It's one thing to disagree with someone, it's another to strongly disagree with someone. But when you feel you need to evoke God's holy powers against your enemy, your moving into Bin Laden territory. But of course the traditional media only runs stories dealing with the "angry left". Right wingers and their extreme hatred is ignored with one exception, Klan/Neo-Nazi rallies, because racism is something everyone can speak out against and feel good. Hell they can even get conservatives who used use the old "southern strategy" to come on TV and say things like "Strom Thurman didn't have a racist bone in his body" with a straight face and not get challenged. Remember this video is of an elected official.
Inaugural Freak Show. You’ll never believe how a Christian right congressman and two anti-abortion protesters have prepared the Capitol for the Obama’s inauguration.
While Mahoney prayed, Rev. Rob Schenck turned his palms to the sky and muttered, "Yes" and "Have mercy" over and over. Then, he dipped his fingers in a jar of oil and painted several crosses on the door’s brass framing "as they did the furnishings of the tabernacle in the temple to the use of God and his word," he prayed.
An officer from the Capitol Police Department stood immediately on the other side of the door, keeping watch over the inaugural stage, a top security concern for both his department and the Secret Service. With his back turned to the door, the officer appeared unaware of the secret ceremony Broun, Mahoney, and Schenck were performing just feet away. Whether security officials gave authorization for the ceremony is unclear; neither the Capitol Police nor Secret Service returned my calls. Broun’s office also refused to respond to my requests for a comment about the anointing.
Nothing "extreme" was said during this prayer. Maybe. But let's remember who we are dealing with. Let's think for a minute about why a radical right-winger would feel the need to perform a secret exorcism on a door Obama will be using.
While the Capitol prayer partners appeared earnest in the prayers for the president elect’s success, they have each distinguished themselves from their Christian right comrades by leveling some of the most paranoid imprecations Obama has faced since he arrived in the Senate. On November 10, 2008, a week after Obama’s election victory, Broun took umbrage at the President-elect’s call for a national civilian security force, a proposal also backed by George W. Bush. According to Broun, who acknowledged the possibility that he might be "crazy," Obama had revealed himself as a radical Marxist Nazi socialist comparable to Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.
"It may sound a bit crazy and off base," Broun told an AP reporter, "but the thing is, he’s the one who proposed this national security force. I’m just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may—may not, I hope not—but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism. That’s exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did. When he’s proposing to have a national security force that’s answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he’s showing me signs of being Marxist."
After seeming to back away from his comments when he was heavily criticized, Broun announced that he was "not taking back anything [he] said." "I firmly believe that we must not fall victim to the ‘it can't happen here’ mentality," he declared in a press release. "I adhere to the adage ‘eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.’"
Amen to that last quote I bolded Mr. Broun. We must be vigilant against the attitude that fascism can't happen here.
As for the rest of this motley crew Rev. Rob Schenck is another total crazy. Who has aided and abetted murder. Think that to strong a charge?
the early 1990s, Schenck was arrested a dozen times during protests outside women's health clinics and abortion doctors' homes, and was momentarily detained by Secret Service after shoving an aborted fetus in front of Bill Clinton outside the 1992 Democratic National Convention. Four years later, Schenck grew so upset by President Clinton's veto of a bill banning partial abortion that he managed to creep behind him during a Christmas Eve service at the National Cathedral and whisper in his ear, "God will hold you to account, Mr. President." He was immediately removed from the chapel and interrogated by Secret Service agents.
A founding member of the hardline anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, Schenck and his allies have engaged in what they call "direct action" to stop abortion by any means necessary. "There's going to be people wounded," Mahoney, a fellow Operation Rescue leader, declared at a 1993 rally. "It's about whose will shall rule on this planet, God's or man's."
Maybe Rev. Rob Schenck, seeing that "his side" lost is just wishing the winning side good luck?
Sensing his influence on the wane, Schenck targeted Obama. In January 2007, Schenck described the newly sworn-in senator’s Christian faith as "woefully deficient." In a March 2008 videoblog, he accused Obama of crypto-Muslim religious sympathies.
Rev. Mahoney at least is just your garden variety anti-abortion type. Rev. Mahoney plans to hold an anti-abortion vigil along Obama’s parade route this January 20. "Sadly, President-elect Obama is on the wrong side of history and human rights by embracing the most radical abortion policies of any President in American history," Mahoney said in announcing the vigil.
The sad thing about Rep. Paul Broun is that he makes looneys like Rep. Michelle Bachman and Sen. James Inhofe look sane.
"We need an investigation of Congress"
Sen. James Inhofe on the "global warming scam."
We have to work together to pull this country out of the hole Bush and his cadre of radical right-winger have dug these past eight years. But we must never kid ourselves about the complete hatred those on the far right feel towards progressives. It's complete and not rational. Stay vigilant.
UPDATE
No love for Senator Tom Coburn? I can't find video but from his wikipedia entry.
"I favor the death penalty for abortionists and other people who take life." Coburn also objects to legal abortion in cases of rape, and he has justified his position by noting that his great-grandmother was raped by a sheriff. In the U.S. Senate confirmation hearings concerning Samuel Alito, Coburn asserted that his grandmother was a product of that rape.
"The gay community has infiltrated the very centers of power in every area across this country, and they wield extreme power... That agenda is the greatest threat to our freedom that we face today. Why do you think we see the rationalization for abortion and multiple sexual partners? That's a gay agenda."