To: Kroger Foods
From: Mitch Berg, Hypothetical Gun Owner
Re: Standing Up To Stupid
Dear Kroger Foods,
Please open some stores in the Twin Cities metro area, so I can shop at them.
Because any chain that tells Michael Bloomberg and his pet group “Upper Middle-Class Moms Want Action” to go pound arugula is a store I wanna shop at.
That is all.
When out and about this weekend, there are two important gun safety and personal defense events coming up over the next couple of weekends.
The “MN Carry Day and Safety Education Expo” will be coming up as follows:
The events are free to attend, and family friendly. And they’re not just for gun owners – the events will cover a wide range of personal safety information.
And they’ll be giving away two handguns donated by Taurus USA, among many other give-aways. Uncle Franky’s mobile food truck will be on site all day at both events.
Want more details? Go here!
And mark your calendars!
…then you know you’re bad.
When you’ve got Carter bagging on you from the right on defense and foreign policy, it’s time to whiz on the dogs and call in the fire.
In the middle of a year that promises to be a good, if not great, year for Republicans nationwide, Minnesota Republicans are hoping to flip the House, so as to at least contest control for the state, and praying for an upset in the Senate and a come-from-behind miracle for Governor.
It was ten years ago that the conventional wisdom was that Minnesota was purple, flirting with red.
Today, it’s a bluish-purple state – some bright-red points, some dingy blue swamps.
In 2002, after the death of Paul Wellstone, the DFL was in disarray; they lost the state House, the Governor’s office and Wellstone’s Senate seat. The grownups controlled all of the state offices except the Attorney General; the DFL held the State Senate by a hair, and was well behind in the House.
Inside six years, they turned that into nearly-complete domination of Minnesota. They held Mark Dayton’s old and barely-used Senate seat, they took Coleman’s they took both chambers of the Legislature in 2008, lost them in 2010, and took them back in 2012, and have controlled all of the state Constitutional offices – Attorney General, Secretary of State, State Auditor – for eight years now.
How did they do this?
The 24 Month Campaign: Ben Kruse got it mostly right Monday morning on the morning show on the lesser talk station; Republicans need to learn something from the Democrats. For them, their 2016 campaign will start in earnest on November 5. The Republicans, in the meantime, will meander about until State Fair time, 2016.
I know – to be fair, Jeff Johnson and Dave Thompson started their governor’s races back in 2012 in all but name; Mike McFadden was aggressively moving his Senate candidacy at the State Fair in 2013.
In contrast, the DFL’s attack PR firm “Alliance for a “Better” Minnesota” never stopped campaigning. The group – financed by unions and liberal plutocrats with deep pockets, including Mark Dayton’s ex-wife Alita Messinger – does something that goes beyond campaigning.
It bombards Minnesotans with Democrat propaganda, 24 months every campaign cycle.
The Communications Gap: The Minnesota GOP has plenty of strikes against it; while it’s made up a lot of financial ground since its nadir two years ago, it’s still in debt, and still scrambling to get back to even.
But even when it’s in the black, it only does so much communicating – and then, it only does it in the run-ups to elections and, maybe occasionally, during legislative sessions (and that’s mostly the jobs of the GOP legislative caucuses).
In the meantime, the Democrats (with the connivance of regional media whose reporters may not overtly carry the water for the DFL, but whose management largely most definitely does) shower the Minnesota voter with a constant drizzle of the Democrat version of “the truth”.
Which means the low-information voter – the one that might start thinking about next month’s election any day now – is kept on a constant drip, drip, drip of the DFL’s point of view. It means the baseline of thought for those who don’t have any strong political affiliation of their own leans left of center; they assume that raising taxes helps schools, that Republicans are rich tax evaders who hide their wealth out of state, that there is a “war on women”, and on and on.
There’s No-one To Fly The Flag – Nobody Seems to Know It Ever Went Down: So how was the situation different when the GOP was contending to take MInnesota away from the left?
Other than the DFL having an endless parade of checks from plutocrats to cash?
