Originally Posted by KaiserD2

The words "peace" and "love" were not much heard in many of the meetings I am remembering. "Smash the state," "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is going to win," and "Hey, Hey LBJ, How many kids did you kill today?" were generally the background noise.

... and now it is the Boomer Right that adopts the methods, if the opposite agenda (as long as one considers fascism the antithesis of Communism).

I have my snappy definition of fascism, in any event: Bolshevik methods and ruthlessness in the service of a reactionary agenda. I once saw some right-winger claim that he admired the methods of Leonid Brezhnev for getting and holding onto power. Brezhnev?

Power is as addictive as drugs, cancerweed, consumerism, alcohol, and sex. Those who lost it in 2006 and 2008 want it again, and they will do just about anything to get it again. Much of the 4T may be the struggle between the Boom/13th Right and everyone else (the Silent Right won't be around much longer). Should the Boom Right get a second chance it will almost surely dispense with all reality of democracy. There might still be iconic images of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Roosevelt (both of them), and even Kennedy -- but gutted, of course, of their liberalism. American government under the Boom Right, should it be given a second chance, will operate more like the government of the People's republic of China... which has iconic images of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao even if the Chinese "Communists" have abandoned Marxist socialism. Gutting those is benign; gutting Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, either Roosevelt, and Kennedy isn't.

Note well that the Silent Right is practically gone. John Warner retired in 2008; I question how long such people as McCain, Grassley, Alexander, Lugar, and Voinovich will be on the scene.

The antics of the Far Right suggest that this 4T is far from over. I can now imagine a benign end, one in which America has rejected the crude plutocracy of the Rove/Cheney/Bush era in favor of an economic order in which everyone has a chance, when people don't fear that they will have consigned their children to some combination of poverty and debt-bondage. I can also imagine things going quite badly after the Hard Right re-establishes itself and then tries to spread what it considers the "American Way of Life" into places in which it is unwelcome.

Originally Posted by AlexMnWi

Tampa Town Hall On Health Care Reform Disrupted By Violence

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/0..._n_253478.html



Wasn't there some intelligence report(s) some months ago that warned of increasing violence from the far-right?

Some Congressman was hung in effigy by protestors this week as well.

How long until someone starts shooting? Seriously? Why are we allowing this s**t?

The parallels that we have now with the late stages of Weimar Germany disturb me. Corporate America rose to the power of wealth and influence that rivaled what was seen during the Guilded age, but this time by de-indistrializiing America. Young people growing up today have no illusions that they are a part of some kind of mythical mass elite as was subtilly sold as reality as recently as the "Ownership society" propaganda tha tthe Bush campiagn used in 2004 as they rode to re-election on the power of the now collapsed housing bubble. But we are past the housing bubble and past Katrina now. Corporate America knows that it has lost the battle for the future that will come about through the democratic process as we know it. If a meaningful healthcare bill is passed the Republican party, their preferred vehicle for policy administration, is dead and they know it. There only hope is to use brownshirt type tactics to distort what should be a meaningful discussion on the future of our largest economic sector into what will eventually degenerate into physical attacks.

Originally Posted by writerGrrl

I don't think there's anything you can do about the protests.
The violence is freaking me out a little bit. Compared to many of the things Obama brought up, Health Care sounds very trivial.

The healthcare issue is the "real game" for one basic reason. That reason is trust. The Vietnam war taught my generation not to trust the government. This distrust eventually led to the age of Reagan who promised to "get the government off of people's backs." He and his allies then used this sentiment to, as Mikebert and others have shown in other posting here at the forum, systematically rewrite the tax code to favor great wealth. This process has led to a slow but steady loss of living standards by most Americans. And the dominant anti-government creed of the 3T prevented the use of governmental action as a serious policy choice. Yes, the cycle explains a lot of this. Simply put, when the two most individualist archtypes, the prophet and the nomad, occupy the midlife and young adult roles as they do during a 3T, then the outer world has to deteriorate to the point that these individualist generation have to understand en masse that collective change is the only way. Katrina got us there by ending the illusion that the individual really had the power to make all of the changes that they needed in their lives. The question now is will we use the constitutionally sanctioned processes to enact change or will we cower to fear the politics of barbarism.

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

How that will play is the question. Nixon used the protests to solidify power, but the religious right used it as a launching pad for social activism. Everyone on the right claimed to be speaking for the Silent Majority. This time, it seems the progressives are getting their voices and rising up against the right. That may prove to be more important than the Obama election.

I think so too, see above.

Originally Posted by KaiserD2

The Obama Administration and the Democratic Party are behind the curve here. They can easily (and need to) create some positive media events, some Marches for Health Care filled with young people. You simply can't count on rationality alone in a 4T.

