Think carefully--how many riots or revolutions have been waged by old, fat middle-class white folks?

[Bicoastal]

Make no mistake--as a group, these people are harmless.

It's the lone nutjobs we've got to be wary of...

[Warpy]

1. Some of those old, fat, white nutjobs are not harmless

and a couple of hate radio shock jocks out there have been telling them to take their guns with them.

It's going to take real violence before the FBI starts looking into it.

[TankLV]

2. other than Nazi Germany, not too many I guess...

but who's counting...

[MADem]

6. They weren't fat, by and large. The lardasses were the exception.

More people walked and used bikes and public transportation back then. People were more fit. They ate less, too.

[ColbertWatcher]

3. How do you know they're all middle class? n/t

[eridani]

4. They're people who USED to be middle class

And they don't like the slide in their status one little bit.

[MADem]

5. They can't waddle fast enough to chase anyone. nt

[quaker bill]

7. listen to them

look at them, note the spelling challenges.

I have not met many recently, but those I have met in the past seemed to fall a bit above the typical definition of working poor, but not so far up the scale as to call "middle class".

Often the stuff they are saying does not even make sense as a completed thought, regardless of whether it is right or wrong in substance. Bad arguments based on faulty facts can be made and presented well by educated folks. Take George Will for instance, his stuff is generally well composed while entirely wrong.

I met a good number of the NWO - black helicopter types during the Clinton years. These folks were tradespeople, retail sales clerks, nurses aides, used car salesmen, auto insurance agents, and such. Not wealthy or even middle class, more like poor to lower middle class, but regularly employed folks who worked quite hard for little pay.

Curiously, these folks are often the beneficiaries of government. They obtain services, such as free public schools for their kids, decent roads, social security, medicare, law enforcement, disaster relief, and fire protection, all combined to cost the larger society far more than they as a group ever pay in taxes. But these things seem "free" to them so no one counts it up.

The entire package as presented speaks to a high school to community college education level. Folks who work hard, have very little, and are concerned that some of it may be taken away, with little training to understand anything deeper than Limbaugh or Beck, and a desire to believe that the entire world is somehow aligned against them. After all, they do work hard, but the "American Dream" seems impossible to obtain, so it must be someone else's fault. They are correct in the sense that it is in fact someone else's fault, they are just intentionally mislead as to whom to blame.

They want their "country back", but they do not understand that it is not coming. The "country" they want back, in a large measure, never existed in reality, and the parts that did exist were last seen wrapped in the Constitution, alone in a room with George W. Bush, who was playing with matches.

That "Country" is gone. It died on November 4, 2008. Remember how we wanted "Our Country" back? The "Country" we lost (think 60's and the Carter 1970s) would never have elected a mixed race man named Barack Obama President. The point being that the "Country" we got back is a very different place than the "Country" we lost. We tried to get that "Country" back with losing candidate after losing candidate. It was only our acceptance of change, that the "Country" we were getting "back" was in fact now a very different place, that allowed it to finally happen.

In living one's way through history, there is no "back". The country is irrevocably changed, republicans may rise to power again sometime in the future, but the reality of it will be very different. Psychological adjustment to a new reality is tough and involves several stages, we seem to be mostly somewhere in the anger and denial stages, with perhaps a bit of the bargaining stage coming on as the economy begins to turn.

[rug]

8. These.

Of course most of the actual fighting was done by others.