This is not about immigration or economics or how the Supreme Court ruined our elections, although they have. This is about the way an abhorrent group of undisciplined, uneducated, lazy, foolish citizens could ruin this country. It has happened before. A few vicious and cruel people in 1789 turned a deserved revolution into an undeserved massacre and tortured an entire country. They paved the way for the greatest dictator Europe had ever known, restored a monarchy and set Democracy back a hundred years.
But by the 21st Century, in this land of the free and brave, we thought we had changed all that. We thought that the America that had set slaves free, ended segregation and passed civil rights had finally entered an era when racism could no longer capture the emotions of weak and mean-spirited people.
Unfortunately, life has not changed. We are not the people we thought we were when we voted for a brilliant, scholarly, equitable African-American man for President. It turns out that we have a very large percentage of residual racists.
Racists are aware that they are racists and that this is not a good thing to be. It is anti-Christian and anti-American. So they couch their racism in other terms. They are simply frustrated citizens, they say, or disappointed with government. (As well they should be if they were talking about the Bush Administration.)
Of course it is not true. They are not people disturbed by circumstance. They are not anti-government. Ant they are absolutely, positively not anti-Republican. They are Republicans, almost all of them. They are Neocons, Neoconservative Republican racists. These are the people that Ronald Reagan brought with him to Conservatism from the old segregationist, Dixiecrat wing of the Democratic Party.
They are the hick families who grew up in the civil rights era and lost. These are the followers of Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, Dick Shelby, Jeff Sessions, Trent Lott and Jim DeMint. These are the people who love to hate. They are the sons and daughters of Dixiecrats, and Confederate traitors, secessionists, who hate this country and all it stands for and still long for the days of Robert E. Lee and his slaves and Jefferson Davis and his slaves.
These are not “good, hard-working decent American families.” These are gun-toting, hick moron racists who have only proved how worthless they are as human beings with their signs and their two-bit threats and idiotic, childish slogans scrawled on cardboard like elementary school children. What should we expect from people whose colleges pass them out from the same courses as their beloved illiterate football and basketball players? These are people who cannot even read or write or pass the simplest of curricula invented merely to let them graduate. And yes, it is the NCAA’s fault too, but more on that later.
These belligerent fools are ruining our society. They are not “Independents” or “Undecided” voters. These are really stupid people. These people are supporting a Neoconservative Republican Party that votes against every single piece of legislation that can help them. They vote for Senators who are owned lock stock and barrel by huge corporations. These Senators have so little respect for their voters—they think them even dumber than the rest of us do—that they make no bones about being more beholden to corporations, like the health insurance industry, than they are to the people who vote for them!
These Senators know the code words that tell the bigots that they too are bigots. And then they vote against jobs and the hicks sit like hounds with their tongues out and shake their heads up and down. It’s a joke. The rest of us are laughing at them. They listen to Rush Limbaugh give them one little kernel of truth and a whole bushel basket of lies, and they swallow it whole. They are too dumb and too lazy to figure out that Limbaugh doesn’t sell enough advertising on his radio show to generate $40 million a year, let alone get paid $40 million, which he does. He gets paid to keep the hicks nodding their heads up and down, up and down, like lap dogs.
Glenn Beck has the little lap dogs shaking their heads up and down too. While 60 national advertisers, from Nabisco to God-knows-who…Federal Express (a conservative company) canceled his show! They canceled because the guy is a liar and he’s nuts. So you have a lot of the hicks tuning in from some other reality show, maybe Donald Trump, to Beck and he simply goes off the rails…no truth… not even any rationality—and the hicks nod up and down, up and down. Because they know that deep down, and by what he says and how he says it…he’s a bigot. He hates Obama as much as any White Supremacist!
What do the hicks want to hear?
“I won’t let them take your guns away.” That is, of course, meaningless. No one is going to take anyone’s guns away, except for people like David Koresh, who not only caused the deaths of everyone for whom he was responsible, including innocent women and children, but also killed several DEA members who were investigating him for owning large stashes of weapons after threatening people with weapons and having killed someone with a weapon. Gosh, how could we have been so determined to persecute this guy? Why couldn’t we have simply left him alone, ignored the many citizens who were terrified of him and let him kill a few more before he concocted the standoff that killed everyone who foolishly stayed with him.
Unless you’re a guy like Koresh or a guy like Randy Weaver…someone with a criminal mentality, no on is going to take your guns away. What do we mean by “criminal mentality?” It is what cops look for. A guy who not only does not think the laws obtain for him, but acts as if they do not. He shoots at people or arbitrarily do what some of us do voluntarily as a sport…beat people up. (Or get beaten up.) These guys simply hurt people with violence or with theft of property or service or simply feel that they should be allowed to do whatever they want, regardless of what society says is legal.
If people were going to take your guns away, they would have done it before hundreds of people were murdered in Chicago or Houston or Los Angeles, by handguns, every year. Guns are finally being used properly, however. In Chicago it has not gone unnoticed by some that almost every incident involving a handgun pulled on a policemen does not result in the man going to jail….but to the morgue.
The National Rifle Association is a huge organization with big support from the Republicans in the Senate is very popular with gangs, white supremacists, drug dealers, criminals, murderers, burglars, and robbers. After all where would criminals be without guns to defend themselves against the police? In addition, from what we see on television, the NRA and guns are popular among the attendees at tea party and Neocon Republican rallies. John Boehner and Sara Palin and Rush Limbaugh all believe you should carry guns, not to shoot someone, but to shoot someone if you can get away with it.