Yes. The pro healthcare side will not win through fear. Fear divides, fear prevents constructive action. Fear creates a desire to strike out at "the other."
Fortunately, people do have higher level brain functions, that's what makes civilization possible. You can attract more bees with honey than with vinegar. The winger crowds and their corporate manipulators are of course out of reach, but most citizens aren't. We can have a 4T based on action to bring about a road to a sustainable tomorrow, or we can allow the worst impluses of the human id to drive us down a road to destruction.

But that road is being graded and asphalted soon. Our actions now will determine which way that road goes.

Originally Posted by pbrower2a

Not so long ago "Your Side" (meaning the Rove/Cheney/Bush Administration) established so-called "Free Speech Zones" wherever Dubya spoke. Protesters would be kept away from his speeches so that they couldn't call attention to the bungled War in Iraq. When "Free Speech" means the freedom to express the official line and nothing else except where it is beyond the attention of the media, freedom of speech no longer exists -- as in Iran, China, Cuba, Zimbabwe...

Who needs to disrupt GOP rallies? When the mainstream of a political party makes horses' derrieres out of themselves, nobody needs to disrupt its rallies.

I don't blame them, I've seen how your side acts and what your side often does in public. The cool thing is, the Democrats that I know don't like your liberal scuz buckets anymore than me.

Originally Posted by KaiserD2

A site, Conservatives for Patients' Rights, which is agitating against any health care reform (and which is run by a guy who used to run for-profit health clinics), actually has a page of various disrupted town hall meetings. I looked at a number of them yesterday. (You can see them at http://www.cprights.org/townhallvideos.php .)

Two things struck me. For one, the vast majority of the protesters are old. Among other things this means that they already depend on government-run health care, that is, Medicaid. They are filled with anger and hatred and utterly uninterested in any serious discussion. Don't take my word for it, following the link.

And all that reminded me of. . .meetings between students and university administrators forty years ago. Yup. The protesters, many from the same generation, had exactly the same certainty, rudeness, and totally destructive agenda.

The Obama Administration and the Democratic Party are behind the curve here. They can easily (and need to) create some positive media events, some Marches for Health Care filled with young people. You simply can't count on rationality alone in a 4T.

there is probably a reason why you have a sense of deja vu with the health care protesters. I heard on MPR today that they are reading and using methods from .... Saul Alinsky.

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

This is the photo-opposite of the anti-war protests in the late 60s and early 70s. I assume the results will be similar. When you scream, are disruptive, don't let others speak and even get violent, you merely anger those you wish to influence. The result is backlash.

How that will play is the question. Nixon used the protests to solidify power, but the religious right used it as a launching pad for social activism. Everyone on the right claimed to be speaking for the Silent Majority. This time, it seems the progressives are getting their voices and rising up against the right. That may prove to be more important than the Obama election.

The GOP is driving the center to the Left out of disgust. The average person in Middle America does not approve of assault and disruption.

Originally Posted by Odin

The GOP is driving the center to the Left out of disgust. The average person in Middle America does not approve of assault and disruption.

Obviously, you don't know middle America.

Originally Posted by K-I-A 67

Obviously, you don't know middle America.

I agree with you regarding moderate Boomers and maybe some Xers in middle America (but I believe Odin is generally right about Millie attitudes in middle America; I was previously indifferent to health care reform at this time but these protests make me want to support it just because of how these healthcare industry-sponsored mobs are treating the political process). I was driving to Home Depot with my dad earlier, about a 15 mile drive. He is a 1957 cohort, raised in a typical first-ring Minneapolis suburb, Marine vet (after Nam, before Reagan), socially moderate-to-liberal but fiscally very conservative. Big Reagan supporter back in the day; voted for Clinton in '92 due to spite over Bush I's broken tax pledge, otherwise not a Clinton supporter but hates Obama. But certainly not for race reasons. Anyway, during the drive I was griping about these protests and particularly the violence tinges I've been seeing (i.e. death threats and effigy hangings of duly-elected Congressmen) and how this behavior offends me as a legitimate voter. I did not say anything specific regarding the actual health care bill other than that I really didn't care about whether it passed or failed based on its own merits (again, I actually support it now, but not because of its content per se). His response surprised me. He said (paraphrased) that protests like this were patriotic, and that we have the 2nd Amendment so that if the political process fails and people (presumably the far right) are being "suppressed" by the government in power, that they can basically take to the streets if it gets bad enough. I told him that was insane, but that's when I knew for sure that this wasn't just a left-v-right thing, but a very generational thing. The fact that this issue of health care is very Boomer-centric means it is not at all surprising how this issue is becoming highly flammable.

Long story short, it seems many Boomers who are even rather moderate but are uncomfortable with the goverment's health care plan (due to previous let downs about government performance, which is understandable) are far from being repulsed by this type of behavior, but rather relatively supportive of this type of protests. Whereas moderate Millies seem to be quite annoyed by the protests.

