This movement by a small group of haters, led by Beck, Limbaugh and Hannity, could ultimately lead to violence because these people have lost their collective minds. Glenn Beck is clearly mentally ill. I don't care how many psychologists he pays to bring on his show. His level of paranoia is abnormal.I don't know how those folks can get up everyday and spew so much hate. Their insides must be rotting.
This week's New York magazine explores and nails the Obama haters, the ones that all the republicans deny. The crazies are a small, obnoxious and dangerous group of people. Bill Cosby and Jimmy Carter have it exactly right. The only way we're going to stop these folks is to denounce them at every opportunity, shame them, apply the peer pressure. Show their children that what their parents are doing is wrong. Republicans ought to be condemning the haters. But they won't do anything until an act of violence takes place. Obama can't stop them. But democrats should stand up and so should the rest of the sane population. Some excerpts (read in full):
This week's New York magazine explores and nails the Obama haters, the ones that all the republicans deny. The crazies are a small, obnoxious and dangerous group of people. Bill Cosby and Jimmy Carter have it exactly right. The only way we're going to stop these folks is to denounce them at every opportunity, shame them, apply the peer pressure. Show their children that what their parents are doing is wrong. Republicans ought to be condemning the haters. But they won't do anything until an act of violence takes place. Obama can't stop them. But democrats should stand up and so should the rest of the sane population. Some excerpts (read in full):
All around were satanic representations of President Barack Obama in whiteface, as a Nazi, an African witch doctor, a Marxist, a Muslim, and Che Guevara’s best friend—but Kathy Golya had never felt so good about the new administration as she did right now. It was a day after Representative Joe Wilson’s outburst in Congress, and the South Carolina congressman had given voice to Golya’s inner heart. He hadn’t just said it on the Internet, he had said it to the president himself.
No, it was not the appropriate place, Golya said, but still she glowed with the memory. “It was the first time in my life I felt good, since he got into office. Someone had called him a liar.”
A prim, slender homemaker in her fifties from northeastern Pennsylvania, Golya had come out to a tea party in Scranton with her friend Donna Biscontini to have solidarity with everyone else with strong criticisms of the president. Not really criticisms, actually, but feelings—anger, upset, a sense of dispossession. There had been a kind of revolution in the country with Obama’s election, the women felt. They talked about the president’s “czars.” One of the czars believed that animals should have lawyers to sue their owners. “Animals have more rights than people,” Biscontini said. Another was for forced sterilization. “Who’s that sound like? Hitler,” Golya said. The president was putting himself at a godly level, was her point; he was saying that man controls his destiny, not God. She saw that as arrogance. She mentioned that the president’s wife wore $600 shoes when she was helping the poor.
Golya, who was Kittykat on the Internet, saw her conflict with Obama as a battle of souls. She prayed for the president every day. “For his conversion.”
I asked her if she thought he was a secret Muslim. “Only he knows that; we don’t know that,” she said. “I’m praying for the conversion of his heart.”
....
When Rush Limbaugh talked about “two Americas,” he wasn’t wrong. The haters’ focus on Che Guevara, Saul Alinsky, and Bill Ayers was a kind of projection. They were radicals, and the sixties provided the readiest role models. They were determined to be the counter-counterculture, and they weren’t going away.
“It’s like if Che Guevara had written Profiles in Courage,” Cashill says, seizing on the left-wing revolutionary hero whose image crops up with surprising frequency on posters in the tea-party rallies. “If people had known before the election, 1960, not only had JFK not written Profiles in Courage but his old man bought him the Pulitzer Prize, that would have cost him the election.”
Then Cashill injected the race issue. He said he had been embarrassed to buy Obama’s book in the Detroit airport, but the black clerk had been gushing and thrilled. What did race have to do with authorship?
The Obama people at first thought that the birthers would simply go away or, maybe even better, lead the Republican Party into the light of truth, where the party would continue to shrivel. That didn’t happen.
....
This was the real concern raised by the haters. Violent fantasies, even cartoonish ones, as these seemed to be, have a way of turning real. Nancy Pelosi has likened the hateful rhetoric boiling up during the health-care debate to the anti-gay reaction that formed against the gay-rights movement in San Francisco in the seventies, culminating of course in the murder of mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk. Before John Kennedy was assassinated, right-wingers in Texas accused him of “treason.” Today’s Obama haters throw that word around more often than the left had thrown around Fascism. At an Obama town hall in New Hampshire, a man carried a gun along with a poster of a DON’T TREAD ON ME snake with the legend IT IS TIME TO WATER THE TREE OF LIBERTY, referring to the Thomas Jefferson quote about renewing the republic with blood.
Ed Hale was obviously a bullshitter, but he took it way too far. A minute after he said he’d never ever threaten anyone’s life, he said, “My biggest villain right now is Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. Those jackasses should be found guilty of treason, stood up against a wall, and shot.”