For starters, back then Minnesota had a number of overt conservative voices on the media, statewide, day in, day out. It was when Jason Lewis was at his rabble-rousing peak; I call him the Father of Modern Minnesota Conservatism, and I’ll stand by it. With Lewis on the air, a lot of people who didn’t know they were conservatives, figured it out – and a lot of conservatives who figured they were alone in the big blue swamp realized there were others out there.
And Joe Soucheray was on the air three hours a day talking, not so much directly about politics, but about the absurdities that the left was inflicting on the culture. It may have been a decade before Andrew Breitbart noted that Politics springs from Culture, but Soucheray knew it, and made it a constant topic for a long, long time.
Lewis and Soucheray had record audiences – not just in the Metro, but outstate, where both had syndication in Greater Minnesota.
And between the two, the media’s left-leaning chinese water torture had competition.
And for a few years, MInnesota had a couple of voices that did for conservatism in the state what Rush Limbaugh helped do nationwide; dragged it out of the basement, aired it out, made it relevant to the challenges Minnesotans faced then and today, and made being conservative, unapologetic and smart a thing to be proud of.
And this happened at a time when Minnesota conservatism…came out of the basement, aired out, and started grabbing Minnesota mindshare.
Coincidence?
Feed The Cat: Of course, this doesn’t happen on its own. While conservative talk radio is still, along with sports, the only radio format that’s paying its bills, the format has atrophied – largely because it’s become, for money reasons, a national rather than regional format. Syndicated network programming – Limbaugh, Hannity, Prager, Hewitt, Michael Savage, what-have-you – delivers ratings on the relative cheap. And they deliver political engagement, nationwide.
But they don’t have a local political effect like a solid, firebrand local lineup does.
But radio stations pay for very little in the way of “local lineup” anymore; KSTP has turned Soucheray into just another sports talking head; AM1280 has the NARN; AM1130 has Jack and Ben and, temporarily, Dave Thompson.
Minnesota business – at least, the part of it that realizes that a conservative outcome benefits everyone, themselves included – needs to pony up and sponsor the next generation of rabble-rousing Conservative media with a cause; the fact that it’s actually a good ad investment is a collateral benefit, compared to flushing money down ABM’s drain.
And yes, I’m focusing on radio – but this rabble-rousing presence would need to cover all of the social and alternative media, not just the traditional AM band. Still – there is no (affordable) medium that reaches, or can reach, more Minnesotans.
And through that, maybe, we start turning the intellectual tide in this state.
It’s happened once. It can happen again.
Needs to happen again, really.
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s gun grab group issued a long series of endorsements in congressional races, including over 50 Democrat incumbents.
Conspicuous by his absence? Rick Nolan, in the 8th Congressional District..
And after all he’s done for them…:
Some incumbents didn’t make the Everytown list. The group didn’t endorse Rep. Rick Nolan (D., Minn.), who co-sponsored the House bill to expand background checks. Mr. Nolan, who has an F score from the NRA, is trying to fend off a challenge from Republican Stewart Mills, whom the NRA gave an A rating.
The endorsements were extremely heavy on incumbents, and almost never involved contested races.
Why, it’s almost like gun control is political poison or something…
Someday, when we need an epitaph for the Obama Years, I’m going to submit this paragraph by Mattew Continetti:
Over the last few years the divergence between what the government promises and what it delivers, between what it says is happening or will happen and what actually is happening and does happen, between what it determines to be important and what the public wishes to be important — this gap has become abysmal, unavoidable, inescapable.
I got word over the weekend that Democrat oppo-researchers, in trying to grunt out a hit piece against Stewart Mills, GOP-endorsed candidate in CD8, “quoted” Mills’ appearance with me last January on the Northern Alliance Radio Network.
The Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) released this exceptionally puerile hit piece on Mills last week.
No, I said “puerile”:
Green Bay Packers fan and millionaire Stewart Mills III emerged from hiding – briefly – to reports in the Minneapolis Star Tribune that he sold millions of dollars worth of cars using stimulus money. As a candidate, Mills has opposed the stimulus.