Originally Posted by pbrower2a

...As a sober liberal, Barack Obama is of course the antithesis of fascism...

-Sure...

1) Fascism comes in all colors. Duh;

2) The original "very real, very American" Progressive movement was the original breeding ground for world-wide Fascism.

As for those using Sturm Abteilung tactics:

Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54

Hmm... Yes. The Tampa meeting should be noted as part the Spiral of Violence...

...there wasn't any violence at those town hall meetings until the Donkeys started busing in union thugs; the peaceful victims in St. Louis & Tampa seem to have all been Teabaggers, the perp's were BO supporters.

Thinking of Jonah Goldberg, this is pretty funny:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/08/08/americans_dont_like_dems_health_plan_97824.html

"Nancy Pelosi, who will get her own bound volume in the annals of asininity, has outdone herself...

...Not only is Pelosi lying when she says protesters are bringing swastikas to these town halls, not only is she suggesting that American citizens are Nazis for having the effrontery to get in the way of Obamacare, but she's also saying that the alleged swastikas are obvious proof that these protests are manufactured by slick P.R. gurus.

How does that work? What public-relations genius says: 'Okay, we need these protests to seem like an authentic backlash of real Americans. Make sure everyone has enough Nazi paraphernalia!'"

...and:

"...how can we ignore the fact that the world's most famous community organizer is whining about community organizing?"

Originally Posted by haymarket martyr

...You are a dying breed KIA. A dinosaur who keeps looking at the tarpits and wondering if that end will be better than the reality you live in.

...yet another subliminated desire for someone's untimely fate. Not really suitable for a so-called "Conscientious Objector". Hypocrisy! Oh well.

---
Back to Playwrite:

I'd still love to know: When PW was supposedly visiting SE Asia, did he bother to check out the "Anti-War" movement's handiwork in the re-education camps, and in the killing fields? The answer seems to be NO...

Back to Haymarket':

I'd still love to know: Who paid Haymarket's Military Service Tax? Come on, I know you're retired, Haymarket. I'd think it'd be easy to go check out the old county draft records from 1969. You can look the guy up, and thank him for his inconvenience...

---

Originally Posted by haymarket martyr

WARNING: The poster known as jamesdglick has a history of engaging in fraud. He makes things up out of his own head and attempts to use these blatant lies to score points in his arguments. When you call him on it, he will only lie further. He has such a reputation for doing this that many people here are cowed into silence and will not acknowledge it or confront him on it.

Anyone who attempts to engage with glick will discover this and find out you have wasted your time and energy on an intellectual fraud of the worst sort.

-So cry many Boomers (self-professed Lefties, mostly) whenever they fail to explain their hypocritical self-justifications, their double-standards, and their double-think forays into evil. Perhaps their consciences bother them, perhaps not. Who knows.

Originally Posted by jamesdglick

-How does that work?

This may be hard for you (self-recognition often is) but duh, these birthers/deathers/screamers/teabaggers/crankies are not the brightest lights on the tree.

Dangerous in many ways but as an organized terror group, probable not. After all, their penultimate leader, the Big Dick, shot his friend in the face while hunting. As speculated on another blog, if these bright lights got together, they'd probable wind up shooting themselves in their groins and coming to Washington to demand that the government take care of them.

Originally Posted by playwrite

This may be hard for you (self-recognition often is) but duh, these birthers/deathers/screamers/teabaggers/crankies are not the brightest lights on the tree.

Dangerous in many ways but as an organized terror group, probable not. After all, their penultimate leader, the Big Dick, shot his friend in the face while hunting. As speculated on another blog, if these bright lights got together, they'd probable wind up shooting themselves in their groins and coming to Washington to demand that the government take care of them.

1) The "birthers/deathers/screamers/teabaggers/crankies" are bright enough to point out that the violence at these meetings only started when the Donkeys bussed in their moron ACORN & Union goons to break up the Teabaggers; the ACORN & Union goons wern't smart enough to realize that that would get them sent to jail. Perhaps the Donkeys don't care.

Originally Posted by KaiserD2

Two questions, Writergirl:

1. What specifically are you referring to you when you say Democrats did "all this and more" during the Bush Administration? They certainly didn't do anything like this at presidential appearances, which the Secret Service kept them out of. I honestly don't recall any video of mobs of Democrats chanting at Republican office holders. I do on the other hand remember seeing an out-of-town Republican mob, led by John Bolton, helping to intimidate Miami-Dade officials into stopping their recount in 2000.

