The whole Tea Bagger movement has always been a way that the scared, angry bigots in this country can vent without being labeled a bigot.

I'm gonna be seriously surprised if no Democrats get killed by summer. Seriously surprised.

These people are crazy, well-armed, and believe that God is telling them what to do.

I heard the second in command of al-Thea (the Tea Bag terrorist arm of the GOP) had a backwards O carved into his face ...

Yeah? What's his name, Will?

Hi all,

This reminds me of the discussion they're having over at the Museum of History And Industry (MOHAI) right now, with it's exhibit "The Enemy Within" about terrorism in America.
Here's a link to a web site where you can share your thoughts about our country's experience with terrorism:

http://mohai.community.officelive.com/Me…

Next Thursday, April 1 (as on all first Thursdays each month), MOHAI won't charge admission, and you can walk through the "Enemy Within" exhibit, watch a provocative video about fighting terrorists (i.e., one person on there advocates changing the legal presumption to that of guilt; and many local religious minorities take offense at it) and share your thoughts right there on a personal computer.

There's also a panel on civil liberties at MOHAI at 7 pm tonight, where for the price of admission, you can hear panelists' views and possibly share your thoughts.

Maybe I'll see you there tonight?

The Russian professor who predicted the breakup of the US doesn't seem quite so friggin' nuts right now.

http://www.politicsdaily.com/2008/12/29/…

Hi all,

This reminds me of the discussion they're having over at the Museum of History And Industry (MOHAI) right now, with it's exhibit "The Enemy Within" about terrorism in America.
Here's a link to a web site where you can share your thoughts about our country's experience with terrorism:

http://mohai.community.officelive.com/Me…

Next Thursday, April 1 (as on all first Thursdays each month), MOHAI won't charge admission, and you can walk through the "Enemy Within" exhibit, watch a provocative video about fighting terrorists (i.e., one person on there advocates changing the legal presumption to that of guilt; and many local religious minorities take offense at it) and share your thoughts right there on a personal computer.

There's also a panel on civil liberties at MOHAI at 7 pm tonight, where for the price of admission, you can hear panelists' views and possibly share your thoughts.

Maybe I'll see you there tonight? (Update: I'm having some technical difficulties, so apologies if this is a duplicate posting.)

Eric Cantor's being shot at too. And he's trying to pretend that it's the other side doing it. You reap what you sow, Mr. Cantor.

Tea Baggers are thugs and gangsters! Thugs and gangsters is what we should call them!

@8, A bagger probably just found out he was Jewish and assumed he was a Democrat.

If you haven't yet, please contact your congressperson and senators and give them your support during this sad period of right-wing terrorism.

@9: You know what's kinda weird? If what the Republicans thought was going on (or told people was going on) was actually happening, and this proposal was actually a "government takeover of health care" that installs "death panels" to "pull the plug on Grandma" and move us one step further "toward a socialized Barrack Hussein Ameristan," then these types of responses would be much more understandable.

I still don't think they'd necessarily be appropriate, but if the bill was in fact going to install death panels to determine who lives and who dies according to what it costs the government, I'm sure would be out protesting as well. But it isn't, so I'm not.

My point is to see the violence not as a reaction to what happened, but what people think has happened. And if you place yourself in the teabagger's shoes, and actually try to imagine what it'd be like if you totally believed we had 'death panels' and government takeover of the entire medical system, it's easier to understand what they're doing.

The problem is that people they should be able to trust - their elected leaders - have been lying to them. Constantly. All the time. On rarely are they called on it. So I'm suggesting it's not that their responses are totally insane for the information they have. It's that they have bad information.

The obvious parallel is the Iraq war. If Saddam was actually building a nuclear bomb, developing biological weapons, and was in part behind 9/11, you know, the war would have seemed like a more reasonable response. Not saying I still would have supported it - but I would be able to understand the people who do. The problem is that none of those things were true. Teabaggers are using the same playbook that Bush did.

@2 Isn't it scary how you could either be describing conservative christians or an army of paranoid schizophrenics...it's pretty hard to tell the difference.

@12 - that was a great comment... the only thing I'll add is that the Teabaggers are apparently not interested in (or capable of?) examining the source of their information, and corroborating what they're being told with the actual facts. Someone (Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin) tells them something, and they believe it.

