 'Western' in which the 'good guys' won. They did win, didn't they?

It was Reagan!

It was not Nixon but Reagan and the psychopathic ilk who followed him blindly over the cliff that all but finished off Democracy. It was Reagan who destroyed labor as he enriched his 'base' of extremely wealthy and powerful people. It was Reagan who transferred the wealth of this nation to an elite that had done nothing to deserve it, had done nothing to earn it. It was Reagan's 'tax cut' specifically that resumed a trend that had reversed during FDR's 'New Deal', that is, the rich began once again to grow much, much richer as those not among the upper 20 percent began to lose ground. As they had done during the era of the Great Robber Barons, Reagan must be remembered for having undone the good that had been done by FDR. This can all be proven with official figures from the Census Bureau, The Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Commerce Department-Bureau of Economic Analysis.

To accomplish GOP/right wing goals, Reagan pandered to ignorance, bigotry, hate, and prejudice. Reagan made psychopaths feel good about being psychopaths. Reagan sold out American industry and labor. As a result, the U.S. is now on the very bottom of the CIA's 'World Fact Book' with the world's largest Negative Current Account Balance, formerly called the 'balance of trade deficit'. China boasts both the World's largest positive Current Account Balance and control over the value of the U.S. dollar.

It was the neo-imperialists, parasites upon the Military-Industrial Complex, who dared dream of an 'American Empire' in the PNAC document: REBUILDING AMERICA’S DEFENSES Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century [PDF]. These neo-imperialists openly pined for a new a 'catalyzing event', a new 'Pearl Harbor', that would be exploited to justify a campaign of aggressive wars, in fact, crimes punishable by death even under U.S. Codes, Title 18, Section 2441.
Documents from Dick Cheney's May 2001 energy task force -- released under court order to the public interest group Judicial Watch -- include charts and maps detailing Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, and refineries. The recently disclosed information also reveals maps of Saudi Arabian and United Arab Emirates oilfields, pipelines, refineries, and tanker terminals with supporting charts of major oil and gas developments. Thus, the billowing cloud of thick, black controversy rising from the task force and resulting energy policy of the Bush Administration grows even thicker. Two years ago, the Los Angeles Times published an extensive investigative piece showing that the 'Cheney-led task force consulted extensively with corporate executives. Its findings boosted their interests.' In April of this year the Washington Post reported that Cheney's lawyer 'received a scolding yesterday from a panel of federal appeals judges over the Bush administration's use of an unusual legal maneuver to avoid disclosing information about Cheney's energy policy task force.' The newly released information once again raises suspicion about what happened behind closed doors and heightens the need to answer what Cheney is trying so hard to keep classified. As Judicial Watch's President Tom Fitton said, 'These documents show the importance of the Energy Task Force and why its operations should be open to the public.'

--Cheney Energy Task Force Had Maps of Iraqi Oilfields
These people benefited from the inability of the American people to grasp the significance of the 'catalyzing event' that, in fact, gave Bush the pretext he needed to attack and invade Iraq, a nation that had been recently 'carved up', like 'spoils of war' by the members of Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force.
Why I moderate comments

  • SPAM: 'comments' that link to junk, 'get rich' schemes, scams, and nonsense! These are the worst offenders.
  • Ad hominem attacks: 'name calling' and 'labeling'. That includes the ad hominem: 'truther' or variations!


Monday, January 18, 2010

Why do 'Tea Baggers' and Republicans make such good l'il Nazis?

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Research repeatedly confirms that Republicans are naturally inclined to exhibit authoritarian personality traits. The research leading to this conclusion is extensive. It was Carl Jung, in his 'The Undiscovered Self' who said that about thirty percent of every population was certifiably psychopathic.
The survival of civilization, he maintains, depends on individual awareness of both the conscious and unconscious aspects of the human psyche. The exploration of the unconscious, in particular, leads to self-knowledge and with it recognition of the duality of human nature --its potential for evil as well as for good. Jung believed that it is this self-knowledge that enables the individual to resist the collective power of mass society and the state and to cope with their possible threats.

