http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_HyyDHyAwI6k/S7wSHEj69MI/AAAAAAAAIw8/IG-tocEoNkE/s1600/we+came+unarmed.jpg"Provacateur?" "Looking for trouble?" How about strapping on a gun and a sign talking about watering the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots? How about accusing the President of murdering people and being a Nazi AND a communist over a healthcare bill? How about burning Congressional reps in effigy? How about shouting down rational debate about healthcare with corporate funded, organized screaming about "death panels?"
May we asume if THESE hundreds and thousands (or millions, if you watch Fox News) of organized provacateurs, rather than one 23-yr-old woman, were pinned to a curb and given a concussion-inducing stomp, that would likewise be a non-issue?
The rest of us will take that under advisement.
I'd love see anyone calling this curb stomping a "love tap" put to the Sean Hannity waterboarding test. If you think it's such a picnic, volunteer to have it done to you. Sean demurred when given the opportunity to put his body where his mouth is. I'm pretty sure the same would apply to curb stomping. Hey, a concussion is only cranial bleeding and brain damage. One by itself is only rarely fatal. What's the big, right?
Let's get something else straight: The MANUFACTURED RAGE here belongs SOLELY to the rightwingers and their ever-more-dark-and threatening rhetoric. Fake rage is their entire game, in fact. That is ALL they are selling. These are, after all, self-styled "patriots," comparing themselves to the Founding Fathers, no less, while wailing about "Marxism" and "Communism" and "Nazis" and "Death Panels," when all they're really mad about is the supposed "tyranny" of the rich paying their taxes and health insurance reform. And of course, their rather transparent pain at seeing a black man elected President in "their" country."Their" country. As though those that dare disagree are foreign invaders who have stolen some unnamed birthright. Their theme is "taking our country back," with an implied (and often expressed) corollary that they will do this "by any means necessary."
They BEGAN with a theme of violence and have ratcheted it up ceaselessly since Obama took office, from Glenn Beck's "special" on the coming tax-pocalypse to Sharon Angle's "Second Amendment remedies," to the gun-toting self-appointed "Constitutionalists" shadowing Obama's speeches to "We came unarmed ... this time."
If liberals or immigrants or Muslims, or any one else but the self-annointed Angry White Protestants in this country merely strapped on a gun, or merely burned a public figure in effigy, or merely urged their supporters to "buy all the ammo you can," they would have been instantly condemned as dangerous, violent radicals.And had any other group beaten someone down in this way, the wails of rage and calls for blood from conservatives would be deafening. Remember, they're still wetting their pants over two black guys shouting slogans in a black voting district. Imagine if those guys had so much as TOUCHED some conservative "provacateur" in a teabag hat waving an "Obamunist" sign.
And speaking again of who is "provoking" WHOM, calling this young woman a provacateur in the context of these fucking gun swinging lunatics who flavor every action with a threat of armed violence is a bad joke. And calling them on their first tentantive foray into open violence now is a favor to THEM, because if someone in these organizations doesn't throw some cold water on these rightwingers sitting around rubbing their rage nuts and deciding that they're "not gonna take it anymore" because a black man is President, they're going to do something even stupider and more violent, and the non-crazy contingent of America, which is a lot larger and a lot more determined than the knuckle-draggers understand, will be obliged to extinguish their little Tea Party with a firehose.
I'd respectfully suggest that anyone thinking of ways to try to paper over this crystal clear case of the current batch of rightwing fruitloops gratifying their oft-hinted longing for mob violence keep that in mind.