The state’s economy is stagnant, we’re heading for deficit – and the Democrat Party is targeting voters whose votes turn on f****ng NFL team loyalty?
This is the mentality of the voter the Democrat Party is aiming for?
The ad tries to jack Mills up because the family’s car business bought vehicles using Cash for Clunkers money.
The nerve; in a system designed to promote and reward rent-seeking, people seek rent!
Of course, that was four solid years before Mills decided to run for office. Y’know – one of those episodes that led him to decide to try, at least, to change things in DC.
Oh, yeah – I’m famous now:
Mills Said the Stimulus was a “Sugar High.” In 2014 Mills said, “The last round of tax spend and borrow stimulus which is nothing but one sugar high after another, negatively affected our part of Minnesota because we had none of the benefits from it, but yet we’re the ones that are going to have to pay the bills.” [Northern Alliance Radio Network with Mitch Berg, 1/4/14]
Wow – oppo researchers were tuned in! I feel…
…dirty.
Oh, yeah – Mills was 100% correct. The stimulus – of which “Cash for Clunkers” was far from the dumbest – was a “sugar high”; it subsidized car purchases in 2009, inducing people to buy buy buy probably earlier than they would have otherwise (the sugar high), meaning they didn’t buy later (the crash).
It’s how every “stimulus” works.
Mills was right. The DCCC is wrong.
Someone tell their oppo weasel I said so. And that I’m a Bears fan.
Tom Scheck notes that this year’s gubernatorial race isn’t a “visionary” contest:
The race stands in mark contrast to the contest four years ago, when two bold candidates for governor – Dayton and Republican nominee Tom Emmer – offered vastly different choices for Minnesota voters.
Um, yeah.
And what does the Minnesota media do when a conservative Republican offers a vision – a real, stark choice – and offers it with uncompromising gusto?
They sniff and label him “extreme” and basically help the DFL do its branding work.
The Irvine Park neighborhood, south of West Seventh Street and downhill from the XCel Energy Center, votes reliably DFL.
And so they care a ton about the homeless.
Provided they are walled away from them.
The Dorothy Day Center – across 7th Street from the X – wants to expand. And that’s got Irvine Parkers up in arms:
The St. Paul Pioneer Press reports that residents of the nearby Irvine Park neighborhood want more say into the plans for the expanded shelter and service center.
Few will deny there’s a real need for the expansion. But neighbors say they already see homeless people spill over into the nearby park and onto their properties while waiting for the shelter to open each evening. They say the proposed design of the upgraded facility won’t do much to alleviate the situation.
Either will sixty more years of DFL rule, complete with using the inner city as a warehouse for the poor and de-institutionalized.
Who do we protest to about that?
Bill Glahn notes that the Dayton campaign’s latest TV ad – featuring a “beleaguered middle class family” – continues a long DFL tradition:
The Ports are in no sense “middle class.” Steve Port owns his own businessin Burnsville, employing several staff. In true, “What’s the Matter with Kansas” fashion, I’m not sure the Ports—by supporting Democrats—are operating in their own self-interest as small-business owners in Minnesota.
But they do support the Democrats. Besides the sizable campaign donations, Lindsey Port recently wrote a letter to the editor supportive of the Democratic cause.
And we do mean large contributions; the Ports gave $1,000 to Roz Peterson’s undistinguished lump of a DFL opponent.
This is, of course, a DFL pattern. Four years ago, the DFL and the “Alliance for a Better Minnesota” and its media allies at “The Uptake”, produced a piece featuring a mother who was “boycotting Target” because of their pro-business campaign donation to the putatively “anti-gay” Tom Emmer. Of course, the woman was an upper-middle-class DFL donor from the southwest suburbs.
The DFL. Fake outrage. Fake numbers. Fake people.
According to Rasmussen, Franken leads McFadden by eight points – but only by three points (48 to 46) among people who are “certain” to vote:
Yesterday, Roll Call included Franken on their top-ten list of the most vulnerable U.S. Senators facing re-election in 2014. McFadden had a “fiery” performance in his debate with Franken yesterday in Duluth and he followed-up today with a press conference today about rate increases for MNsure consumers.
