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A “Below The Fold” Bonus Article...

Is Inciting Sedition The Latest Republican Strategy?
by Stephen Rose | April 10, 2009

Back in June of 2008 I wrote a blog entitled, “Surround Barack Obama With Protective Energy.”  Most of the over 2000 readers “got” the point, the need to protect by any means a man who, by his very nature, would incite many against him.  After all, he was half Black, and his liberal-leaning ideas would most assuredly seem threatening to many within the economic “Establishment” and, by definition, the right wing.  Little did I know at the time just how important the need for protection might become.

I didn’t realize the extent of the forces that would align against him no matter what he said or actually did.  I didn’t know the Republican Party would so viciously and systematically go after Obama simply because he won the election.  I didn’t as yet understand how pathologically desperate the right wing is to be “right,” nor did I know how firmly and totally they embrace the ideology that there are only two kinds of people in the world, those with them and those against them, basically those who are them, and those who are not!

And why is the right wing so offended?  The Republicans deserved to lose the presidential and congressional elections.  After eight disastrous years of pushing their own agenda under the “leadership” of the Bush Administration and its congressional enablers, they left the nation in tatters.  The voters at least got it! -- Ah denial.

A fairly reasonable person might have guessed that the Republicans would regroup, lick their wounds, and at least make a show of working with the new Administration to get the nation and citizens back on their feet, if for no other reason than to make the errors of the past eight years seem less egregious and blameful.  One would also expect that the Republicans would honor a period of transition in which the new administration would be dealing with a most difficult situation, one that they had no solutions for themselves.

Instead, their strategy is immediate lie-fabrication and fact-distortion while creating an atmosphere of “imagined” mistakes way before the effectiveness of policies can be measured.  Are they attempting to incite many of the most unstable and paranoid people in our society to sedition?!?

Rush Limbaugh says he wants Obama to fail, an idea mimicked by other right wing mouthpieces.  Ostensibly, says Limbaugh, this is because Obama is a socialist and will turn the nation into a socialist society.  Apparently Limbaugh, his mimickers, and dittoheads don’t understand true socialism, but it’s always a great right wing talking point, along with “no new taxes.”  (The fact that both Reagan and Bush Sr. raised taxes because they had no alternatives just ain’t important.)  The right wing never met an “ism” they didn’t love to use against their opposition.  True meaning is irrelevant.  They only care about some label they can turn into a rallying cry for those Limbaugh often refers to as individual thinkers (cough); the same “group” that follow his every word like he is the gospel.  Does dittohead really sound indivualistic? -- talk about oxymorons!

Meanwhile, as that loony congresswoman from Minnesota, Michelle Bachmann, warns that many in Congress (liberals of course) hate America, Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-Ala.) “…Makes List Of 17 Socialists In Congress.”  This is somewhat reminiscent of Joseph McCarthy and fictional character Senator John Yerkes Iselin, in the original movie “The Manchurian Candidate;” both scammed a Communist witch hunt in the Congress.

In summary, we have many on the right hoping Obama fails, ergo the nation, representatives in Congress accusing other members of Congress of hating America and/or being socialists, and right wing talk show hosts like Sean Hannity and Glen Beck telling their viewers and listeners 24/7 to “take their country back.”  In addition, the minority and obstructionist “Party of No” in Congress is literally and figuratively saying no to any and all legislation put forth by the majority party just elected by the people of America and charged with the recovery of the nation.

Countless right wing politicians and pundits of all sorts are busy decrying, ad nauseam, that our nation is under serious attack, our liberties are endangered, and the First and Second Amendments are threatened.  They are purposely doing this at a time when all too many people are already feeling vulnerable and insecure.  Many Americans are presently under grave stress, fearful for their families and futures and perhaps more susceptible to manipulation by fear mongers disguised as people who care, but who, in reality, are more interested in themselves, their money and power.  We are told that corporations, yes the same ones requiring and requesting multi-billion dollar bailouts because they admittedly screwed up so terribly badly, are in danger of losing their sovereignty while socialists and America haters abound.  In short, according to the right wing, the American way of life faces the worst threat in its history.

