13 September 2009

Time to add hot water?

Well, it's a tough job, but I guess someone had to try it. Elizabeth Mika attempts to engage with the grievances (if that's the correct term for something so inchoate) of the teabagger right, and debate them rationally. It's too bad that none of them will read this. If it couldn't get through to them and make them think, nothing could.

The photos at the top of the posting show that yesterday's rally in Washington was, if anything, even further off the deep end than teabaggerdom has plunged in the past. In particular, check out the sign on the left in the second photo. Whatever you think of Obama (and I'm no fan of his), this is flat-out disgusting.

Andrew Sullivan has a cogent observation:

One wonders where these people were when Bush was massively increasing debt, spending like LBJ, detaining citizens without charges and torturing them, and nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan? I guess limited government is an elastic notion..... Here's a test: when you see as many posters lambasting Bush and Cheney and the GOP for getting us into this crisis in the first place, I will take these people seriously as genuine small government non-partisan conservatives and independents.

Finally: Wow.

Update: Oliver Willis has lots more photos.

4 Comments:

Anonymous rita said...

I don't know how you & Elizabeth can stand researching & writing about that insane stuff. It's makes me wants to bang my head against the wall & I'm just reading it.

13 September, 2009 08:54  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Banging head against wall -- been there, done that, Rita -- don't recommend. Painful. A nice long walk and/or staying away from the media for extended periods of time work better, in my experience. :)

But yes, it is insane.

Infidel, the last photo, of a kid in the "McCarthyism" t-shirt is really... something. The white hoods of KKK cannot be far behind. And bringing kids into this dangerous nonsense is another level of horrible.

13 September, 2009 22:42  
Blogger Infidel753 said...

The things that struck me about the last photo were:

(1) That's a printed shirt. It's not just one thing that one individual made -- it was mass-produced.

(2) These people are constantly ranting about the Democrats being Nazis or Communists, but here's an endorsement of McCarthyism, which is the closest this country has ever come to the kinds of practices that constitute actual totalitarianism.

14 September, 2009 06:48  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

These people are constantly ranting about the Democrats being Nazis or Communists, but here's an endorsement of McCarthyism, which is the closest this country has ever come to the kinds of practices that constitute actual totalitarianism.

Indeed. While we bring back McCarthyism, why not public lynchings and witch hunting/burning? Let the festivities begin. You won't have to go to carnivals on your dates, the carnival will come to you.

Ugh. Sorry, got carried away with sarcasm here, but this both worries and angers me. This is not the country and the world I want my kids to inherit.

Frum calls this wild accusations and the paranoid delusions coming from the fever swamps, but he is in the minority in his criticism, as most GOP leaders support and encourage this idiocy (they want their base to remain "energized.").

What also drives me crazy are the comparisons with the "left fringe" during Bush's years. As if there was an equivalency here between these nutjobs' paranoid accusations and demonstrating against an illegal and immoral war.

14 September, 2009 10:22  

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