Demented

So the television is on this morning. One of those cop dramas, and the case is about a bigoted asshole who shot and killed a black man because he was pissed that a black guy took a taxi he considered "his." Turns out, of course, the guy has a history of racism, like writing letters to his co-op board opposing interracial couples and accusing a black co-worker of stealing his clients. The prosecutors charged him with a hate crime. His defense? Bigotry is a mental disorder.

It is. But it's not one you're born with, or one that just has a later onset. It's a learned behavior. But at any moment you can step out and start unlearning it. Or, you can keep teaching yourself bullshit, and teach it to your children too. That'll make it much harder for them to get along when they get older. Kinda like those assholes in New Jersey who named their children JoyceLynn Aryan Nation, Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie and Adoph Hitler.

I'm just sayin. Plenty of people are obviously batshit insane, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be held accountable for their actions.

Like Fox "News," for example, and a whole bunch of newspapers. They showed you plenty of images from Wednesday's teabaggeries. Images like this one. Now, there's much we can say about the sign behind the taxes sign -- "silent majority no more." Things like, you've never been silent, and you aren't a majority, but we'll let them have that little delusion. Tea-ed off about taxes, that's kinda delusional too, because these same folks want a return to the Reagan years, when taxes were 10 points higher than they will be under Obama's budget. But hey, we can't all have brains and actually use them.

But that was the stated purpose of Wednesday's protests. Unless you were actually there. Then, as CNN's Susan Roesgen correctly pointed out, "This is a party for Obama bashers." She asked a guy holding a sign picturing the president as Hitler why he did so, and his response was "He's a fascist." Several times she tried to ask him why he said that, and his response each time was "Because he is."

That's kinda 8-year-old logic. Because I say so. I'm king a da world! And an asshole. Because you're not 8 years old. You're a grown man.

And that brings us to the images the right-wing media and their blind followers don't want you to see, because they want you to think they're a legitimate group of Americans just complaining about high taxes -- and we won't even go into how America has the lowest tax rate of any developed nation or that what the organizers of the teabaggeries are insterested in is not help for the average American taxpayer, who is getting a tax cut this year courtesy the president, but rather for their rich-ass selves. Go figure.

Nope, they don't want you to see the prevailing attitude at the teabaggeries -- the attitude fueled by the bloviators on the radio and tube. They would prefer that you not see images like this one.

Man, they got pissed off when idiots on the left compared GW to Hitler. Or called him a fascist. Or a torturer -- and we all know how that turned out.

But nobody at the teabaggeries said word one to guys like this one. Pity the photog didn't get his face. I'd like to splash it all over so anyone who runs into him would know what a dick he actually is.

And just like the McCain-Palin rallies during last year's campaign, the anti-Obama folks like to lie and say it's just a small part, that they're not all complete jackasses.

That much is true. They're not all complete jackasses. But most are on the scale somewhere.

Here we see Obama portrayed as some kind of maniacal street thug attacking Uncle Sam from behind. I think the text says "we must resist." How about resisting hyperbole? Somebody hit the panic button and these guys went totally berserk. It doesn't help, of course, that their heroes on the airwaves are telling them this shit.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm not advocating that we take 'em off the air. Just that we be more honest about what's going on. It's really hard to have a radio show that keeps its audience by having a rational, intelligent discussion of the issues, a true debate about one approach versus another. Much easier just to say "SOCIALIST!!!!!!" and wait and see what happens.

I mentioned children earlier. Here we return to the Obama as monkey theme that featured so prominently during the campaign, this time with a child.

They like to use children -- and, interestingly, complain bitterly if the left does so. But it's really quite clear that everything is fair game if you're a conservative or Republican.

It's as if they think they own the market on children, that children on the left don't matter, I suppose, because they're parents are so incredibly wrong and perhaps gay on top of that.