--Princeton University Press, Review:The Undiscovered Self, C.G. Jung
Dr. Gustav Gilbert, who had been tasked with keeping Nazi war criminals alive until they could be hanged, concluded that his 'clients' had a defining characteristic in common: all, he said, 'lacked empathy'. Later, Hannah Arendt, founder of the New School for Sociological Studies in New York, coined a phrase to describe what she had observed of "Adolph Eichmann at this trial: 'the banality of evil'.

Jung believed that it was important for the individual to resist the "collective power of mass society". Some of the more recent research is surveyed by John Dean in his "Conservatives Without Consciences". Essentially, conservatives are 'authoritarian' types and tend to sort themselves into strong leaders (fuhrers) and eager, non-questioning followers (good l'il Nazis). I suspect that it is this personality and the various 'props' required of it that results in Republicans having more night mares and 'night terrors' than do normal people.

Liberals and progressives, by contrast, are often independent, creative, original. An 'ENTP' type is one of several types identified by the Jung Personality Test, similar to the Myers/Brigg test. ENTP, specifically, is described thus: "Inventor". Enthusiastic interest in everything and always sensitive to possibilities. Non-conformist and innovative."

This kind of personality will not produce good, unquestioning follower-conspirators! This kind of person does not make a good li'l Nazi. The GOP, by contrast, is over run by good li'l Nazis, eager to click their heels and carry out orders from on high, specifically, the GOP national headquarters and the 'johns' who purchase the GOP on K-street in DC.


The 'tea bagger' movement is the 'enemy within', the anti-democratic, pro-fascist brownshirts who may have already destroyed the US ideal of a free and democratic republic --something that we have most certainly NOT seen since the rise of Ronald Reagan.

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, however, came to Carter’s defense on Wednesday. “Jimmy Carter tells the truth about some, not all, but some of the rabid rage against President Obama,” Olbermann stated, “and is thus the recipient of the automatic blowback from those whose livelihoods depend on enabling the ragers to tell themselves it is not racism that they feel.”

In introducing the segment, Olbermann claimed that he could offer “at least 37? cases that he believes “prove President Carter to be correct.” He also noted that Rush Limbaugh had attacked Carter’s statements by saying “Jimmy Carter is the nation‘s hemorrhoid” — and retorted, “”Well, I got to defer to him here, the nation‘s asshole would know about the nation‘s hemorrhoid.”

Some of Olbermann’s examples seem fairly indisputable, like a poster used at tea party demonstrations that depicts Obama as an Africa witch doctor, or Limbaugh’s claim that Obama has made it okay for black kids to beat up a white kid on a school bus.

--Olbermann: 37 racist incidents prove Carter is right
Already losers, a now desperate GOP has made a Faustian bargain with bigots. It is significant that the so-called GOP 'leadership' has yet to issue a tepid reproach, let alone a strongly worded condemnation of a movement that is 1) un-American 2) bigoted 3) made of liars to a person!

Until the GOP leadership steps forward and condemns the 'tea bagger movement', I remain confirmed that the 'tea bagger' movement is encouraged by the highest ranking members of the GOP embittered by the legion of failures chalked up by their party since the inauguration of Ronald Reagan.

We have a right NOT to be intimidated!'

If we are attacked, we will fight back and have a right to do so! Violence must be met by an organized, effective and appropriate response. Tea baggers, having shown the world the face of bigotry, should just crawl back under their slimy rocks. They have very nearly undone the gains we thought we made in the sixties. They have rolled back the clock.

Encouraged by the GOP, bigoted liars like Rush Limbaugh, and, even worse, the hypocrites daring to spew this venom from the pulpit, the GOP resorts to form --encouraging ugly mobs to disrupt legal democratic town hall meetings. I urge that legal town hall meetings be defended by arms and armor. Enough is enough. The Democrats have a right to meet and they have a right to defend themselves against felony violence. They have a right to oppose and defend against a gang of would-be felons!


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Friday, December 25, 2009

U.S. Patriot Act: 'Tea Baggers' are Domestic Terrorists !

