Priorities

Well, we evidently had us a lil' rally the other day here in Columbia:

COLUMBIA — Brian Frank thought awhile before he strung his American flag upside down on a handheld pole for a rally at the Statehouse Monday. But these are appropriate times, he decided, to send the signal of dire distress.

"Americans are going to start caring when it's too late to care," said Frank, a Gaffney man who works in manufacturing and had served as a National Guardsman and Army reservist.

"It took a little bit of guts to show up with a flag like this, but Americans need to wake up," he said.

Was he protesting the illegal, immoral war his fellow armsmen have been thrown into by Bush's idiocy? The collapse of the American economy under 3 trillion dollars of war debt? What could have provoked such courage to hang ***THE FLAG***® upside down?

Fear of brown people, of course:

Frank was one of about 100 who trekked to Columbia for a rally organized by the loosely-formed South Carolina Coalition on Immigration Control. It was a forum designed to push state legislators to improve their plan for addressing illegal immigration, and gave a platform to a handful of men who want Lindsey Graham's seat in the U.S. Senate.

Yep, these are the kind of folks who think Bush & McCain just aren't conservative enough, given their aggressive lack of having built that iron curtain steel-and-concrete barrier from ocean to ocean to separate us from the dusky hordes of Mexico who wish to steal our jobs, go on welfare, attack our women and pee on our lawns. Oh, and let's not forget the Iraqi terrorists sneaking over the Southern border!

Meanwhile, there's some indication the anti-immigrant hysteria these people exude is translating into action:

The latest annual count by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) found that the number of hate groups operating in America rose to 888 last year, up 5% from 844 groups in 2006. That capped an increase of 48% since 2000 — a hike from 602 groups attributable to the exploitation by hate groups of the continuing debate about immigration. And it comes on top of some 300 other anti-immigration groups, about half listed by SPLC as "nativist extremist," formed in the last three years.

I feel we're seeing an analogous situation to that in the early 90's, when people took anti-government rhetoric seriously enough that they indeed decided to take up arms. They'd been told over and over that we were in a Kulturkampf, and by god, they believed it.

Until one or two of them got just a little overenthusiastic.