Recommended by a friend, here's a piece by Roger Ebert who writes about the extremist fringe who lives in an alternate reality of paranoia, racism, and hate. What the hell is wrong with people who are more concerned with their perceived constitutional right to carry a loaded assault weapon to a Presidential speech than about almost 45,000 people dying each year due to lack of access to health care?
As Desperado wrote about earlier this week, the paranoid rhetoric has reached a level that many, including me, fear violence over fake issues that have been whipped up by eliminationist rhetoric that is now freely used by mainstream Republican leaders and talking heads. He described a piece on Newsmax, a very popular and oft-quoted website that is well know for peddling much of the hate speech that now permeates the right. This particular piece, now taken down, discussed the real possibility of a military coup to "resolve the Obama problem." You can read the full text of the redacted article here.
Republican leadership needs to speak out loudly and now to distance themselves from this kind of Nazi-like propaganda and hate mongering. Lindsey Graham, finally, has begun doing that. This week, speaking at an event at Washington's Newseum, he said that it is time for Republicans to say to birthers, "Knock this crap off." It's refreshing. Have a look:
As even Graham is now saying, responsible adults on the right need to stand up and call crap crap. They need to tell the nuts and hate mongers like Beck, Bachmann, Limbaugh, Savage, Malkin, Palin and the others to sit down and shut up. I'm not holding my breath, though. There's too much money in the performance art, and political stakes too high for them to think about America or their fellow citizens.
As Desperado wrote about earlier this week, the paranoid rhetoric has reached a level that many, including me, fear violence over fake issues that have been whipped up by eliminationist rhetoric that is now freely used by mainstream Republican leaders and talking heads. He described a piece on Newsmax, a very popular and oft-quoted website that is well know for peddling much of the hate speech that now permeates the right. This particular piece, now taken down, discussed the real possibility of a military coup to "resolve the Obama problem." You can read the full text of the redacted article here.
Republican leadership needs to speak out loudly and now to distance themselves from this kind of Nazi-like propaganda and hate mongering. Lindsey Graham, finally, has begun doing that. This week, speaking at an event at Washington's Newseum, he said that it is time for Republicans to say to birthers, "Knock this crap off." It's refreshing. Have a look:
As even Graham is now saying, responsible adults on the right need to stand up and call crap crap. They need to tell the nuts and hate mongers like Beck, Bachmann, Limbaugh, Savage, Malkin, Palin and the others to sit down and shut up. I'm not holding my breath, though. There's too much money in the performance art, and political stakes too high for them to think about America or their fellow citizens.
Just think about the recent Facebook page containing a poll as to whether President Obama should be assassinated.
There is truly evil sentiment growing out there in nutjob land.
The problem is not that there is hateful rhetoric. There has always been hateful rhetoric. The John Birch society has been around for decades. The problem is that the hateful rhetoric is now profitable. I've told my wife many times that I could come up with something so outrageous that only one percent of the public may buy into it. If I can get that one percent to buy that book we can both retire from our jobs and live very comfortably. If I expand that number to ten percent then I build myself a hefty empire. This is despite the fact that 9 out of 10 people not only would think I'm wrong, but need to be put in a padded room. In order to stop it you must remove the profit potential.
Welcome back, my friend!
It is simply shocking and bizarre. It is nothing short of treason in my opinion.
thanks for the thought delezzia, what happened to your mom is an outrage, but sadly common. my son was diagnosed at age 7 with a rare blood disorder called ataxia-telengiectasia (AT) at texas childrens in 1991, after repeated bouts of antibiotic resistant pneumonia. this disorder is so rare, less than 500 in the world have been diagnosed, and few live past the teens. it also carries a 75% predisposition to lymphoma so oddly i was prepared for the cancer, which has occurred now twice. he maxed out on his dad's private insurance at 1million by age 10 and qualified for child medicaid under the chronically ill/disabled (CDC) texas program. but nothing could have prepared me for medicaid to drop him 30 days after his 18th birthday, in the middle of his first chemo at md anderson! his caseworker had informed me that between 18 & 19yrs i would file the SSI claim which would be "presumptive", meaning no interruption of coverage. something happened at the state level with perry's bootstrap program and i was told to start "spending down" resources. so i sold my home, moved into an apt, drained ALL of my resources to make under $14,400 per year and began the nightmare process of being bounced between the madness of slick rick and king george. i filed the claim in 2004 and after the obligatory denial, denial of reconsideration and appeal, i was able to obtain the disability attorney and file for hearing , what a racket! thank god md anderson has a charity program for pediatrics which kept the GI treatments up, got us to the remission and started the next treatment in brain & spine when the remission ran out. i admit i am a worn out, possibly bitter and often bewildered caregiver and patient advocate. but even some doctors at md anderson bristled at the medicaid, in 2005 one even suggested palliative care, refused further diagnostic testing due to "limited resources" and told me we should "stay the course"! he was promptly replaced with another md who assured me the charity care was for people like my son, also informing me that the NIH had a grant for AT research at mdacc and they rec'd additional compensation for treatment. i've sat in waiting rooms listening to "business specialists" tell patients the insurance denies this or that test, treatment, medicine, etc. while people openly weep and tremble. if i was not also taking care of my dad i would pack my kids up and get to a compassionate state. but i can't and also only 2 other places treat AT, ucla berkley & hopkins, both places with very high cost of living. so like the guy in the movie, i'm mad as hell and not taking it anymore! ps they can shove tort reform, the SSI attorney rec'd $16,000 of your taxpayer money while my son nearly died. he could and should have been put on medicaid, but texas ties it to federal SSI to keep sick people off. so the 10th amendment is being used as a death sentence. the congressman said it just right, their answer is DIE!
