27 March 2010 Feel like we’ve been here before.

27 March 2010 Feel like we’ve been here before.


“In the faces of Tea Party shouters, images of hate and history
By Colbert I. King
Saturday, March 27, 2010 The angry faces at Tea Party rallies are eerily familiar. They resemble faces of protesters lining the street at the University of Alabama in 1956 as Autherine Lucy, the school's first black student, bravely tried to walk to class. “…

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/26/AR2010032603335.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

Mr. King goes on to relate his and others concerns and recollections of Little Rock, at a David Duke rally in 1991, of George Wallace rallies, and of the Tea Party protests in D.C. last week.

He’s right to be concerned. The GOP has embraced the politics of lies, bigotry, hatred, and Christian fundamentalism since the Nixon Southern strategy was put into place. It has since been used to elect Reagan and both Presidents Bush.

The levels of hatred, disinformation, and bigotry were ramped up by Palin and her handlers during the 2008 campaign to take advantage or the fact that Obama was the Democratic candidate. They hoped to recreate the Wallace mantra, railing against the three G's of government, Godlessness, and gun control.

Now Palin is milking the Tea Party mob for all it will contribute. And that mob hears her call for violence. A poster seen in D.C. last week read "If Brown [Scott Brown (R-Mass.)] can't stop it, a Browning [high power weapon] can." While mob organizers can claim that such signs are only rhetoric, while Palin can claim her admonition to “reload” is a metaphor, I know such disclaimers are lies. Those signs and on-line comments are used with the hope that someone will interpret them literally, as they are intended to be taken. We’ve reached the point where the right wing extremists and the mob they’ve created to do their public dirty work are ready to pick up weapons and harm others. So far this year it has been bricks, rocks, and bullets fired at windows rather than people.

Palin has no drive or call to serve the nation. Her drive is for money and a mob to shout her name. She has never stuck with any elected job, always quit, leaving her terms of office incomplete, leaving a mess for someone else to clean up. When the going gets hard, Palin quits.

Yet she attracts the lowest common denominator of voter, those who want to force their religion on others, those who can be swayed by physical come-ons that are so poorly delivered as to be off-putting to anyone who can read at third grade level and see beneath her makeup. She is quite willing to play to the gun lobby, the theocrats, and the poorly educated. She’s quite willing to incite hatred, spread lies, and to claim that only those who feel the way she is programmed to feel are “real Americans.”

Mr. King doesn’t label her as the newest incarnation of George Wallace, doesn’t depict her in white robes in front of a burning cross. Mr. King doesn’t have to. His readers know all too well the type of voter gravitating to the Tea Party mobs and to the Palin demagoguery tour.

I wore my nation’s uniform in combat. I still have shrapnel in my body. Ms. Palin wants to depict me as un-American because I don’t want this nation to become a theocracy ruled by bigots, racists, anti-Semites and anti-intellectuals. How dare she! And how dare the Tea Party mobs threaten to unleash murder and other violence against their fellow citizens who disagree politically with them! They have the temerity to call for harm to our elected leaders and then to describe their selves as patriots. They want to reverse a century’s advances in civil rights, women’s’ rights, and social safety net legislation, to hand over the nation’s treasury to corrupt corporate bankers and financial traders, and they want to rewrite history in order to eliminate the role of anyone who looks, speaks, or prays differently from them.

I believe we should have declared English our official language long ago. But no GOP Congress has done so.

I believe we should have clamped down on illegal immigration long ago. But no GOP Congress has done so. In fact, the sainted Reagan worsened the problem by declaring a huge amnesty for millions of illegals.

It amazes me how the Tea Party can idolize Reagan yet ignore his spending, his taxation, and his amnesty. I guess that lack of education that goes along with Tea Party mob membership helps overlook truth and reality.

I wonder how long it will be before some Tea Party fellow traveler is going to shoot a Congressman, a Senator, as encouraged by the extreme right demagogues. I wonder what the gunman will shout as justification for murder. And I wonder what Palin, Boener, Limbaugh, and the rest will shout to distance their demagoguery from political murder by the poorly educated minions who hang on their words as if they were handed down by a deity. I wonder how the GOP and Tea Party pro-life mobsters will justify murdering citizens whose only crime was to disagree with them politically and to vote accordingly

The fuse has been lit; we’re all in the theater now.