By the way

"But it should be their right to be racist."

Anyone else get the feeling John Stossel has devoted zero time, for all the Libertarian blabbing he does, to thinking about what a "right" actually means?

No, not peak wingnut yet

Not when there's still room for John Stossel to pop off with some douchey goodness:

STOSSEL: because private businesses ought to get to discriminate. And I won't won't ever go to a place that's racist and I will tell everybody else not to and I'll speak against them. But it should be their right to be racist.

Oh, and better yet - he actually had the 'nads to argue that the government should actively work to protect business that decides to be racist:

But Stossel didn't just argue for the right to discriminate. He went a step further, suggesting the "public accommodations" section of the Civil Rights Act should be repealed, thus allowing businesses to practice racial discrimination. This is the section of the law that prohibits a lunch counter from refusing to serve African-Americans -- a practice which was commonplace when the law was passed.

The government, Stossel says, should be protecting the rights of businesses that want to discriminate -- not the rights of minorities facing pervasive discrimination.

Hopefully this will inspire a movement to discriminate against "being John Stossel". After all, he says he'd have no problem with it...

What. A. Surprise.

Sooooo... it turns out Dick Armey, of the Freedom Works lobby that a'borned our lovely Teabagger movement, has a shall-we-say interesting past:

As chairman of FreedomWorks, the group credited with mobilizing the Tea Party movement, Armey is the movement's de facto leader. Yet Armey's years spent lobbying for a group recognized by the State Department as being a terrorist organization--should give Tea Partiers pause.

And what is this "terrorist organization" that Armey was shilling for? Why, none other than our old buddies!

In that capacity, from 2005 to 2009, Armey promoted the People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran, otherwise known as Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), which the State Department has branded a terrorist group. Armey lobbied his former colleagues on behalf of legislation that would have provided taxpayer support to the MEK.

'Member them? The organization one "Alireza Jafarzadeh" belonged to; one of the foremost guys who tried to convince us the IEDs in Iraq actually came from Iran, probably in the hopes we'd do something stupid in response?

And Dick wanted us to give my tax money to these clowns. And now he's riling up hatred against taxes in the first place. How nice. Win/win, really. *gag*

Blood in the water?

The 'baggers oust Bob Barr from Utah:

The conservative Tea Party movement in the US has blocked a three-term Republican senator from Utah, Bob Bennett, in his bid for re-election.

Sen Bennett came third at a Republican Party convention in Salt Lake City.

The two challengers, one backed by the Tea Party, will face each other in a primary next month for the right to contest November's Midterm elections.

It is the first major victory for the grassroots movement that objects to big government and opposes high spending.

I wouldn't take this lightly- this is one of their first political victories, and things like that have a way of energizing groups for more. About all we need right now is to entrench these clowns in Washington - to put in place Congressfolk who are beholden to those who think Obama is a Nazi and a Stalinist simultaneously.

The two candidates in June's primary, businessman Tim Bridgewater and Tea Party-backed lawyer Mike Lee, both claimed during the campaign that they were better suited to rein in government spending than Sen Bennett.

"There is a mood that has swept across this country and has certainly swept across Utah that is demanding a new generation of leaders. Leaders committed to constitutionally limited government," Mr Lee told the Reuters news agency.

Wheee, so it's a toss-up between yet another bid'ness man, who from the look of the Web page for his run, is gLibertarian, or a Teabagger. Lose/lose for Utah; a bad sign for the rest of us. When one of the guys who helped take down Clinton is no longer conservative enough for you, it's all downhill from there.

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?)