There have been Democratic protests at government buildings (at least in Seattle, I was in a few.) At those protests, there were people who had Republican lawmakers on wanted posters, or dressed up as Nazis, murderers, members of the KKK, you name it. There also were people handing out literature about 9/11 conspiracies and that suggested Bush was going to declare Martial law or somehow retain power in an undemocratic fashion. This doesn't mean that everyone who was at the protests believed 9/11 was orchestrated or believed Bush was like Hitler. Therefore, not everyone at the conservative rallies is a "birther" or "teabagger" or whatever.

2. What exactly do you disagree with, factually, in the email that you received?

I agree with everything they said, I just don't agree with the delivery. The issue I have is transparency. That was the one thing I think Obama had going for him in the long drawn out debates he had with Hillary Clinton during the primaries on Health Care. This involves treating everyone like adults and telling them the facts, not platitudes calling the other side a "mob" that tells "frightening lies" like the email did.
I believe that the majority of Americans, if told what Obama's plan would entail, would be in favor of it. Yet the Republicans now have the limelight, and all they have to do with it is say "socialism, socialism, socialism," and suddenly Obama's the bad guy. Whatever messages he does deliver about his plan are falling on deaf ears.
Only 20% of respondents in an Economist/YouGov poll say they will receive better care with Obama's plan while 31% say about the same and 35% say worse. Also 53% say that they will have to pay more in taxes or insurance, with Obama's plan while only 9% say less.

Poll here:
(The health care questions are on page 3)

Obama needs to tell the country about how it will benefit us, as well as refuting the Republicans who are trying (and succeeding) at convincing Americans that Universal Health Care is socialism and/or too costly. Now he almost seems detached from it because he doesn't want to look like he's got Congress on a leash. Yet people trust him more than they trust Congress, so I feel this needs to come from his voice, and it needs to draw in enough attention to drown out the Republicans, as well as pwn them back into the Stone Age (or the Garden of Eden, as many of them would put it.) Perhaps another big speech is in order?

Additionally, Obama needs to make it clear to Congress and to the United States that Universal Health Care is his vision and that he will not take any watered down political posturing (which the Health Care bill now contains a lot of) as a "victory."

One of the issues people have with Obamacare is that Congress is going to chicken out because they want to kowtow to the insurance companies. This is made easier by the fact that Obama hasn't made it clear exactly how he wants health care to be reformed (besides that it has to be and it has to be "universal."

Originally Posted by jamesdglick

1) The "birthers/deathers/screamers/teabaggers/crankies" are bright enough to point out that the violence at these meetings only started when the Donkeys bussed in their moron ACORN & Union goons to break up the Teabaggers; the ACORN & Union goons wern't smart enough to realize that that would get them sent to jail. Perhaps the Donkeys don't care.

Protest all you want, but don't blame anything on ACORN. ACORN is a non-issue and that is cowardly and juvenile.

Originally Posted by AlexMnWi

I agree with you regarding moderate Boomers and maybe some Xers in middle America (but I believe Odin is generally right about Millie attitudes in middle America; I was previously indifferent to health care reform at this time but these protests make me want to support it just because of how these healthcare industry-sponsored mobs are treating the political process). I was driving to Home Depot with my dad earlier, about a 15 mile drive. He is a 1957 cohort, raised in a typical first-ring Minneapolis suburb, Marine vet (after Nam, before Reagan), socially moderate-to-liberal but fiscally very conservative. Big Reagan supporter back in the day; voted for Clinton in '92 due to spite over Bush I's broken tax pledge, otherwise not a Clinton supporter but hates Obama. But certainly not for race reasons. Anyway, during the drive I was griping about these protests and particularly the violence tinges I've been seeing (i.e. death threats and effigy hangings of duly-elected Congressmen) and how this behavior offends me as a legitimate voter. I did not say anything specific regarding the actual health care bill other than that I really didn't care about whether it passed or failed based on its own merits (again, I actually support it now, but not because of its content per se). His response surprised me. He said (paraphrased) that protests like this were patriotic, and that we have the 2nd Amendment so that if the political process fails and people (presumably the far right) are being "suppressed" by the government in power, that they can basically take to the streets if it gets bad enough. I told him that was insane, but that's when I knew for sure that this wasn't just a left-v-right thing, but a very generational thing. The fact that this issue of health care is very Boomer-centric means it is not at all surprising how this issue is becoming highly flammable.

Long story short, it seems many Boomers who are even rather moderate but are uncomfortable with the goverment's health care plan (due to previous let downs about government performance, which is understandable) are far from being repulsed by this type of behavior, but rather relatively supportive of this type of protests. Whereas moderate Millies seem to be quite annoyed by the protests.

The way I see it, the liberals are just getting a small taste of their own shit.

From my perspective, Obama's issue with selling universal healthcare is the lack of a pragmatic edge and most importantly, assurance that it would not somehow diminish the self-reliant character that is a vital component of the American psyche.

