Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Kill Hippie, Kill

...may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.
I despise people who go to the gutter on either the right or the left and hurl rocks at those in the center.
                                                                            -  Dwight D. Eisenhower


Are Democrats really  violent Nazi-esque Extremists?
The Corporate Republican “Sin to Win” philosophy has reached a nadir this summer.

The Republicans willingly allowed health insurance profiteers to lather them into such a frenzy of fear about becoming the new Soviet Union, that they grabbed up their lusty assault rifles and turned America  into Somalia instead.

The talking points argument coming out of the GOP airspace last month - that the LEFT is  violent, racist and bullying - is a new level of sycophantic mis-reality even for the post Bush GOP. As a line of reasoning it enjoys the same problem as many of their previous and failed versions of make-your-own reality that doomed the GOP: It won't play well in the long view with moderates who can read. The health insurance and services companies are almost certainly behind much of the town hall meeting anger. They don’t want either side to deliver an alternative to the current success of their Clinton-Bush era deregulated profiteering.

The only industry in American history that promises a more dangerous, corruption-driven meltdown for our economy than the banking industry of 2008, is the health care industry of 2009. So, by all means lets allow the extremists to prevent us from slowing a financial and health care disaster that we can already see approaching like four hundred Hurricane Katrinas.

Jesus Was a Door Gunner
We've seen several stories this month about Republican white churches continuing to pray for Obama to fail, or die, or, well whatever. The left has almost never approached the fever of hate-preaching, gun-totting, religious ranting that the right has decided to partake of. Smearing the left as violent is a classic and typical Rovian trick - falsely accusing the left of being as mean and un-Christian as the right. Right wing "Christians" won't even break with party loyalty long enough to pray for the health of the 30 million +/- Americans without any significant access to modern medical science.  They'd rather celebrate Jesus the healer's life by praying for Obama and the hippies to die.

.... Yes, Yes Jed, we know... all the liberal  hippie-girls,  gay people, dopers and college history professors are just chomping at the bit to go to Idaho and Arizona and start killing skin-heads with the piles of Ak-47s and monogrammed K-Bar knives they have behind the Grateful Dead posters in their basements....

The left was totally disenfranchised during the Cheney - Bush - Rove Presidency, yet the closest they came to gun waving, town hall outbursts was to create “The West Wing”, give Al Gore an Oscar and let a disgusting and banal film maker pretend to be their spokesman for a few years.

In their reaction to the Bush years, the left never came close to the level of nutty, armed, violence-espousing racist hate we  see every day from the right.  There is a simple reason for this – the moderate left would never allow it to continue.

Here’s an idea from the middle for the Great White Hopefuls: Instead of worrying that President Obama might not have been born in the United States, they might start to worry that their most visible members act like they weren’t born on planet Earth. You know, the same earth that Jesus walked on before they killed Him for healing the sick and comforting the destitute.

Teach a Man to Fish  Shoot
The new American right hasn’t accepted a moderate voice into their big bloodstained tent since Dwight Eisenhower.  Until they change that trend, they will remain the ones who stay behind. The right uses assault rifles the way the left uses bumper stickers - and then they act like it's the same form of "loyal opposition".

The left is visibly represented by comedians while the right is joyously represented by armed violence-espousing militants.  There really is a difference kids. This summer the Republican base crossed a threshold between loyal opposition and agency of provocation.

Torch and pitchfork lynch-mobbery might keep the GOP's new illiterati from ever watching a news show that is made by an American owned media company again, but it will never earn this new party of faithless complainers a congressional majority or a Presidency either.

The only people who buy into the new extremist right’s kill-em-all-and-let-Jesus-sort-em-out fervor are the ones already on board the crazy train. (And, certainly not Bush's Homeland Security Republicans who first penned that controversial warning about violent right wing extremism becoming the next Al Qaeda level threat for the United States.)

Accusing the left of orchestrating this new wave of town hall anger is about as logical as blaming Spielberg for Auschwitz. But if being dumbed down, sexed-up and armed to the teeth is all the GOP has to cling to, by all means get it out of the system now. Because in 2016 the GOP’s entire existence will hinge on an ability to get people like your humble (Ex) Cowboy - a western born, christian minded, college-educated, moderate - back to a voting inclination anywhere near the extremist war dance of doom and hate you now call worthy moral leadership.

Thanks for putting up with me,

Ride For the High Country

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