http://firedoglake.com/2009/08/15/come-saturday-morning-is-this-really-what-you-want-wingers/Come Saturday Morning: Is This Really What You Want, Wingers?
By: Phoenix Woman Saturday August 15, 2009 7:30 am
In the comments thread of this fine post by bmaz on 21st-Century Hate in the USA, bobschacht worried out loud about the possible consequences of the fanning of the flames of right-wing and racist hatred:
...I think the Town Hall meetings imbroglio going on across the country now have ripped open a scab in the body politic: It may be that most of the country has moved on, and is willing to accept a Black President, and gay marriage, but there is a Resistant Core that is terrified because their world is getting turned upside down.
During the Bush years, the Republicans stoked the fires of fear about National Security, teaching us to fear each other and Watch Out for “terrorists,” most of whom were expected to have brown skin and speak Middle Eastern languages.
Now that Bush is no longer in office, and we have a non-White President who campaigned on a platform of change, Republicans are stoking the fires of fear because circumstances have forced President Obama to tackle ten problems at once, each one knee-capped by the Bush administration. But the cumulative effect is to raise the prospect of wholesale change, upsetting the Status Quo and threatening the Domestic Security of the people who identified with the previous ruling class.
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It will be a miracle if President Obama makes it through his presidential term(s) alive.
Well, as I told him, this is what I tell wingnuts who I suspect of fantasizing about committing grievous bodily harm against President Obama, Democrats, or non-wingnuts in general:
Remember how we got the Great Society? Aka New Deal II?
That was when JFK got martyred in a city known to be a hotbed of right-wing racist extremism. The guy who took over for JFK turned out to be much more progressive than JFK ever was, much to the dismay of the right-wing nutjobs who’d put up all those “WANTED for TREASON” posters all over Dallas in the first weeks of November, 1963.
Remember how Bill Clinton got re-elected in 1996, two years after the Republicans — backed by a media that they or their arch-conservative financiers had increasingly bought up, bought off or scared off from honest reporting?
That happened when some of your buddies in a right-wing Michigan militia thought it would be a neat idea to murder 168 government employees and their children by blowing up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. {See also the picture in this post.}
Do you all really want to go for the trifecta here?
Heck, we could even go back to when the ultimate wingnut, John Wilkes Booth, ruined the chances of his beloved South's making a smooth adjustment to a post-slavery world when he put a bullet in the head of the man who advocated generosity, "with malice towards none and charity for all", towards the foe he had just vanquished. This is why key leaders of the Confederacy, people such as Generals Robert E. Lee and Joseph Johnston, were horrified at the news of Booth's murder of Lincoln: Because they knew that the near-universal shock and revulsion generated by Booth's act had opened the door to the South's being treated as a captive province for the next few decades.
A word to the wise, wingers: Is this really what you want?