Hence the hemming and hawing of the Right over the concept because they perceive this as yet another erosion of their choices.

For example, if Obama were to declare a policy for a huge buildup of mass transit infrastructure, and leaves it at that, that could be misinterpreted as "he's going to take away our cars and force us on buses and trains like cattle!". Had he sold it as instead that mass transit would help raise the bottom line for transportation for everyone and increase the choices of travel for people, then those who would normally be resistant would be more agreeable to the plan, as long as it doesn't put a huge dent in their pocketbooks.

It's great that White House policy is so readily supported by those who voted for him into office, but their reasoning for supporting is far different from what it would take to convince the Right to support it.

A problem I'm seeing growing with this escalation of hate is the fact that neither side is willing to synergize for fear of "selling out" their principles.

And it probably could be a symptom of older, less mentally flexible people.

This very well may turn into a "street-level" civil war in that either side will push hard to make sure their political and ideological opponents are completely shut out in the forseeable future in order to preserve their vision that absolutely cannot allow compromise.

This attitude could easily warp the minds of the Millennial generation into acting upon it with utmost efficiency. Given our civic nature, it's as easy as the Red Guard.

I am a Right Wing person by nature and that is an inherent aspect of my personality, and yet I agree and support a good number of ideas and policies that one would readily identify as Progressive. However, and this is where a good portion of clashes between ideologies come about is that I support Progressive ideas for very different reasons than True Progressives would. For example, I tend to support the policies from purely humanistic vantages, in how it would benefit overall living conditions of humanity, especially in tangible and material ways (health, standard of living, diet, etc.). I could care less about the moral benefits so touted by Progressives such as Environmentalism or Sustainability (which is basically efficiency for Luddites) or helping the less fortunate. And sometimes, just not agreeing with the premise on which the policy is constructed on is a sin to some.

Originally Posted by AlexMnWi

I was previously indifferent to health care reform at this time but these protests make me want to support it just because of how these healthcare industry-sponsored mobs are treating the political process).

I wouldn't have called myself indifferent to the health care issue, just rather jaded and cynical. But this outrageous behavior by the opposition has pushed me over the edge. Congratulations, a$$holes.

Originally Posted by Child of Socrates

I wouldn't have called myself indifferent to the health care issue, just rather jaded and cynical. But this outrageous behavior by the opposition has pushed me over the edge. Congratulations, a$$holes.

Exactly how I feel, and how I've responded.

While not particularly supportive of one or another approach, I did share some of the serious concerns that have been raised about the various proposals. I wanted to hear more about the issues, the options, and, most of all, the context of "if we did nothing."

That began to change with DeMint's "Waterloo" comment and the blood became heated with the Town Meeting screamers. It has boiled over with the euthanasia and abortion-promoting crap. At that point, it became less a health care issue and more a dire sense of the 3T culture warriors with their hands still around the Nation's neck. I'm fed-up with these morons.

Race, Taxes, Birth Certificates, and Eugenics: The Rise of a Postmodern Racist Movement?

A Friday email cited by Ta-Nehisi Coates, at the Atlantic...

Yesterday evening I was to attend to the Health Care summit with(D) Rep Betty Reed and(D) Rep Kathy Castor, I'm a Precinct Captain (203) in Tampa and we received our talking points to rebut any NEGATIVE GOP talking points on healthcare. I never made it in the building. I've never in my life really experience outright racism in a public place. Signs of Obama hung in effigy, racial slurs on signs, people chanting negative words ( too many to list) and outright screaming at Obama supporters. The hatred was in their eyes and they actually scared me for a moment. At first I was shocked, then a little scared and then I got outright mad in the span of 1 minute.............. I actually left (the "hood" would have come out). I was totally blown away it was a mad house. I'm kinda mad at my self now, because I left. I'm still shaking my head in awe....................I'm still cold inside.

There seems little question that something odd is going on with the healthcare debate. Foremost is the ridiculous extent to which the debate has been entirely commandeered by flagrant, outright lies -- things about euthanasia, and death panels, and the like, abject propaganda peddled directly from House and Senate offices. We have had lying in our discourse since the beginning of that discourse, but it has been a long while since the fabrications have been so blatant, so absolutely without even the smallest grain of truth. To take a Republican-sponsored healthcare provision that rather innocently and uncontroversially extends insurance coverage to those that want to create their own living wills and turn it into a declaration that the government will decide every five years whether or not you should be euthanized is something out of the Protocols, or out of Saddam's Iraq, or a mimicry of the worst and most stupid and most absurd of North Korean propaganda towards their own citizens.