Which reminds me ... remember the right wing extremist report from Homeland Security this week? And how the right got all crazy about it -- as if it were talking to them specifically? Apparently, it was, and they're not afraid at all to admit it. But get what Christian extremist Pat Robertson said? Here's a hint -- remember that he thinks gay men and lesbians are responsible for hurricanes.

Give up? Aw, try again. It's not that hard. I mean, it's not like the Bush administration ordered the report ... oh, yeah, they did. Well, it was prepared by Obama's people ... oh right, the department that prepared is headed by a Bush appointee.

OK, here's what Pat said:

It shows somebody down in the bowels of that organization is either a convinced left winger or somebody whose sexual orientation is somewhat in question.

Only a fucking queer would ever question the patriotism of somebody who advocates the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. Jeez. What was I thinking.

I might have been thinking that people had a little more sense than that. I'd have been wrong, of course. After all, we're talking about folks who don't accept certified copies of birth certificates as certified copies of birth certificates. Not to mention the idea of impeaching a president after two months in office for doing pretty much what he was elected to do.

It's that whole "taxation without representation" thing again. See, these lunatics like to try to link themselves with the colonists who dumped tea into Boston Harbor. Colonists who had no representation in London. Seems I remember having an election not to long ago in which we chose 435 members of the House of Representatives, several senators, and, oh, yeah, a president.

Are these folks sore losers or what?

Remember when they called Al Gore and Joe "I really am a traitor" Lieberman "Sore Loserman" for taking the 2000 election to court after they won and had the election stolen?

This time we have Norm Coleman still fighting to keep Al Frank from being Democrat No. 59 nearly six months after the vote -- Minnesotans are rightfully getting pissed -- and in New York, the special election for Kirsten Gillibrand's seat is being held up while Republican Jim Tedisco challenges his loss to Democrat Scott Murphy. This week, despite trailing by several hundred votes, Tedisco petitioned the court to declare him the winner.

And then there's the threat of violence. Rick "Gov. Hairdo" Perry of Texas joined traitor Chuck Norris in talking openly about the Lone Star State seceding from the Union. That didn't go over so well last time, as I recall. I wasn't there, but I have read rather extensively about it. The teabaggers seem to be very confused about what constitutes treason too.

But there's that airwaves thing again. When the leaders of your party are media celebrities who command big paychecks as well as your attention, the black guy at party HQ means very little. As does IQ, apparently.

American history, of course, isn't the only thing the teabaggers have trouble with. There's that little thing they keep talking about -- socialism.

By their definition, just about any government program is socialist, including -- especially including -- the military. But given the right's propensity for hired mercenaries, maybe they'd like to open the military to a free market system too. And they'd probably take no-bid contracts on it, which means the taxpayer would be paying wayyyyyy more for the hired hands than what we pay now.

We already know what they think about that other great socialist program -- public education. And the very idea that all Americans have equal access to affordable health care, well, that's just anti-American.

I don't know of Marx would be proud, but I bet he's laughing his ass off.

So, they don't know much about history, systems of economics or government, official documents or the law, and they have no problems displaying their ignorance and bigotry.

Talk about embarrassing. Sheesh. Then there's that little problem of our president's name. It's Barack Hussein Obama. Personally, I love it that we have a black president with a funny name, if for no other than to watch the right spin itself into a frenzy over the very idea of not having a president named John or Richard or Ronald or Herbert.

They do have a problem with this name, though. And we've already addressed the impeachment thing. Although these folk may think he should be impeached just because his name is similar to the guy who ordered other extremists to fly airplanes into buildings several years ago. A guy who, incidentally, is still at large despite our previous president's declaration that we would get him dead or alive.

Really, there's just so much wrong with this group. The good news, of course, is that they didn't quite draw the millions Fox "News" tells us they drew -- that's a lie. Five Thirty-eight compiled as many non-partisan estimates of crowd size for the rallies as it could, and came up with a total of 300,000 in about 350 cities across the country -- although I have some doubts about the non-partisanship of the estimate where I live. Regardless, that's a pathetic turnout. Why, more people than that turned out just in Washington for Obama's inaugural.