If the poll is accurate (and since Scott Rasmussen retired, it’s been less so – but it’s also swung a bit toward favoring the left), this could be very good news for the GOP in MInnesota…
(Via PoliMN)
Last week, Sally Jo Sorenson of Bluestem Prairie – one of the small minority of Minnesota progblogs that don’t deserve police surveillance or restraining orders – was jumping up and down over this article in the Minnesota Daily, the U of M newspaper.
It’s an interview with a couple of design and communications professors, going over the symbology of various campaign signs.
On the one hand, I do a lot of that sort of thing as part of my day job. It’s more than an academic subject to me.
Sorenson quotes the piece in the Daily by Kevin Karner, in re the two professors’ comparisons of the signs in the Secretary of State Race between Steve “Couldn’t Get To 45% in the Primary” Simon and Dan Severson:
Severson also tries to indicate his party affiliation through color, but the placement of the blue ribbon with white stars over a red backdrop almost evokes the Confederate Flag — an odd choice for Minnesota.
Here’s the Confederate Flag – the “Stars and Bars”, which sounds a little like an uptown hipster tavern.
Yep – red field, blue bars, white stars. Modeled after the Union Jack. Maybe the regional left needs to get on the Scots and Brits for their racist microaggressions.
Here’s Severson’s:
Red “Republican” background. Blue stripe – unlike the Rebel flat, there’s one, not two of them, and not only is it wavy, but it and its white stars seem to vanish into the distance. Almost like something zipping across the sky. Leaving contrails behind it, even.
Now, I’m not a college professor or a progblogger, so I have no idea what one might associate with Dan Severson…
…that would involve something with a star on it flashing across the sky into the distance?
Being neither an associate design professor nor a progblogger with numerous elite academic credentials, I’m obviously too stupid to figure it out.
Heck, we all are! It just has to be a Confederate flag reference! Sometimes I just feel so stupid.
Hm. What could that slashing, star-clad blue ribbon mean?
DUURRR! DAAAAAAAR! Stupid conservative blogger! Must smash things!
Oh, yeah; Sorenson:
Given the side Minnesota’s soldiers fought on in the Civil War, it’s odd indeed.
Given the side Ms. Sorenson’s Democrat party forebears fought on in the Civil War, I suppose it’s just high time for incongruity.
…is that so many of them think “declaring what the facts are” is a substitute for “knowing what the facts are”.
Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is on the air! I will be on from 1-3PM today!
I’ll be talking with:
Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1570, and Brad Carlson has “The Closer” edition of the NARN Sundays from 1-3PM.
So tune in the Northern Alliance! You have so many options:
Join us!
This is the campaign sign that seems to have driven a certain U of M professor insane:
Here’s the Senate GOP’s tool for calculating your new, awful MNSure premium.
Here’s Bill Glahn’s blog.
As the US flirts with Ebola panic, it’s worth noting that Nigeria – more corrupt than Chicago but probably not Camden, with ethnic and social divisions that would make the most hardened academic grievance-monger yak up her skull, and a nation that as a whole is like a Detroit that rarely ends – has managed to stop its Ebola outbreak pretty much cold. 20 were infected, and eight died – a tragedy, sure, but since the outbreak occurred in Lagos, a city of 21 million that is among the least hygenic metropolitan areas in the world, that seems fairly miraculous.
Nigeria did it by doing the public-heath blocking and tackling that has stanched epidemics from cholera to malaria to dengue fever; isolating the infected and the infection, monitoring the exposed, practicing basic hygiene around the ill and the potentially ill.
They knuckled down and did what needed to be done.
Now, the US is one of the healthiest nations on earth. Perhaps too healthy – modern parents’ mania for germ-killing may be hurting their childrens’ immune systems. Worse, while some among our public health community are well aware of the dangers a virus like Ebola could cause, it seems there were several major breakdowns in the handling of the first case, Thomas Duncan, a Liberian living in Dallas.