Likewise, the explicit instruction to protestors not to debate, but to aggressively attempt to shut down the meetings entirely -- not normal. It is perhaps the best possible approach for insurance lobbyists to take, if their goal is to protect the profits of their industry -- but it is still not normal. We have always had the fringes of such speech, but I cannot recall a time it has been so celebrated as the formal solution to political debate. Certainly not by a major political party, coupled with the majority of their most popular pundits and talking heads, coupled again to lobbyist groups with long histories of corporate astroturfing. And the proud shuffling just-up-to-the-line-of-violence, right in the very faces of their own representatives of Congress, requiring police protection in order to escort those elected representatives safely from the meetings -- that part is new. That part is not normal.

It is more than a little troubling that each of the recent, most explicitly aggressive and loud and factless "movements" to appear on the scene since our first black American president took office appear to be, in large part, made up of the same people. Categorizing them informally there are the birthers, people who do not believe President Barack Obama is truly an American. There are the teabaggers (our name for them, cough, not theirs), a group that suddenly came to the conclusion that a tax structure that was begrudgingly tolerable in 2008, under Bush, is now the highest form of tyranny a mere handful of months later. There are the deathers, those that seem to quite firmly believe the propaganda of eugenics and euthanasia being cheerfully peddled to them by national leaders, and who take the conspiracy theory to absolute heart as being the nearly unavoidable result of any attempt to reform the straining, hyperexpensive and increasingly incompetent American healthcare system.

But these are not three disparate movements with three different practitioners, three different conspiracy theories that simply happen to share the same summertime stage. In practice and organization they are one movement, a single collection of the same set of animated citizens and televised leaders, and their signs decrying fascism, Naziism, communism, taxes, euthanasia and outrage over 1960's-era Hawaiian government paperwork mingle freely at every protest. If you find a newly minted tax protestor, you are as likely as not to find a birther and a deather as well, all tucked neatly inside the same polo shirt. They are nearly exclusively white, predominantly middle aged and elderly, and unambiguously conservative. Many of those shouting against their government are already participants in the same "socialized medicine" they decry, but to a person will not consider their Medicare to be of that evil ilk.

It is, in short, a movement made up of the enfranchised and enabled; people who have gained every benefit from the politics of America and yet who feel in their very bones that they are the oppressed ones, the ones who have nothing left to lose, so rapidly is America falling away from them. It is rare to run across any movement so deeply angry -- or more to the point, a movement which explicitly celebrates anger as the primary mission of their activism. They are not willing to listen to any factual evidence that contradicts their own beliefs in whatever dark conspiracies have been peddled to them; they have in fact made it their publicly proclaimed mission to block any such explanations from even being attempted.

That seems the operative element of discourse, of late. It is angry beyond any objective rationale. It is actively hostile to fact. It finds the mere premise of debating a political argument to be deeply offensive.

And as a movement, it is large.


Pondering the email he was sent, Coates writes:

One thing to keep in mind is that race, and racism, have rarely ever acted alone. One of the best points that Phillip Dray makes in his classic history of lynching is that epidemics of lynching often coincided, not just with an expansion of black rights, but with increased labor mobility among white women. So fear of white women, and their independence, as well as fear of sexual competition, all worked in concert. It wasn't simply "I hate niggers" -- it never is. It was "I don't much like black people, and prices are going up, and I have to let my wife work, so I can survive, and I'm scared she won't stay with me if she's not dependent on me and I'd die if she left me for a black guy." Or some such.

Ditto for the Civil Rights Movement. It wasn't just racism -- it was class also. In the South you had this black middle class that always had to be deferential to the most poorest white person in the world. The prospect of losing that deference, of already being lower than the white aristocracy and now also being lower than a class of blacks too, wreaked havoc.

It seems at first a bizarre thought, a mere freeform hiccup of the brain, but between a half-dozen different commentators I am apparently already far from the first to have it: it seems to me like the last time we saw public discourse be as intentionally devolved as it is today was during, of all things, American desegregation.

That was the last time you had deeply conservative southern governors and states yelling about secession because the federal government was forcing things on them that they couldn't tolerate, and making belligerent anti-federalism statements over the slightest little thing.

That was the last time America so prominently saw, on television, shouting white mobs and the threats against lawmakers, all explicitly intended not at debate, but as efforts of pure intimidation in order to stop the debate from ever taking place.

That was when you had phalanxes of very dumb but very loud people weeping in front of the cameras that the fabric of America was being destroyed, though they couldn't begin to actually tell you why or how, only that it involved black people rising above their place in the world and the subsequent corruption of their government.

That was when you had men with fervent political beliefs walking into "too-liberal" churches and murdering in cold blood those who they disagreed with.