But that's just it. These folks think they're right, and they think they're a majority, both of which are demonstrably wrong. The truth is that they can't stand it that they are truly and clearly in the minority -- and it's a shrinking minority.

Must be horribly frightening for them. But it doesn't excuse their irrational behavior.

That behavior may be the most pathetic thing of all, But it's par for the course from bigoted extremists, who, while 100 percent responsible for their 0wn actions, are nevertheless quite demented.


News Writer
AWOP Political Contributing Editor
Author of Stop the Press!

Cross-posted at Stop the Press!

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Tolerance is alive and well in Utah's GOP

Y'all welcome our newest contributor at AWOP, Mark Bruno of Left Of Center. We will be featuring his posts on a regular basis and we hope you will enjoy his work as much as we do! You can visit mark at Left Of Center anytime by following his link in our Contributor section of the sidebar.

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Tolerance is alive and well in Utah's GOP

So, last Tuesday, Utah Senate Democrats called for the ouster of a GOP lawmaker from two additional key committee posts because of his anti-gay comments. In recent comments to a documentary filmmaker, state Sen. Chris Buttars compared gay activists to radical Muslims and said they are "probably the greatest threat to America going down." He also said gay people lack morals. Here's a clip:



OK, here's my question: How many times do you have to be dropped on your head as a child before you are qualified to become a Republican legislator in Utah?

Apparently, Buttars has been reprimanded by his state party. The GOP out there in the Beehive State has decided not that Sen. Buttars is wrong in thinking that gays are the most significant threat to the United States -- far worse than armed terrorists -- but that he didn’t raise his hand and take his turn while speaking. No, it isn’t because they disagree with Buttars. The Utah GOP evidently had an agreement with this numbskull that he’d keep his trap shut unless he got permission, especially when it comes to gays. From the Salt Lake Tribune:

Senate leaders disciplined Sen. Chris Buttars, R-West Jordan, not for anti-gay comments he made in a recent interview, but because he violated a deal with leadership that he not talk about gay issues, a senator said Saturday.

“Most of what Senator Buttars said, I agree with,” Sen. Howard Stephenson, R-Draper, said in a weekly Red Meat Radio program he hosts on K-TALK. “We as a Senate caucus had an agreement that because Sen. Buttars had become such a lightning rod on this issue, he would not be the spokesman on this issue, and basically he violated that agreement.”

Buttars was under fire for statements he made to a documentary filmmaker in which he compared homosexuals to radical Muslims, called them the greatest internal threat to America and said they had no morals.

Senate President Michael Waddoups, R-Taylorsville, announced Friday that he was removing Buttars from two committees: the Senate Judiciary, Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Committee and the Senate Judicial Confirmation Committee, both of which Buttars had chaired.

In making the announcement, Waddoups said he was trying to ensure the Senate runs smoothly, but also noted that “we agree with many of the things he said. … We stand four-square behind his right [to say what he wants].”

At no time did Waddoups mention that Buttars had actually been told he could not speak on gay and lesbian issues. But it was the breach of that directive that led to the reprimand, according to Stephenson.

Of course, we know the real reason why they don’t want to let him speak -- because when he does he comes off as a complete whack job, and as a committee chair Buttars then makes the Republicans look, well, exactly what they are in Utah, a party of whack jobs.

Needless to say, Sen. Buttars is a sad, hateful little man who dishonors his office, his constituents and his status as an American citizen. The last time I checked, Sen. Buttars, gays are Americans, too. And get this, some even serve in the military and defend the right of homophobes and bigots like you to speak freely. You were rightly censured and lost your committee seat for spreading your message of hate. You should also have become unemployed. Your words were nothing more than prejudiced, ignorant bigotry. You and your ilk are truly pathetic, un-American and slowly fading into a shameful footnote in American civil rights history.

Regardless of how people feel about homosexualilty, gays, lesbians, bisexuals and the transgendered deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.

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