So, yeah, the electeds and the right-wing media are leading them astray, and their responses make sense given what they believe to be happening. But where's the curiosity/critical thinking that would make them investigate whether or not death panels are really in the bill? I mean, if someone had told me that Bush was setting up internment camps, I would have been like "Really? Who's saying that? What's the evidence?" But, these guys seem to want to believe what they are being told, because they hate the "liberals".

Anyway, most of the actual Terrorists in the Tea Baggers turn out to be on the government dole and use socialized medicine.

Kind of ironic when you think about it.

Not that they do.

That would require brain cells.

Okay, so words have consequences, public figures should own responsibility for the things their listeners do, etc.
I gotta ask: Isn't this pretty much the exact opposite argument than the one you would make in the case of some sort of provocative speech that they agreed with or enjoyed? Say, rap lyrics? Video games? Literature?

Is this principle really being consistently applied? Because it doesn't make much sense to me to dismiss out of hand claims that the entertainment a kid consumed before shooting up his high school had a role in inciting that act, and then turn around and claim that Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are raising a vigilante army simply because they are using highly charged speech.

How you gonna let the Insane Clown Posse off the hook for the things their fans do and not do that for Glenn Beck?

The only thing keeping the Tea Baggers from being the full fledged form of an American Nazi party is a strong semi-intelligent leader.

this makes me sick..

@ 18 - Too true.

And another reason to be grateful that Palin IS such a boob. Dear God, can you imagine what might have happened if she'd actually had a BRAIN??

shudder

@17: This is the kind of "I want you to be a hypocrite because maybe that means I'm right" parsing I'm worried misses the point in this debate. The problem actually isn't just that people are lying. It's that people are believing them. #14 sorta begins to explain this, I'll explain further.

I'd prefer if no one chose to lie, but I know that's not realistic. I also don't really think it's a good idea to start censoring people we think are lying. But when someone says something, we need to have a broader life experience and appreciation of the context, and bring this to bear to evaluate their claims. We also have to consider their motivations.

When we don't, we end up in a situation - on both sides - where what people are doing would make some sense if what they've been told was actually true; but isn't because what they've been told simply isn't reality.

Let's consider the Iraq war example in detail, as Republican leaders have conducted both this fight and that one in the exact same way. (Which also makes sense: we often rely on methods we've used in the past with success.) A lot of claims - many of which later turned out to be lies or inaccurate - were used to justify that war. I'll admit I was "duped" by some of them, choosing to trust experts on claims I had no qualified ways to reasonably evaluate.

But I was unsure about going to war because I consider war to be a serious enough action - just like trying to intimidate a member of Congress - that I wanted to make sure I understood the issue before I simply went ahead and supported it.

For instance, a central claim justifying the war was that of nuclear weapons development. We were told Saddam was developing nuclear weapons. But we also should know that Iraq at the time had been subject to economic sanctions for years, and as such, is likely to be a fairly poor country, as it was. Nuclear weapons are incredibly expensive, both to build but also to develop and to train people to develop. Additionally, even if a country did pull it off - some poorer countries have, such as India and Pakistan - it would still be difficult to deliver them to American targets. In this context, it makes less sense that Saddam's nuclear weapons would be developed and that they could be used against us. Furthermore, UN inspections experts seemed to support - or at least not dismiss - this conclusion. I'm not saying I could say for certain that the claim was "wrong," just that I didn't know for sure, now had legitimate reason to suspect deception, and wasn't about to justify a war simply on this basis.

Other claims proved equally shaky with a cursory glance. A large part of the original war rationale was that Saddam somehow played a role in 9/11. This seemed unlikely, given that Saddam's Iraq was relatively secular; a necessity arising because of both its religiously divided population and its long standing difficulties with neighboring Iran. This did not mean that Iraq didn't have ties to al-Qaeda, but that I needed to know more about what those ties were before I was able to trust that they were accurate and support an action as serious as a war.

On top of all this, I knew what the Administration had in mind. I was aware of their ideas related to the conservative think tank PNAC; I knew that the war, even without all the claims they were making, fit into their geopolitical worldview about American power. This told me that they would likely push for war even if they knew nothing about nuclear weapons or ties to 9/11 - and thus gave more reason to hold off on getting behind the war effort.

This same kind of reasoning could be done with the claims around health reform. At the very least, before throwing a rock into a congressional office, or calling in with death threats, one could read the entire bill. Sure, it's a complicated 2000 pages, but when you're about to undertake an action as serious as Congressional intimidation, it seems reasonable to make sure this action is justified in the larger context of reality.

