Okaaaay….
Not long ago we heard of a man at a Democratic town hall meeting who carried a gun–but it turns out he had a permit and very cooperatively agreed to put the gun in his car instead of wearing it at the event. Okay.
But now, MSNBC has footage of a protester outside the president’s town hall event–a protester who not only is wearing a gun, but bears a sign saying that “It is time to water the tree of liberty,” the ending of that quote being, “with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” And these protesters have made it crystal clear that they consider Obama to be a tyrant.
Remember back in the Bush days when protesters were moved to secluded “free speech zones” miles from the events the president attended, and people who wore t-shirts or held signs that were even borderline critical of Bush were promptly arrested?
Now we have people with guns holding up signs that might as well say “Time to Kill Obama” and apparently they are only being “closely watched.”
Yeah, Obama’s Amerika is a thuggish tyranny, all right. Not like the freedom-and-liberty days of the Bush administration.
Seriously, I am fully expecting there to be a serious injury or death at some point soon. But rather than dialing back the rhetoric like McCain futilely tried to do during the election last year, the right-wing political figures are only pouring gasoline on the fire with more and more explosive, not to mention completely fictional rhetoric.
The mentality these people carry almost begs for something awful to happen. Personally, I think if Obama makes it eight years it will be a minor miracle.
The greatest fear of the right is a charismatic liberal. This goes back to Roosevelt the first great charismatic liberal of the modern era. The new deal was the greatest catastrophy to the uber-rich hard right. There recovery didn’t begin until Reagan. However, like in the 1920s, their policies have created widespread chaos and suffering. Back in the 1960s, it’s almost as if they gunned down charismatic liberals with regularity.
What I think is going on now is a sort of trial balloon and conitioning of the media and society for what I fear is the gunning down of someone important to come. There’s danger in all this for the right though. Death is one of the few things that penetrate Americans. Kennedy’s death resulted in a public reaction that gave Johnson a massive landslide in 1964 paving the way to the Great Society legislation. The quickest way to single payer universal public medicine is to make Obama, or perhaps even someone else, a martyr for the cause.
Fear of the reaction is the greatest restraint on an otherwise hate filledd, angry and violent right wing extremist wingnuts.