Tragic, I feel for you. My mother is a RN, worked thirty years caring for others and fell on the job and knocked her hip and back out. Numerous surgeries and ten years later, still trying to receive what is rightly hers and hard earned. Fighting for SS benefits is not easy nor is anything but a freebie for lazy freeloaders or whatever others want to call them. As far as flu shots, healthcare workers who refuse to get them are just ignorant and putting the people they are supposed to care for in harm's way. Fire them I guess since they have no professional and ethical standards. As for the these so called Christians, I have yet to meet one yet who truly practices what they preach. Most are hypocrites and others are ignorant fools who spead lies and hate. They've always been there, just now they feel empowered by the right wing talking heads to come out of their holes and babble and blame liberals, Obama, illegals, gays... fill in the blank .... sick of them all. TX is full of them. I didn't seem to notice so much when I lived up North... nothing against the south but just sayin...
ashamed to admit i just posted on the chron tin foil hat page about the immigrants getting the flu shot, couldn't help myself. i told one particularly bad speller that in answer to his question of "who pays?" that we all pay when schools spread flu, parents get sick & miss work with no sick time benefits, businesses suffer and commerce can be crippled due to public health outbreaks. oh and i offered him a history lesson about saint reagan and his blanket amnesty, so walmart could openly hire/exploit janitors to clean their floors at night. they did this cleverly through subcontract services and subsidiaries created especially to take advantage of immigrants. as a parting shot i told him to watch out for "patriot" nurses who refuse to have the gummit tell them to get the vaccine, and will soon be coughing the flu on us all! ps a few days ago i could not stop myself from the "entitlement" thread either. i told a flamer that i make no apologies for my son getting that big $112 food allotment each month, or the fact he qualifies and receives that huge $674 per month on SSI. i've worked and paid taxes to support safety net programs (what they are, not entitlements as the gop calls them) since i was 14. i also had to "spend down" and exhaust all my resources including my savings to save my child's life to qualify him for these so called "entitlements". so he is ENTITLED and they can all bite me! now i think i'll go and make some of that free govt mac & cheese i just bought on your dime lol.
I read that one too. It amazes me the complete inability some people have to stop for a moment and consider what it would be like to be in someone else's shoes. A friend and I were discussing this last night and she made the same point you just did about how the people that are the fastest to tell you about what a good christian they are are also the first ones to act like they are anything but.
On a similar subject about "freebies" and "give-aways", there is a letter to the editor in today's chronicle...something to the effect of "food stamps are not a constitutional right".
I demand to know what the hell is wrong with these people that they don't seem to give a rat's ass if their fellow Americans are suffering? As long as they got theirs, they don't give a shit if their neighbors are dying, from lack of health care, from lack of food, from lack of caring.
Where is their soul? Where is their compassion?
The sad part is you KNOW most of them have their asses firmly planted in church on Sundays and would bleat to the world that they are Christians.
I call BULLSHIT on them.
why does cnn allow lou dobbs to spew his birther crap? how can fox let beck keep advertising his hatefest 912 tea party when the 2010 flyer for tax "revolt" says roll obama in the mud where be belongs? can facebook really pretend they are not moving traffic that's hate-based treason? we've always had a fringe, but when corporate giants are openly ok with this, something has gone terribly wrong. last time i checked it is not first amendment protected free speech to yell "fire" in a crowded theater, yet fire is what's being yelled under the first amendment. and the mayhem might continue if this slippery slope is not addressed. i'm still waiting for mainstream media to spend as much time investigating the murdered census worker as they obsess with david letterman's sex life or jon gosslin's divorce. pathetic.
Speaking of racism and hate, I just finished reading a Chron article that encouraged the Hispanic community to get innoculated against the swine flu. Save for a handful of reasonable comments, the comment section was one long hate filled diatribe. It's astounding really. It was as if they thought they would be doing themselves a favor by having an at risk portion of the populace go unvaccinated. Like they can't catch the flu from an illegal immigrant? I don't think that even half of them actually read the article either. If there was one comment that said "freebie", "freeloader", "give-aways" and in some way stated that Hispanics were being given preferential treatment over whites, there were 100. The funny thing is, the article mentioned absolutely nothing about free shots. Nada, zip, zero. As close as they got was a community health center offering children (that's all children, not just the little Hispanic kids) a $10 shot instead of the normal $25 for 4 hours on one day. Given the level of hate I see over there day after day, it just makes me wonder, where the hell did it come from?