Will the CDC and the other public health authorities react appropriately to the outbreak? Especially given that the CDC answers to an Administration that clearly values political correctness over competence?
Let’s just say that this is one area where I’d love to think government was as competent as big government’s proponents tell us it is.
The track record is mixed, of course.
Through much of the last 100 years, between sound public health and public information, and world-leading research (thank you, free enterprise!), most epidemic diseases have been contained, and many former scourges have been nearly eradicated.
And yet when the AIDS epidemic broke out, it quickly escaped the public health agencies’ ability to control it. Part of it was the government’s response; in one of three mistakes he made as President, he kept the government’s response low-key.
Of course, there was plenty of blame to shame. Some countries contained AIDS using sound, traditional public health practices. Cuba contained its outbreak far more quickly and effectively than the US, using sound, traditional public health techniques including quarantining the infected…
…which were politically untenable in the US; as the gay rights movement gained traction, the idea of focusing public health efforts on gay culture, much less quarantining gay male patients, as the Cubans did), became politically incorrect.
(And since some liberal will no doubt read the above as “Mitch Berg calls for quarantining teh gay” – I’d say the same thing if there were a 100% lethal, contagious, viral disease that spread via the behavior of straight Presbyterian conservatives; public health is public health).
Will the Obama Administration react any better to this crisis than they did the last several? There’s always hope. The President certainly isn’t getting useful advice from some of his supporters (hint to MSNBC hosts and other illiterates; the CDC needs a surgeon general to react to an epidemic about like the IRS needs a director to process your 1040 form; Obama needs to quit politicizing public health. Oh, wait – there it is again!).
Fingers crossed.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Remember when I worried that the new Domestic Abuse legislation would let cops seize guns on a mere allegation from a spouse? I was wrong, and Andrew was right, about the wording of that legislation.
But the Eid case that I sent you illustrates the difference between that the law SAYS and how the law is ENFORCED.
The cops in the Eid case claimed – and the HennCo prosecutor argued in court – that taking a person to lock-up for a 72-hour hold on the fear that he might be a danger to himself or others, was legally identical to a judicial finding of mental illness sufficient to commit a person to a mental hospital after a full-blown commitment trial; therefore, loss of gun rights.
No, that’s not what the law says. But that’s how HennCo enforces it.
Unless you can afford a great lawyer to fight the system, it doesn’t matter what the law says, it only matters what the law does to you. I was wrong about the wording. But was I right about the risk?
Joe Doakes
Como Park
that is always the kicker, with any law: governments in force laws any damn way they please. Or, as the Obama administration has shown us, if they care to do it at all.
There has apparently been an epidemic of kidnapping; 15 major celebrities, all of whom were stridently antiwar up until 2009, have completely disappeared from the face of the earth.
If you see any of these celebrities, notify the authorities.
That is all.
Nuisance lawsuits often get big headlines when they’re filed. But for the cost of a filing fee, anyone can sue anyone for a billion dollars.
The real question is – is it going to fool a judge or jury?
Pimp loses his lawsuit against Nike for failing to warn on the box that Air Jordans should not be used to stomp people’s faces.
A friend of mine on Facebook (who admits he based it on a statement by Senator Michelle Benson, on the Dave Thompson show) notes the wierdness of the state’s math in arriving at the “4.5% increase in MNSure Premiums” number that the media is trumpeting.
He put it this way: If a fast food restaurant serves 500 customers and has $5,000 in the till at the end of the day, that’s an average of $10 per person.
If a coffee shop next door has 5 customers and makes a grand total of $25, they averaged $5 per sale.
So what was the average amount spent by customers to those two stores?
If you’re a Democrat, you picked “1” – which is the average price of two items, but is not the average amount spent by the customers If you undestand economics, you picked “2”.
What the state has done – and the media has reported more or less uncritically – is tell us the average price of the plans (that are still on the market). Not the average amount customers will have to spend to stay in the exchange – which includes nearly 2/3 of all MNSure customers who lost their lower-priced Preferred One plans, and who will be paying at least 20% more.
