Wow! Look at all those people.
This is supposed to be a shot of the 9/12 protesters last Saturday.
Since turning 60-70,000 people into a million would be a miracle of Biblical proportions a lot of folks on the Right will instinctively believe it.
And like a lot of things that they instinctively believe, it would be wrong.
There's another big problem with the photograph: it doesn't include the National Museum of the American Indian, a building located at the corner of Fourth St. and Independence Ave. that opened on Sept. 14, 2004. (Looking at the photograph, the building should be in the upper right hand corner of the National Mall, next to the Air and Space Museum.) That means the picture was taken before the museum opened exactly five years ago. So clearly the photo doesn't show the "tea party" crowd from the Sept. 12 protest.
Now that America's Ignorancefest 2009 is over, what conclusions can we draw from this spontaneous, grassroots, Fox News/Freedom Works/Health Insurance Industry sponsored and coordinated outpouring of white people's inability to grasp reality?
Well, the most obvious thing that they are wrong about is who they are. They believe that they are independent thinking defenders of the Constitution and the "American Way of Life". You gotta admit that sounds a lot better than corporate lackeys.
What's really happening with these protests is that the genuine rage and not unreasonable economic insecurity of these citizens is being stoked, exploited, distorted and manipulated by movement leaders for entirely different ends. The people who are leading them -- Rush Limbaugh, the Murdoch-owned Fox News, Glenn Beck, business-dominated organizations of the type led by Dick Armey -- are cultural warriors above everything else. They're all in a far different socioeconomic position than the "middle-income Americans" whose anger they're ostensibly representing. Their principal preoccupation is their cultural contempt for various groups (illegal immigrants, the "undeserving" poor, liberals) and their desire to preserve the status quo whereby the prime beneficiaries of government policies remain themselves: the super rich and the interests that control Washington. It's certainly true that many of these protesters are driven by the standard right-wing cultural issues which have long shaped that movement -- social issues, religious fears, cultural and racial divisions, and hatred for "liberals" as Communist-Muslim-Terrorist-lovers. For many, all of that is intensified by the humiliation of being completely thrown out of power, at the hands of the first black President. But much of it is fueled by the pillaging of the corporations and Wall St. interests which own their government.
Ouch!
70,000 dupes getting together to show the world just how little they know about the things that they are protesting against.
Congressman Joe Wilson, (Idiot-SC) is a microcosm of the 70,000 and the Right's approach to the health care debate. I could care less that Wilson shouted, "You lie!" to the President on the floor of Congress. That's just free speech. However, if you are going to do a major breach of decorum then you should at least be correct in your accusations. It's not a hard thing to do, ten seconds on Google would have saved Joe from showing the world just how big of a moron he really is. Now we all know.
The 70,000 Fox News induced protesters are just Joe Wilson gone Viral.
Neal Gabler, Boston Globe covers this phenomenon nicely in his article, The extreme Republican Party.
Let’s not mince words here: We now have an entire political party that is not only dedicated to the mediocre. It is dedicated to the nearly deranged.
Nearly?
Anyway, we kinda know what they are protesting against, which is more than they seem to do. So what are they for?
That's easy, just type into Google, Health Insurance Horror Stories.
"When Steve and Leslie Shaeffer's daughter, Selah, was diagnosed at age 4 with a potentially fatal tumor in her jaw, they figured their health insurance would cover the bulk of her treatment costs." But "shortly after Selah's medical bills hit $20,000, Blue Cross stopped covering them and eventually canceled her coverage retroactively."
So begins a recent report in The Los Angeles Times titled "Sick but Insured? Think Again," which offers a series of similar horror stories, and suggests that these stories represent a growing trend: more and more health insurers are finding ways to yank your insurance when you get sick.
Beats the hell out of me why they would want more of that. But there it is and that's what we'll be getting without the public option in the Health Care Reform Bill.
70,000 people getting together to show their support for health insurance company profits and taking a dump on their fellow citizens. I'll bet Glenn Beck is proud.
To be honest, some of the protesters could care less about the insurance companies, Fox News, you, me or anything else. They are on a mission, they believe that they are doing the Lord's work. Like He would need any help from these cretins, right?
If you're not fortunate enough to live in the Bible Belt and can't really experience this first hand, then I would highly recommend reading the full article, Glenn Beck and The 9/12 Marchers: Subversives From Within. It's about a growing group of people who want to do away with the America that we know and replace it with a country based on some lame preacher's interpretation of the Bible.
Sounds far-fetched? Well, both of my U.S. Senators from Oklahoma belong to that C. Street cult known as "The Family".
The tactics that progressives develop for actually winning against the right have to involve far more than politics. They have to also involve ceaseless vigilance against an enemy that has now -- literally -- raised up an armed, paranoid and deluded alternative nation within our borders and created a fifth column to undermine the United States and our democracy. They need to be called out by the rest of us in no uncertain terms.
Long term the Religious Right subculture has to be understood, then exposed for what it is: an anti-democracy movement built on willful lies with potentially violent underpinnings in the thrall of an apocalyptic cult of revenge on everyone not like "us." It is also the useful tool of corporate lobbyists. Who use these shock troops of the proudly ignorant for non-ideological reasons.
This article was written by Frank Schaeffer, he knows because he was once a big dog in the Religious Right.
The BBC has just made a movie about the life of Charles Darwin. But it looks like it won't be shown here. Any guesses as to why?
"The film has no distributor in America. It has got a deal everywhere else in the world but in the US, and it's because of what the film is about. People have been saying this is the best film they've seen all year, yet nobody in the US has picked it up.
"It is unbelievable to us that this is still a really hot potato in America. There's still a great belief that He made the world in six days. It's quite difficult for we in the UK to imagine religion in America. We live in a country which is no longer so religious. But in the US, outside of New York and LA, religion rules.
In light of a recent survey, it looks like the health care reform protesters will have to stop seeing their doctors. Because they are communists! At least by their own reasoning.
A RWJF survey summarized in the September 14, 2009 edition of the New England Journal of Medicine shows that 62.9 percent of physicians nationwide support proposals to expand health care coverage that include both public and private insurance options—where people under the age of 65 would have the choice of enrolling in a new public health insurance plan (like Medicare) or in private plans.
If you think that things are crazy now, just wait until we tackle the most important issue: Climate Change.
Later
