The news today was not good. Same old cooks, same old venues, only this time the President of The United States was visiting New Hampshire and there was an armed white guy. On Church property. This will end ugly...uglier than any of us care to believe. And you know why? Because THEY show up with guns...and we make political contributions over the internet.
The GOP has turned into the party of James Earle Ray. George Wallace...David Duke...and they aren't even ashamed of it anymore. They seem to embrace it, and challenge you to call it for what it is, suggesting that it's YOU, not THEM, who has a problem. Except that in 1968 there was only one James Earle Ray...and today there are hundreds of them. Maybe more. And nobody knows what to say or do about it. Least of all us. We're much too rational and civil for that sort of trench warfare.
Who will the next Reginald Denny be? Remember him? That poor truck driver that got caught in South Central Los Angeles after the LAPD had the bad taste to open up a can of whoop ass on Rodney King and have it all caught on video? I lived in LA then. It took me four hours to get home that afternoon.
Somewhere, out there, is a redneck birther, one of these guys that is showing up to all of these town hall meetings screaming his lungs out. Or hers. Today, one of them had a gun strapped to his thigh.
One might have wished that saner people would have wrestled him to the ground and stuck the barrel of his pistol inside of his mouth...but that didn't happen. Instead, Chris Mathews will interview him shortly.
We are heading down the path of a national nightmare...and nobody is doing anything about it, myself included. You think the LA riots were fun? Just wait until one of these crackers shoots Obama. The whole country will boil over.
We are rapidly becoming Israel...a country that is predominantly secular, but is ruled by a vocal minority of religious zealots... They understand that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and we provide the grease. We don't like conflict...and they don't know any other way to interact.
We show up to town hall meetings with questions for our Congressperson, and they show up with guns, and with hatred, and vitriol, and a bigotry so visceral that it's almost hard to describe.
We've lost.
Because we cannot match there anger and hatred, and we allow them to spew it without challenge.