The state’s spin is dishonest. The media uncritically running the spin is an abdication of their purported job of keeping government honest.
I went into a chain diner the other day. I had a bowl of soup. I promptly felt ill, and before long came the projectile vomiting, and then the projectile diarrhea.
I went to the manager after I cleaned up to complain.
“Yeah” said the manager, “we’ve had a lot of that today with the soup. OK – actually every person who’s eaten the soup today has gotten sick. But in our defense, people eating the soup at all our other stores have gotten even sicker. You should feel pretty good, all in all!”
——–
MNSure – the state’s Obamacare exchange – has been a bulgarian goat rodeo from the very beginning. Between the cataclysmic botch of the rollout, to the Director’s corrupt canoodling with the state’s Medicad director, to the technical review that indicates this year’s open enrollment could be worse than last year, to Preferred One – the provider with the best value for most younger, healthier people – dropping out, it’s been an ordeal to watch a pretty typical example of government control of any product or service.
But now – in the wake of yesterday’s price hikes – MNSure, the DFL and the media (ptr) are trying a new tactic; the bizarre non-sequitur; I’m adding emphasis:
Even with the premium increases for 2015, the cost of a mid-level benchmark policy on MNsure for a 40-year-old will be about $182 per month, state officials said. That’s less than the rate for comparable plans in 16 other metropolitan areas, according to figures published in September by the Kaiser Family Foundation, which is based in California.
On Wednesday, the Commerce Department supplemented the foundation’s analysis with preliminary and current rates from more than two dozen other metropolitan areas, and concluded that rates in the Twin Cities are the lowest.
“When you compare Minneapolis and St. Paul to every metropolitan region throughout the country, Minnesota has the lowest rates in the nation,” Commerce Commissioner Mike Rothman said during a news conference near the State Capitol.
Ah. So Minnesotans’ rates are rising – rising by a lot for the people on the lower end of the market – but they’re higher elsewhere?
Ahem:
SO WHAT?
Minnesota had a system that covered 92% of Minnesotans – the highest rate in the country – with everything from cadillac government union plans to UCare to company health plans to inexpensive “catastrophic care” plans (now illegal!).
And it did all that for even less!
If your rates are rising 20% – and if you were a Preferred One customer, 2/3 of MNSure’s customer base, they are – on top of the higher rates you’re already paying (because MNSure replaced the catastrophic-care-only plan you may have had two years ago with a plan that includes mental health, preventive and, for the guys, OB-GYN services), why do you care what people are paying in Newark?
Are their plans rising 20%? If yes, then that proves the point. If no, then what is Minnsota doing wrong?
Watching last night’s gubernatorial debate in Rochester, it’s easy to see why Governor Messinger’s Dayton’s handlers didn’t want to have too many televised debates, and wanted to make sure they were only televised on outlets like C-Span and Farmington Cable Access. He was awful.
At one point, I could have sworn I heard him mumble that he lowered taxes by $2 Billion. What the flaming hootie-hoo? Someone sic Catherine Richert on that claim!
Jeff Johnson wiped the floor with Dayton. If the Johnson campaign doesn’t have comparison shots of Dayton and Johnson answers on TV and Youtube in the next week, they’re insane.
And today comes news that the Duluth News Tribune (and perhaps the entire Forum chain of papers) has endorsed Johnson.
Among Johnson’s priorities are to reduce taxes and shrink government. While that sounds like Republican boilerplate, the reality is that if Minnesota is to compete in a competitive national economy, it has to improve its tax climate and streamline its ossified regulatory systems. Johnson can’t do it alone, but as governor he can force lawmakers to talk about it.
Johnson is young, educated, experienced in public service and the private sector, and focused on issues vital to his state’s future. Minnesotans would do well to make him their next governor.
And if voters in Greater Minnesota return the MNGOP to control in Saint Paul with Jeff Johnson as Governor, we can make some progress.
(And, naturally, if the GOP keeps itself focused. Which may be the biggest battle of all.