And who is attacking us?  “The terrorists?” The “Axis of Evil?”  Lord Voldemort?  Sauron?  Extraterrestrials?  No -- nothing nearly so mundane.  The real threat, of course, is Barack Obama and the dreaded liberals in government.  What do the voters know?  Those delusional souls claiming to know better are the same people who brought us a disaster called the (Neoconservative) government between 2000 and 2008.  Guess who?

Hell, the editor of my local newspaper, The Paradise Post, recently authored and published a column entitled, “Freedom’s death march.”  The first paragraph will give you the gist of the anger/fear-inciting article: “The President of the United States has done a fine job in less than three months of dismantling economic freedom, firing CEOs of private corporations, threatening to send goon squads to those same CEO’s (sic) and attacking his own country from abroad.”  I love the “less than three months” part.  It’s key to the bogus nature of the present right wing attack on the Administration, the fact that Obama has not been president nearly long enough to judge the merits or results of the direction towards which he is headed.

What matters is that this article is by no means atypical of the kind of paranoid disinformation and fear mongering being spread all around the land by the same sore losers and whiners who enabled the crippling of the nation in the first place.  They had no solutions then, and have none now, but that doesn’t stop them from unmercifully attacking the new president who is forced to attempt new and drastic measures while approaching problems he inherited from them.  Now, instead of giving the new Administration the time and support to turn things around, they seem Hell bent instead on encouraging its failure by any means available.

Where is the line drawn between the exercise of Free Speech, the right and need to criticize, and the actual inciting of some sort of insurrection?  Desperately hoping for the failure of the president before he has even created dust motes in the White House, passive-aggressively perpetuating questions about whether or not he is a Muslim (whilst we are engaged in two wars against Muslim radicals) or even a natural born American, and encouraging audiences of tens of thousands to (somehow?) “take their country back” are collectively borderline at best.

Have we learned nothing of the dire consequences of driving people to emotional stress by spreading lies intended to make them fear the loss of the rights/things they hold dear, and usually in the pursuit of political advantage or economic profits?  One example might be the ongoing right wing mantra, no doubt encouraged by the NRA, that liberals want to ban the Second Amendment guaranteeing Americans the right to bear arms.  Though I’ve heard arguments for re-instating the expired ban on assault rifles, I’m not aware of anyone proposing legislation that would ban the Second Amendment or take away peoples’ guns.  The fact that the state of the art weapon at the time this Amendment was drafted was a single shot musket, not rifles shooting hundreds of bullets per minute, seems non sequitur to those making a case for putting assault rifles in the hands of everyone and everybody who wants them.

Some news sources have recently alleged that Richard Poplawski, 23, who recently killed three police officers in Pittsburgh, PA, might have been motivated by fears that the present government intended to ban the right to bear arms in America.  According to an article entitled, “Pittsburgh Cop-Killer Reportedly Feared Gun Ban,” ‘Poplawski had feared “the Obama gun ban that's on the way” and “didn't like our rights being infringed upon,” said Edward Perkovic, his best friend,” and, ‘Another longtime friend, Aaron Vire, said Poplawski feared that President Barack Obama was going to take away his rights, though he said he “wasn’t violently against Obama.”’

Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary defines sedition as “incitement of resistance to or insurrection against lawful authority.”  Incessantly telling anyone who will listen that the Congress is full of people hating America, and otherwise purposely creating an attitudinal climate that coaxes people into believing America is on "Freedom's death march,” that rights will be unjustly banned, and that they should hope the government fails, all the while telling them they are threatened by their own government in ways that warrant them to “take their country back” is not only dangerously irresponsible, but should have consequences.

Sending these messages into the airways 24/7 with the desire to destroy an administration newly in office and not yet guilty in any way of harming the nation (unlike the previous administration), has little to do with Free Speech.  Does it instead have everything to do with unjustly inciting open rebellion of “some sort,” and at a time when the nation is already seriously hobbled by the “real” mismanagement of government over the past eight years?  The next elections are two and four years off.  The present Republican strategy seems more focused on immediacy.  It doesn’t appear to me to be aimed at gathering strength before those elections occur so much as to actively promote some sort of extreme visceral, emotional and ultimately physical reaction before those elections.  We have all painfully learned that the nation has no shortage of angry, fearful and violent people on a short fuse; we know exactly to whom this sort of skullduggery is aimed.

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"He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad."

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