Why on earth would a southern governor choose to raise the specter of secession over something as asinine as a policy dispute over nuances of a financial stimulus package? Is that all it takes, is that the end-all issue of issues, over these last long decades, the final thing that brings the rallying cry of "too much!" from the head of state of, well, a state? And we are to believe that the American public, which wants a public option in heath insurance by margins ranging from sixty to eighty percent or so, in various polls, is at the same time is so enraged that the government would dare offer such a thing that they want nothing to do with even holding meetings on the subject? And we are to believe in government-mandated Death Panels, now, if government dares assure you that your health insurance will optionally cover living wills, if you desire to have one?

Now, how it is that a healthcare reform debate has managed to raise a viciously angry, assertively fact-hostile and debate-hostile political climate that brings back national memories of American desegregation seems outright baffling. Except that many of the paranoid healthcare protestors are "teabaggers" as well, and many of those "teabaggers" are "birthers" besides, and the whole parcel is, from polling, clearly a fringe movement based most substantially in the southern states, the only remaining stronghold of the party that contains them. And -- there is no way around it -- America has just now elected the first black president. The very first, after two centuries and then some, and even though I am in the terribly liberal, very nearly socialist hellhole of California I can still go no more than a few miles from my home and see the confederate battle flag hanging from a living room window, or stuck to the bumper of a worn and battered truck.


Before we ever had healthcare town halls, the teabaggers-now-eugenics-protestors were purportedly all about taxes: they had large, conservative-promoted protests about how unfair the entire affair was, and Obama held prominence as the be-all, end-all cause of it all. Now, their taxes under Obama were actually going down, not up, but that major, presumably all-deflating fact didn't make so much as a dent in the movement. It simply didn't matter: they still insisted that under Obama, taxes were suddenly at socialist comma fascist comma Europe-like levels. The same people, all denizens of far-right conservatism, didn't have fits about their taxes under Bush -- it only came up as prominent, so-called "popular" movement at the exact moment Obama became president.

Likewise with the birther movement. There is no documentation that can deflate it; there is no final number of reporters from the right, the left and the center who have, can or could go see the original certificate and report back that all is in order; there is no number of public birth announcements or assertions from the officials of the state of Hawaii that can dim the candle of their beliefs. Some of the them hold up signs with the President's name misspelled, Barrak, or with swastikas or sickles or other emblems of past tyrannies: they seem to be less than serious in their grounded explorations of the man's origins.

We didn't have a nationwide epidemic of people buying up weapons and ammunition under that terrible menace to the nation, Bill Clinton, though those years saw far more substantial gun legislation than anything any Democrat has proposed this decade. But when Barack Obama was elected, it started immediately, and continues to run full speed.

The last poll this site commissioned was startling. From a prominent and credible pollster, it showed beyond question how very explicitly racial the birther movement is, and it cannot help but raise questions of motive. Maybe this fight is a postmodern segregationist one after all, postmodern because it is not even about the thing it is purportedly about, but fought through weird three-times-removed proxy issues that even the participants themselves don't really grasp and heaven knows have no actual information on.

The mere continued presence of ingrained racism is nothing surprising. We had strong rattles of the old segregationists during the Reagan years, and over and over in every "immigration" debate from then until these last summer days, where people like Pat Buchanan moan about how we're becoming a not-white nation, thereby destroying their own visions of America, and where Lou Dobbs pivots seemingly effortlessly from virulent anti-immigration rhetoric to being one of the few talking heads to give televised credence to allegations of suspicious foreign-ness against a mixed-race President.


That may be the difference; this time we've got a black president, the first one ever, and one that received not a bare minimum of votes but delivered a true political spanking to the conservatives that rallied against him, and maybe that one small fact turns out to be the only thing it takes to turn the usual muttering about federal meddling and states' rights and incipient brownness-slash-socialism into full-on talk of secession and eugenics and organized intimidation explicitly plotted to discredit even the concept of discussing national issues. Because it seems to be the same people -- white, ultra-conservative, mostly from the south and from rural areas -- and the same general arguments, and the same climate of aggressively irrational, proudly uninformed, thoroughly paranoid fury.

There is not a conservative politician or talking head in the country that would not deny it up and down, of course, and be red-faced that anyone would even suggest it. But the current climate is the current climate, and has been documented on every television screen. We've got governors yelling about secession, and major politicians peddling stories of imminent threats to your family and your children by the very government they are supposedly a part of, and every day the town hall footage just seems to look more and more like a modernized version of the mob attacks against citizens and legislators during old anti-desegregation rallies, and we don't need to say "sooner or later someone will be shot" because it has already happened, and multiple times, and in truth it never really left us, these last fifty years.

As of yet it is only an idle, troubled thought, good for nothing. But as Coates says, even during racism it wasn't about racism, it was always about a nebulous something else. Given how readily every lie is latched on to, and how furiously everything to the contrary is shouted down, one wonders if even the protestors truly know what they are protesting against.

If you realize the problem is a group that clearly has no reason to talk and they won't listen, the 4T solution is to effectively eliminate that group and prevent them from ever being relevant for the long future.