I read yesterday’s headlines about the new, Preferred-One-Free MNSure rates, and got ready to write.
Then, I got an email from a friend who works in the Healthcare industry, which explains it much better:
The headlines on MNSure saying premiums rose only 4.5%. This reminds me of an old story.
A friend of mine was flying a helicopter in the fog in downtown St. Paul and his radio and navigation equipment failed suddenly. He knew he was in the midst of the downtown and going any direction could mean an immediate crash. He stayed put hovering for a few minutes, inching lower. When the fog lifted he was right outside the MN Dept. of Commerce. Not recognizing the building he grabbed a piece of paper and a big sharpie. He wrote in big block letters “Where am I?” and put it put it on the outside of his windshield. A commerce employee saw the helicopter’s predictament and wrote a note back and placed it in the building window. “You’re in a helicopter.”
Technically correct and absolutely meaningless.
That’s my take of this headline. The real problem is that the low cost insurer, Preferred One, dropped out. Maybe the remaining plans only increased by 4.5% but to the 60% who were on Preferred One, the real story is that their premiums are rising about 20%. Minnesotans will understand that if they take time to read the full story.
Which the DFL is counting on people not doing, naturally, as they relentlessly pound away with that “4.5%” number on ads around the state.
Recent history shows it’s not hard to fool Minnesotans.
Democrats who ran four-square against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – including Al Franken – have suddenly turned into war-hawks.
Which sorta answers the question “where are all those peace creeps now that the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner is in office?”.
So it’s almost refreshing to see that the official Miss Bloodyshirt USA 2007, Cindy Sheehan, is not only still anti-war, but still batspittle crazy:
Sheehan said the left anti war movement is being ignored by the democrats because they are “reverse racists” who are supporting Obama only because he is an African-American.
She said, “I think that there are some people on the so called left, who might say we have to circle our wagons around the first African American president, and to me that is racism in reverse because his policies are actually still the racist policies of empire.”
I said she was crazy. I didn’t say she was all wrong.
I try to find things in common with people with whom I disagree. I really do.
Part of it was growing up a liberal, into my twenties. I don’t see liberals as “the enemy” – not reflexively, at least. They’re people, mostly.
Do both sides have crazies? People who regard dissent and disagreement as signs of depravity and evil, things to be eradicated? Sure.
Unfortunately, on the left the crazies are pretty mainstream. One of my enduring memories was after the death of Tony Snow, the former talk show host who’d become Dubya’s press secretary before being diagnosed with colon cancer. The outpouring of hatred in the lefty alt-media after the death of Snow – one of the most genuinely good people in the media racket – was a telling moment; to a big part of the “intellectual” left, it’s not just about elections and bills; it’s a scorched-earth battle for control of the entire culture.
So perhaps it’s unsurprising that the NYTimes expresses…shock? Confusion? Befuddlement at Republicans in Congress expressing their concerns for the President’s security; I’ll add emphasis:
WASHINGTON — President Obama must be touched by all the concern Republicans are showing him these days. As Congress examines security breaches at the White House, even opposition lawmakers who have spent the last six years fighting his every initiative have expressed deep worry for his security.
“The American people want to know: Is the president safe?” Representative Darrell Issa of California, the Republican committee chairman who has made it his mission to investigate all sorts of Obama administration missteps, solemnly intoned as he opened a hearing into the lapses on Tuesday.
Genuine desire not to see the President and his family killed? It doesn’t seem a stretch – on the right. Conservatives see Liberals as wrong; Liberals see Conservatives as Evil. Evil people wish death upon their political opponents. (Anyone but me seeing a Berg’s Seventh Law reference here?)
Put another way: Today’s GOP, for all its maddening problems, is directly descended from the party that freed the slaves and brought about a shot at freedom for hundreds of millions in the Eastern Bloc. Today’s Democrats are controlled by extremists who are intellectual descendents from sixties radicals who drank from the same well of Kool Aid that might not have openly endorsed herding kulaks and counterrevolutionaries into railroad cars to ship to Siberia – but they could see the reasoning behind it, too.
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