So, in short, it's not the lying itself that's the whole problem (though it certainly doesn't help). It's the fact that too many are easily persuaded by the lies, and lack sufficient contextual information to evaluate them. They're jumping before they look; which, if I didn't look, would make total sense to me too.

I don't look before I jump because I'm so much smarter and more rational than them. I too often have jumped before I looked. We all do. But what's important is that we try hard to learn from those experiences, as we often reflect on them with regret and realized they were very stupid things to do.

@21: My point isn't about the rightness or wrongness of the teabaggers' claims; I happen to think that Beck, Palin and the lot of them are engaging in very irresponsible speech and seem to show little concern for the veracity of the statements they make. My point is simply that if we are to take the next step and accuse these entertainers (and that is precisely what they are) of "inciting" violent behavior in their listeners, why then do we object when others turn this around and use it against entertainers whose work we enjoy?

Are entertainers responsible for acts of violence inspired by their words, or aren't they?

Relax, people. Extremist behavior on the right is the best friend the left or the center could possibly ask for. When all they have to offer in response to the health care bill is "it's shootin' time!", we win, not them. I hate to say it, but the best thing that could happen to the Democrats would be a violent attack on them.

Emotional political disputes are won by the side that can absorb the most punishment, not inflict it.

This kerfuffle isn't a whole lot different than any number of other disputes right on down through American history. You should see what they said about Thomas Jefferson.

#14 is right. These people WANT to believe what they hear from Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin and other neo-con nut-jobs. It's not a question of who to hold responsible, both are ultimately responsible.

But there is a grain of truth to what #23 says. Violent attacks on the democrats will only backfire in the end, even if they manage to do real damage. I was listening to the radio this afternoon and some Repub said "well it's the consequences of what they've (the dems) have done" ~ Which immediately made me flash on the stereo-typical wife-beater: "she asked for it, it's her fault" Really awesome, repubs. Look at who you count among your own.

What the neo-cons have done is create a monster. They wanted to make people feel victimized and unhappy and ultimately change how they vote. But now what's happening is these types are taking things into their own hands, so to speak, and they think violence is the answer and there's nothing the Repubs can do to stop it now.

@22: "Are entertainers responsible for acts of violence inspired by their words, or aren't they?"

They aren't responsible for acts of violence inspired by their words. They are responsible for their words. All that means is that people might stop listening or call them stupid if they say irresponsible things.

Also, it's my position that, while we always and unquestionably have the right to say everything and anything we want, we don't always have to actually do that.

There will always be people - and should always be people - who use their god-given freedom of speech to say mean, irresponsible, or stupid things. I just won't hesitate to use my freedom of speech to call it stupid, irresponsible, or mean, and I wish that they'd take a moment to think about what they're saying and consider if they think it's appropriate. That's what I'm doing now.

@25: Blah, blah, blah, ooo so scary!!

...Or you could ignore the self-identification polls and ask Americans how they feel on the issues. This country may have been conservative even as early as five years ago; but it is no longer. On issues ranging from gay marriage to the war in Iraq to infrastructure spending to, yes, even health reform - it's obvious the country is now way more liberal than it was just a few years ago.

A lot of this is because the Millenials - my generation - are now beginning to vote and participate in politics, and as a generation, we're just done arguing about whether gays should have rights. They should, and we're going to make sure they get them.

So yeah. We will not be intimidated. We will not back down. Liberals throughout history have suffered far worse while fighting for their ideas than you and your immature little NRA pals can bring on, and that's for damn sure.

And finally, no amount of guns is going to allow conservative ideas to outlive their natural lives. You can't beat death, and your numbers are slowly dying.

@25: Yes, go ahead. Start a civil war against the rest of America and march into battle wearing orange hunting vests.
Also, don't expect the military to join you suckers in this; they aim to defend America, not overthrow its democratically elected leaders. You'd be eating artillery, airstrikes, and .50 cal fire three meals a day.
And like doesurmindglow said, your ideas will die out with you, as they are not fit enough to be politically viable. Darwin's ideas aren't applicable just to biology.

@25, And you think that all the moderates would join your conservative coup, too? They're moderate for a reason, start shooting and you'll find yourself well outnumbered in public opinion.

And yeah, not a chance in hell you'd get the military supporting you.