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Tea Baggers and on-air personalities who have threatened President Barack Obama with death are 'Domestic Terrorists' as defined by the U.S. Patriot Act. Threats against Obama are up 400% over those against Bush and according to many sources, the Secret Service is not able to keep up.

A recent exchange on YouTube convinces me that it is time to to deal with lawless tea baggers while making a point about the rule of law. Those threatening the life of the President have, in fact, sought to '(i) intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion'. That means that threatening the life of the President is an act of terrorism.
Section 802 (Pub. L. No. 107-52) which expands the definition to cover "domestic". terrorism " ...if the act appears to be intended to: (i) intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion ..."

--U. S. Patriot Act

The Southern Poverty Law Center says that the U.S. has seen a 35 percent rise in hate groups in recent years, and few doubt that the discontent stirred up over the election of an African-American president is fueling the rise in threats. But, could the influx of modern technology also be to blame?
As the cost of computer technology has fallen (and accessibility to high-speed Internet service has spread), more and more people are spending more and more time online. Accordingly, these people are doing what people often do on the Internet: sending emails, communicating in chat rooms and on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, watching YouTube videos, etc. According to results of a recent study by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, these activities seem to be enhancing the scope of extremist groups' reach:

--Report: Secret Service strained to protect Obama
America is as divided now as was England between Protestants and Catholics during the reign of Elizabeth I and, later, James I. James had promised a crackdown after Guy Fawkes tried to blow up Parliament, an act of terrorism. Overt threats to Obama are, in fact, acts of terrorism as defined in the U.S. Patriot Act.
True to form, just like I called it, even before the New Year could began in earnest three more Black men were lynched in America. Somehow, just saying I told you so doesn’t really do it for me. On New Year’s Eve, Johannes Mehserle a White police officer shot Oscar Grant Jr. a 22 year old Black man in his back, killing him instantly as he lay prone and unarmed on a train platform in Oakland California. The incident was caught on tape. It became just the latest public lynching of a Black man in the United States, and it sparked several days of angry rebellion.1

On that very same day, in Bellaire Texas a police officer shot the 23 year old son of Bobby Tolan, a once famous professional baseball player. Robbie Tolan ended up with a bullet lodged in his liver, only because as he stood in the driveway of his own home, a White police officer simply assumed that the car he actually owned was a stolen vehicle.2 Then, hours later on New Year’s Day, nine police officers in New Orleans discharged their weapons 48 times and put 12 bullets into the back of yet another young unarmed African American man; 22-year-old Adolph Grimes was shot dead in a hail of gunfire just a few feet away from his grandmother’s home. A total of 14 bullets pierced violently through his body. ...

All that it requires is the will and the means to take someone’s life. Now, with the election of the first Black man to the highest office in the land, it appears as if some White people across the country have simply lost their minds.

--Death Threats Against Obama - Racist Atrocities Soar As America Regurgitates Its Soul
Everyone threatening the life of President Barack Obama is a terrorist as defined clearly and unambiguously in the U.S. Patriot Act!

Anyone making threats against Obama, be they Beck, Billo or Limbaugh should be prosecuted under the provisions of the U.S. Patriot Act!


Saturday, September 19, 2009

Tea Bagger Bigotry Exposed

The GOP has either allied themselves with the bigot-based 'tea bagger' movement or it is the instigator of it. Just when I had come to believe that the GOP could not possibly sink lower, it is now clear to me that this endemically bigoted party is positioned to exceed all previous lies, idiocy and hate talk spewed on that party's behalf by Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly and a legion of venom filled wannabes. Indeed, the GOP --apres Bush --is a deluge, a jack-booted army of right wing hate mongers.

Now --let's clear up another issue. A heavily-trafficked site [What Really Happened] which often links to my articles has referenced my article with the following lines:
Yeah, they are really desperate to sell this idea that anyone unhappy with the government must be a racist. [emphasis mine, LH]
Let me make this clear: NO ONE TELLS ME WHAT TO WRITE! There is no 'they' who dictated any content to me whatsoever! There is no 'they' and I resent the implication that my thoughts and my opinions were dictated to me in any way whatsoever by some mysterious and unidentified 'they' !!

