The conservative traveling town-hall carnival has come to my neck of the woods. Not since the construction of Roosevelt Dam have so many jackasses been herded so closely together in such an organized manner.
Today there will be two gatherings. At nine o'clock in the morning, professional protestors will descend upon the office of Democrat Harry Mitchell. It was tempting, the idea of experiencing political thuggery at its ugliest, but my principles are keeping me away.
My views wouldn't matter to Harry because he isn't my Congressman. Republican John Shadegg is. His town-hall meeting is to be held at 11:30 a.m. just a few miles from the spot where Harry will be harrassed. Both will be graced by the presence of an insurance-industry-backed lobbying group called "Americans for Prosperity".
These are the people who have told their rent-a-mouths to "put the fear of God" into Democratic representatives, even if it means riding the bus from state to state, the outfit that compares the Obama health care plan - whatever that might be, since Congress hasn't produced it yet - to the Holocaust. Yup. The Holocaust.
(My brother married a nice German gal; I should ask her if that's the way it was presented to her in school, that the Third Reich was trying to provide health care to six million Jews. Maybe.)
In other words, these are not rational people, not far in spirit from that twisted religious cult from Kansas that went around protesting the funerals of soldiers because God killed them on account of He hates gays. Makes sense to some. I would sooner attend a Klan rally than be in the presence of such truly vile people.
It might be a different story if they had a point, but they don't. Between seniors on Medicare (39.5 million Americans), civilian federal employees (1.8 million), our fine military personnel (2.66 million strong), kids on SCHIP (about 7.5 million) and federal prisoners (all 206,576 of them), we already have as many folks receiving government health care in this country as we have without any health insurance at all...
Which means that we're already halfway through the Holocaust! Why, it's been taking place forever now, including the 12 consecutive years that the U.S. House of Representatives was controlled by the GOP. Heck, the most conservative president we've ever had in the White House watched it happen right under his powdery nose. And what did they say then?
So, when you see the footage of these right-wing lunatics disrupting the machinations of democracy, you understand that they're not doing it out of concern. They're doing it out of hatred for Barack Obama and nothing else. Why else compare him to the most extreme embodiment of evil in our time, Adolph Hitler?
In doing so - especially here - they have relegated the works and ideals of a great Arizonan, Barry Goldwater, to the children's fiction shelf in our national library. The conscience of today's conservative is but a fairy tale without a moral.
pH 8.o8.o9
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