Just be careful of the collateral damage.

Originally Posted by playwrite

Exactly how I feel, and how I've responded.

While not particularly supportive of one or another approach, I did share some of the serious concerns that have been raised about the various proposals. I wanted to hear more about the issues, the options, and, most of all, the context of "if we did nothing."

That began to change with DeMint's "Waterloo" comment and the blood became heated with the Town Meeting screamers. It has boiled over with the euthanasia and abortion-promoting crap. At that point, it became less a health care issue and more a dire sense of the 3T culture warriors with their hands still around the Nation's neck. I'm fed-up with these morons.

I just wrote a letter to my local paper. I'll let you know if it gets published.

Originally Posted by playwrite

Exactly how I feel, and how I've responded.

While not particularly supportive of one or another approach, I did share some of the serious concerns that have been raised about the various proposals. I wanted to hear more about the issues, the options, and, most of all, the context of "if we did nothing."

That began to change with DeMint's "Waterloo" comment and the blood became heated with the Town Meeting screamers. It has boiled over with the euthanasia and abortion-promoting crap. At that point, it became less a health care issue and more a dire sense of the 3T culture warriors with their hands still around the Nation's neck. I'm fed-up with these morons.

For me, I'm very sympathetic with some of the objections to health care reform, but it startles me that this is the issue riling up the Right. I just think: Seriously? They're going to the barricades over health care reform?

I guess this an echo of the 1993-94 health care debate, but back then the issue for conservatives was that if you watched the TV news you wouldn't even see arguments against it. These days, there's no shortage of conservative opinion in the news -- so it's bizarre to have people acting like the only way for their views to be heard is to shout at someone in a town hall meeting.

Also, these people didn't care nearly as much when Bush added a drug benefit to Medicare when the program was already in the red. It's so infuriating when people only care about an issue when the "other side" is pushing it.

I was up in arms about the Medicare debacle. Today, I wonder if Obama's poll numbers are going up for inciting the public in this fashion. This thesis of Obama's/Gibb's is working to a tee from earlier this year. Only if they take credit will I be able to respect this administration.

According to the book's authors, the 4T is the flip side of the 2T just as winter is the flip side of summer.

Yet these two even turnings do have some similarities.

Originally Posted by The Rani

I wonder if 4Ts are more like the flip side of 2Ts than anyone wants to admit.

I see it as more of a "what goes around (2T), comes back around (4T)" moment or a "what gets dished out (2T), gets taken back (4T)" moment or the "tolerence finally breaks down and delivers the ending" moment.

Originally Posted by Brian Beecher

According to the book's authors, the 4T is the flip side of the 2T just as winter is the flip side of summer.

Yet these two even turnings do have some similarities.

So basically, whatever blooms or buds during the 2T will go dormant or die during the 4T or whoever is born during the 2T will die during the 4T or whatever grows during the 1T will be harvested during the 3T, ect.

Originally Posted by Andy '85

If you realize the problem is a group that clearly has no reason to talk and they won't listen, the 4T solution is to effectively eliminate that group and prevent them from ever being relevant for the long future.

Just be careful of the collateral damage.

I think these people are doing a great job of marginalizing themselves (and notice I'm using the term "marginalize" rather than your more inflammatory "eliminate." I can't say I really care for the strawman argument you seem to be making here ).

This reminds me of the Terri Schiavo situation. The extremists went so far overboard that they managed to alienate everyone else. It's happening again.

Originally Posted by Child of Socrates

I think these people are doing a great job of marginalizing themselves (and notice I'm using the term "marginalize" rather than your more inflammatory "eliminate." I can't say I really care for the strawman argument you seem to be making here ).

This reminds me of the Terri Schiavo situation. The extremists went so far overboard that they managed to alienate everyone else. It's happening again.

No way, this is way smaller than the Terri Schiavo situation. This isn't a situation of the government stepping in and intervening with a case of life or death that involves a human being. This is a situation going on at ground level involving ordinary people voicing and stressing their negative opinions. Now, do you really have a problem with people voicing their negative opinions, expressing negative opinion or showing signs of major discontent at left-wing Democrat-ic town halls or public meetings? It is what it is, whether its working for you or working against you lady. I mean, that is what it's really supposed to be all about in America isn't it? Trashing shit is a proud element and a proud permanent fixture of our wonderful, glorious and often colorful American history. IT IS WOVEN IN OUR NATIONAL FABRIC. IT IS TRADTION! What would the liberals do if the right to trash shit, break shit, lie about shit, write nasty shit on signs, say nasty shit to peploe, burn shit, trample on shit and hanging mannequins all dolled like Sara Palin and other liberal shit like that were suddenly and abruptly taken away? Well, I suspect that the liberals would go berzerk and go all ape shit.