The Unreal America

“Thuggery is a left-wing tactic. We denounce it. We will not stand for it.” - Mark Williams

At least Hal Turner's got the guts to say to his intended victims, "I want you dead and I'm making no bones about it." When he wants you broken and bleeding, he doesn't mince words and doesn't back away from his threats. At least he has that much courage in his twisted convictions.

But Turner's the exception, not the rule. Most right wingers are craven asswipes who, like Turner, prefer to do things tribally. Sarah Palin, a largely unemployed hasbeen whose entire relevance derives from being able to stir up racist animosity, is such a case in point.

Palin's now saying that the "lame stream media" is lying about the innumerable instances of Tea Party violence that's been breaking out since the first hours after the health care reform bill passed. This is coming from someone whose own Facebook page marks 20 Democratic districts with crosshairs and has exhorted her minions to "reload."

Sure, the targeting terminology is usually part and parcel to politics but these aren't usual times. Instead, these are times that more than just the Chinese would find interesting, times that have seen gun nuts sent to Obama rallies by insane ministers who have openly wished death on the President. These are times in which addresses are being disseminated with the intention of inciting violence and victimizing, instead, relatives of Congressional reformists by cutting their propane lines.

These are times in which right wing bloggers firmly connected to the Tea Party movement have encouraged people to throw bricks through the windows of Democratic congressmen and we've seen it happen in at least five states. These are times in which congressmen and their children have been threatened with death.

These are times that have been wrenched back into the pre-Civil rights era in which African Americans weren't served at Woolworth lunch counters, had to use separate washrooms and water fountains, had to ride in the back of the bus, were lynched with impunity and openly called "nigger" while being denied the right to vote.

These are times in which congressional chairmen and longstanding members of Congress are called "faggot", further pushing us back into a pre-Stonewall age in which gay men were beaten to death with impunity, hadn't the right to marry within their gender and were targeted by police and politicians for harassment.

In other words, left wing thug tactics. We're the ones famous for throwing bricks through Democratic congressional offices, for vandalism, for threatening to murder children.

And a thinking person would be mindful of these things, to know that this lunatic fringe that has so captivated the mainstream media like a hundred boys in a hundred shiny balloons is quivering for the slightest sign to let slip the dogs of domestic war.

But Sarah Palin and asshole apologists like Andrew Breitbart and Mark Williams are not thinking, astute people who are willing to assume even a shred of fucking responsibility for using inflammatory words such as "targeting" and "reload" and crosshairs on maps of congressional districts.

In spite of a neverending stream of news stories of right wing thuggery that's been conclusively connected to Tea Baggers and the Republican Party, this is a left wing tactic, don't you know? It's the liberals who are targeting liberals and Democrats for giving them the health care reform they wanted.

And if it isn't us, well, it certainly isn't the Tea Party movement, either. That's the other America, ya betcha.

The problem with Mark Williams' asinine comment is the fact that right wingers like Palin do stand for mob tactics and prove it every time they try to deny these things are happening.

There's no commonly held definition for "stupid." There are no real, peer-reviewed scientific studies studying the origins and causes of stupidity. Not enough books have been written on the subject to fill even half a book shelf.

But if anyone's picture belongs next to the word "stupid" in a dictionary, it would have to be Sarah Palin's. Since she was named by John McCain in late August of 2008 to be his running mate, we've seen the resurgence of ugly, snarling pockets of racism, mobs great and small who choose not to learn anything from anyone or anywhere aside from Palin's Facebook page, Twitter tweets and Glenn Beck's hyperventilating on Fox.

Sarah Palin's fan base, these Teabaggers, are ongoing, vivid reminders of the willfully ignorant, those who revel in their stupidity and ignorance and prefer not to think outside carefully choreographed Two Minute Hates that have instead stretched to nearly a year.

Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck are so contemptuous of your own intelligence that they're telling you you can't trust your lying eyes and ears even when one congressman after another in one news item after another has told us of acts of violence, prejudice, and vandalism in an alarmingly short span of time.

The teabaggers, however emotionally invested they are in the health care debate, no matter how sincere their concerns, serve as an ominous reminder of the pogroms in Eastern Europe that ran roughshod over the Jewish communities, of the mass hysteria that can be whipped up into a bloodthirsty frenzy over nothing by irresponsible, hateful bigots. Bigots who are too cowardly to own up to violence they incite by using borderline, inflammatory rhetoric and visual cues who then try to claim the violence they incite is more characteristic of their political enemies. Bigots who are so craven and cowardly they sidestep from these acts of violence as if around dog shit dropped by someone else's dog and then enable more of the same by denying its very existence.

Such people are beneath contempt and yet Sarah Palin keeps coming back like a herpes sore to remind us of how vulnerable we still are and always will be to our own stupidity and prejudices.