I was just on Skype, talking to a friend of mine. We were talking about the different things we have seen so far from those who oppose the current administration, and grappling with patterns behind those different things.
What I can't get my head around is the who and why... please have a read and add or subtract as you can!
First, look at the town hall meetings this past month. What I saw as a bunch of angry people yelling anything, regardless whether or not it made sense. I do think that they are honestly angry, but what they were yelling about wasn't the real reason so it didn't really matter if it made sense. The underlying issue for them is having a black man as President. This is what allows them to switch so easily between claims of socialism, communism, and Heil Obama... none of that is really the issue.
The problem is that there are the Glenn Becks of the world who are stirring this kind of thing up. I think that the racism is a tool to get people angry. Imagine for a moment that Hillary was elected... would things be any different? Instead of thinly veiled racist blather, wouldn't we be hearing about that Nazi B*tch? Instead of stirring people up based on racism, I think the tool would probably be the innate Republican hatred of the Clintons.
Any Democrat in office would be subject to the same thing. No matter what policy or simple action that a Democrat would take, that President would face a wave of criticism... even for something as innocuous as 'hey kids, work hard in school'. It's sabotage, plain and simple. What I don't understand is why. I don't get why anything resembling civilized discourse has disappeared, and I don't understand why the classic Republican platform of fiscal conservatism and everything else has disappeared. What happened to opposing parties that worked for the greater good of the country, as opposed to a party that has transformed itself into an enemy?
Ok, back to the town hall meetings. What's up with the guys with guns, what were they doing at those meetings, locked and loaded? I think that in some sense, they were soldiers wanting to be martyrs. Think of what Fox News would look like if there was some sort of incident... maybe it would be one of these guys marched off in handcuffs, or maybe there would be some gunfire. Plastering that video 24/7 on Fox would be like red meat dropped into a pack of starving hyenas. Would it be a flash point? A clarion call for revolution? Who is their enemy? I think they want a new Waco, but I don't understand why. I also think it would be on a whole different scale... I think part of the reason that Fox puts these screamers on camera is so that they can see each other, and know that there are others like them who are just as angry all across the country.
So the Glenn Becks of the world, why do they do it? What is Glenn Beck a mouthpiece for? Why does he still have a job? These are the things I want to understand! I wonder if it's democracy as a whole that's being sabotaged, and not just the Obama administration. I don't feel like the Bush administration accidentally made the mistakes that they did... they mindfully got us into a war based on pure fiction. With warrantless wiretaps, concentration of power in the executive branch, disregard for habeus corpus and an economy left teetering on collapse... it's clear that there was no respect for the principles that this democracy was built on.
So, I think that while a Democrat is in office they sabotage the government by sabotaging the Democrat... while a Republican is in office, they use policy to do it. But who is they? And what do they want this country to be?