Frickin' frick the frickin' frickin' frickers...

Our local alternative weekly has a couple letters this week concerning the Tea Parties and accusations of racism and bigotry on their part. These letters HAVE to be astroturfed - not only do they sound incredibly similar, but their themes are A) we (liberals) were so awful to Bush, anything the 'baggers do is justified, and B) the Tea Party movement is not never nohow racist, there's absolutely no evidence of that in the letter the previous week criticizing the 'baggers, and if one were to find examples of racism, well 1) the Party is huge and there have to be a few rotten apples therein, 2) even were proof to be provided of Teabagger racism, the liberals were so mean to Bush (see (A)), and 3) Obama is a big meanie Socialist who wants to impose his dark Communist dictatorship on America and that's why they're allowed to do whatever. In addition, we liberals ("Progressives", in the new Glennbeckian formation) will "do whatever we need to" to destroy the 'baggers, much like we destroyed Sarah Palin. (She's been destroyed? Did I miss something? She's sure as hell in the media a lot for someone who's been "destroyed".)

Note also that one speaker at an anti-war rally critical of Israel = "the Left is anti-semitic", while accusations of Tea Party/GOP racism are just a tiny minority and not representative of the movement as a whole. Of course.

(And when even Charles Johnson of LGF recognizes what's going on... you're soaking in it, bucko.)

But, I mean - let's take them at their word. That they're not racist. Even so, there's a proliferation of comparisons of Obama with Stalin and Hitler. Maybe there's no violence at an actual Tea Party rally (though with guns carried openly, one wonders) but the rhetoric itself is violent.

What would you do if you found yourself in 1936 Germany, after all? Concede? Or resist? And that's what the 'baggers are claiming - we're in the early days of Nazi Germany.

(Note that it's arguable that we have gone too far down the road of corporatism and contempt towards the weak, towards fascism - but that is not what these people are arguing; instead we're to assume a centrist Democrat somehow has a secret plan for all-out Communist rule he's hiding from everyone (except of course Glennbeck) and is plotting to seize power... somehow. Sometime. Sooner or later. You know.)

Whining about Tim McVeigh aside ("For years we haven’t heard anything about McVeigh; now they’re trying to use McVeigh as a poster boy representing the Tea Party movement."), are we to assume that if person B thinks - seriously thinks - the country's on the verge of Nazism, that he isn't going to act? That someone isn't going to act?

We're hearing the same out of the 'baggers as we heard from the militias pre-4/20/95 - that they're harmless boy scouts, they're just concerned, they're not a menace to anyone, that it's just empty words or at the least just a reasonable political arguement, yadda yadda.

Incendiary rhetoric has a way of prodding people to act. As someone once said, "words mean things" - and the words coming from the Tea Partiers mean something. As I've said before, they keep up this way and someone is going to take those words and turn them into actions, and then the protests of empty rhetoric and mere concern are going to be seen as empty as they are.

Too late. Again.

(BTW- anyone else get the icky feeling that ham-handed attempts at labeling the word "teabagger" as bigotry is laying groundwork for using hate-crime laws against those critical of the Tea Party?)