Is that clear?

No one else is responsible for the content of this blog and no one tells me what I can post and what I cannot! I reserve the right to cite sources, quote other writers and/or politicians and analysts as well as numerous official, government sources.

More than three decades later we have Sherri Goforth, an aide to a Republican state senator in Tennessee sending out a mass e-mail of a cartoon showing dignified portraits of the first 43 presidents, and then representing the 44th — President Obama — as a spook, a cartoonish pair of white eyes against a black background.

When a gorilla escaped from a zoo in Columbia, S.C., a longtime Republican activist, Rusty DePass, described it on his Facebook page as one of Michelle Obama’s ancestors.

Among the posters at last weekend’s gathering of conservative protesters in Washington was one that said, “The zoo has an African lion and the White House has a lyin’ African.”

These are bits and pieces of an increasingly unrestrained manifestation of racism directed toward Mr. Obama that is being fed by hate-mongers on talk radio and is widely tolerated, if not encouraged, by Republican Party leaders. It’s disgusting, and it’s dangerous. But it’s the same old filthy racism that has been there all along and that has been exploited by the G.O.P. since the 1960s.

I have no patience with those who want to pretend that racism is not an out-and-out big deal in the United States, as it always has been. We may have made progress, and we may have a black president, but the scourge is still with us. And if you needed Jimmy Carter to remind you of that, then you’ve been wandering around with your eyes closed.

Glenn Beck, one of the moronic maestros of right-wing radio and TV, assures us that President Obama “has a deep-seated hatred for white people.” Some years ago, as the watchdog group Media Matters for America points out on its Web site, Beck said he’d like to beat Representative Charles Rangel “to death with a shovel.”

--The Scourge Persists, Bob Herbert, New York Times
The conclusions stated on this blog are mine and mine alone. And there is no denying --except by idiots and/or bigots --that bigotry underlies much of the criticism that is leveled by the right wing fanatics inside the 'tea bagger' movement.
Another racist photo [seen above right] showing Obama as a witch doctor is making the rounds with Tea Party activists.

Republicans accuse Speaker Pelosi of inciting racism with her health care comments.

Democrats are unhappy with proposed tax in the Baucus health care bill.

Rep. Pelosi said:
I have concerns about some of the language that is being used because I saw this myself in the late '70s in San Francisco.

This kind of rhetoric was very frightening" and created a climate in which violence took place.

I wish that we would all, again, curb our enthusiasm in some of the statements that are made.

She said some of the people hearing the message "are not as balanced as the person making the statement might assume.

Our country is great because people can say what they think and they believe.

But I also think that they have to take responsibility for any incitement that they may cause.

--Nancy Pelosi, Statement
Mob scenes are now the GOP modus operandi. Paul Krugman asks: "What's behind it?" The answer to that is as clear and present as is the danger to the American republic and every freedom loving American: the leadership of the GOP, the GOP in Congress, the GOP at large:

Some commentators have tried to play down the mob aspect of these scenes, likening the campaign against health reform to the campaign against Social Security privatization back in 2005. But there’s no comparison. I’ve gone through many news reports from 2005, and while anti-privatization activists were sometimes raucous and rude, I can’t find any examples of congressmen shouted down, congressmen hanged in effigy, congressmen surrounded and followed by taunting crowds.

And I can’t find any counterpart to the death threats at least one congressman has received.

So this is something new and ugly. What’s behind it?

Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, has compared the scenes at health care town halls to the “Brooks Brothers riot” in 2000 — the demonstration that disrupted the vote count in Miami and arguably helped send George W. Bush to the White House. Portrayed at the time as local protesters, many of the rioters were actually G.O.P. staffers flown in from Washington.

--Paul Krugman, The Town Hall Mob
Like pre-war Nazis, the American GOP exploited the mob mentality most prominently in the so-called 'White Riot' --in fact and by law a treasonous 'coup d'etat' which stole the election for George W. Bush. In fairness to mere rank and file extremists, however, it is clear that in the year 2000, it was the GOP leadership that bussed to Florida a white-shirted, button-down mob of right wing radical extremists whose purpose and assignment was to disrupt the election process, to stop the vote count while Bush was still ahead.