So about what else do the hicks want answers? How about this:
A common rant is: “I am losing my freedom.” It is very hard to know how the average guy who goes to work every day, makes his money, pays his taxes, goes to the PTA meetings and sits too long on the freeways is actually losing his freedom. We have more freedom here than anywhere else in the world.
But people do lose their freedom. Prisoners…i.e. convicted criminals, like Neocon Representative Randy “Duke” Cunningham of California who defrauded the government, let his constituents down and disgraced the Congressional Medal of Honor lost his freedom. But the people who stupidly voted for him are still free.
Jack Abramoff, who cheated Native American tribes out of something like $66 million by pretending to help them with Congress then actually laundering some of their money through Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist’s organizations…a convicted felon…lost his freedom. Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist still have their freedom…plus the millions and millions that Abramoff gave them.
Some of the brave American boys who went to war in Iraq, a war we were all lied into by Bush, Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, lost their freedom for a while. Then they were beheaded and lost their lives. But I don’t notice any Southern White Crackers, the guys who love war movies…just the movies, not the real thing…losing their freedom.
No one takes away their freedom unless they get drunk and their gun goes off accidentally in a crowd. It often does with these faux soldiers who have never seen a rifle range or felt the discipline of what happens to you when you somehow neglect to “clear” your weapon or even know what that means.
What about the tea party idiots, morons, imbeciles shouting that they are losing their freedom? Should such insignificant people even have freedom, people who make no contribution to society except as consumers of fatty foods, television sitcoms, beer and dog food?
Why don’t we ask Dick Cheney about who should have freedom? He thinks that if we were attacked by blond or red Headed Muslims, then we should profile every redhead redneck, restrict their movements, have the right to invade their homes, have the authority to tap their phones, take them out of airport queues to interrogate them and lock them up in Guantanamo or some foreign prison where they could be tortured without writ of habeas corpus. Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo are going to tell you to shut the “F” up about your freedom.
What about this, expressed many ways on many a sign?
“Our President is a totalitarian dictator.” That doesn’t seem to be true. After all, he is the elected President of a capitalist democratic republic with a minority Republican Senate that votes against every progressive measure his Democratic congress proposes. Over 116 bills have been prevented from passage and over 70 major pieces of legislation for jobs, for infrastructure improvement, for wind and solar energy, for jobs, and even for extending unemployment for people who really need it, have been tabled by the Neocon Republicans. That doesn’t seem like a very strong Dictator.
Hundreds of needed executive jobs have been held up by the Senate on technicalities, keeping government departments, Interior, Energy, HHS, and the Defense department from functioning. If the President can’t get bills passed, can’t get his executives into their positions to run the departments and can’t get judges approved, how is that being a dictator again? Of course he did hold a live, nationally televised meeting with Republicans at which point they had the opportunity, after voting no on every single piece of the health care legislation, to make their suggestions directly to the public. But they didn’t.
They merely went over repeatedly what was either already in the bill or what had already been rejected over and over. Let’s take tort reform. This is the idea that doctors who kill patients because of negligence should get off basically with a fine of $250,000. Only about .5% of health care costs have anything to do with tort reform. And in those states where the caps of $250,000 have been legislated, medical liability insurance costs have not gone down. So, since it hurts citizens and does not help the good doctors, it was rejected.
The only comment other than that was “let’s start over.” A little late to suggest starting over. All they had to do was promise, in, say, June of 2009, a year earlier, that they would get involved realistically. The reason they didn’t—let’s face it—was that the Republicans promised the health insurance industry that they would once again defeat universal health care for the people in return for $500 million. They didn’t.
“We’re becoming a Socialist/Communist country.” Actually we’re not. We’re probably the farthest thing from a Socialist country there is right now. Pure Socialism (or Communism) would be a state in which there was no private property. Well, of course, we all know that many Americans have a great deal of private property. We learned that Presidential Candidate John McCain and his wife own 9 separate homes. Barbra Streisand was said to own 9 homes. Donald Trump owns all kinds of property including a home in Florida the size of an airport terminal. Bill Gates is worth about $40 billion; so is Howard Buffett. They don’t think we’re Socialist. We know, because he told us, that Buffett voted for Barack Obama.
Not only do tens of millions of people own their own home and another home, but unfortunately about 3 million people will lose their homes this year, lose some of their private property, because of the Bush Recession. Many have already lost their property and 15 million or so are without jobs. While that was happening, bankers on Wall Street were making billions in bonuses. That’s pretty capitalistic. How about this: the top 1% of all Americans own 42% of all the wealth and the top 20% of All Americans own a full 92% of all the wealth. That seems pretty Capitalistic.
You know, if you owned a big hunk of America…about 60% of all corporate stock is owned by those in the top 1% of wealth…you might not want income redistribution either. Once your tax rates were running at a net rate of about 23%, i.e., you could keep $770,000 out of every million…why would you want income distribution. George Bush kept cutting those taxes on the rich and that is what keeps shifting the wealth to those people in the top 1%. Not exactly a country with no property and everyone in the same income bracket, is it?
I guess the one question that all the Neocons want to know is: why do we have to have a black President? And there really isn’t a good answer to that. About 54% of us voted for Barack Obama because he seemed and seems like a good man and a good President. Of course he’s only half African. But his skin color is brown, so apparently that means something to people who only care about what people look like. So that is a question that must go unanswered for now.
In the meantime, we can hope that the racists will begin to worry about that big percentage of the riches of the richest country in the world (for a while still) that is going to that top 1%. As long as the Neocons have any power at all, that will only get bigger and bigger. And the more the hicks march and the more signs they carry and the less they read and understand what is actually going on…the worse the Neocon Republicans will make the country and the lives of those brain-dead tea party protestors.