Typically, Antonin Scalia would issue the absurdity of the decade: "Count first and rule upon legality afterward is not a recipe for producing election results that have the public acceptance democratic stability requires." Robert Novak was just as stupid but more succinct: "The democrats are trying to steal this election by counting votes!" 'Logic' of the same fallacious form was heard even earlier from Barbara Olson who said that Gary Condit was guilty of murder not because there was evidence against him but because there was none! That, she said, was proof he covered it up!

Just words
from an idiot

The 'recipe' is how every election had worked since the invention of Democracy in Ancient Greece. Voting and then counting the votes is how elections, indeed, Democracy itself, is done. Scalia is a not an intellectual. Scalia is a dumb-ass who has learned a 'trick'. The American west was peopled with itinerant 'snake oil salesmen' who had learned a few big words and how to impress the yokels with them.

GOP mob mentality was again in vogue when Sarah 'Wolf Murderer' Palin purposefully appealed to a 'base' which revealed itself to be most responsive to messages of hate and prejudice.

Democrats have a right NOT to be intimidated!

Certainly, the GOP has resorted to form --exploiting ugly mobs, encouraging them to disrupt legal democratic town hall meetings. I urge that legal town hall meetings be defended by arms and armor. Enough is enough. The Democrats have a right to meet and they have a right to defend themselves against felony violence. They have a right to oppose and defend against a gang of would-be felons!

Why do Republicans make such good l'il Nazis?

The answer lies in research that shows how GOP-types are naturally inclined to conspiracies. That's why they would prefer you believe that conspiracies don't exist. Read Carl Jung and some of the more recent research surveyed in John Dean's book "Conservatives Without Consciences". Conservatives are 'authoritarian' types and tend to sort themselves into strong leaders (fuhrers) and eager, non-questioning followers (good l'il Nazis).

Liberals and progressives are often independent, creative, original. An 'ENTP' type is one of several types identified by the Jung Personality Test, similar to the Myers/Brigg test. ENTP, specifically, is described thus: "Inventor". Enthusiastic interest in everything and always sensitive to possibilities. Non-conformist and innovative."

This kind of personality does not make good, unquestioning follower-conspirators! This kind of person does NOT make a good LI'L NAZI. The GOP, by contrast, is over run by good li'l Nazis.


The 'tea bagger' movement is the 'enemy within', the anti-democratic, pro-fascist brownshirts who may have already destroyed the US ideal of a free and democratic republic --something that we have most certainly NOT seen since the rise of Ronald Reagan.

MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, however, came to Carter’s defense on Wednesday. “Jimmy Carter tells the truth about some, not all, but some of the rabid rage against President Obama,” Olbermann stated, “and is thus the recipient of the automatic blowback from those whose livelihoods depend on enabling the ragers to tell themselves it is not racism that they feel.”

In introducing the segment, Olbermann claimed that he could offer “at least 37″ cases that he believes “prove President Carter to be correct.” He also noted that Rush Limbaugh had attacked Carter’s statements by saying “Jimmy Carter is the nation‘s hemorrhoid” — and retorted, “”Well, I got to defer to him here, the nation‘s asshole would know about the nation‘s hemorrhoid.”

Some of Olbermann’s examples seem fairly indisputable, like a poster used at tea party demonstrations that depicts Obama as an Africa witch doctor, or Limbaugh’s claim that Obama has made it okay for black kids to beat up a white kid on a school bus.

--Olbermann: 37 racist incidents prove Carter is right
Already losers, a now desperate GOP has made a Faustian bargain with bigots. It is significant that the so-called GOP 'leadership' has yet to issue a tepid reproach, let alone a strongly worded condemnation of a movement that is 1) un-American 2) bigoted 3) made of liars to a person!

Until the GOP leadership steps forward and condemns the 'tea bagger movement', I remain confirmed that the 'tea bagger' movement is encouraged by the highest ranking members of the GOP embittered by the legion of failures chalked up by their party since the inauguration of Ronald Reagan.

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