I'm doing a slow burn and need to vent. I just heard that our local tea bagger group has requested that the Union School Board waive the fee for use of the new auditorium at the high school so they can have an "educational" event to teach people how government works !! If they have to be given credit for one thing, it's that they certainly have a lot of nerve.
These are the anti-tax folks who are carrying petitions to abolish property taxes. They preach smaller government, fewer taxes and then have their rallies in public parks and their protests on public street corners. Yikes !!
Look at the website for Franklin County Patriots (arghh......patriots my ass) and you'll see that this is NOT some rinky dink local group. Look at the product line they offer. Where do they get the money to mail invitations to their rallies? Look at the links they provide - Glenn Beck, of course, is right up there with other right wingnuts.
And there's SO much more to this than anti-tax fever. The gal who arranged for us to watch the President's pep talk to school kids at the coffee house in Pacific the other day told one of our Franklin Co Dems after the rest of us left that she thinks Obama is the anti-christ. She doesn't believe his birth certificate is real. She's convinced that some prophecy is coming to pass. (I saw an ad on TV for some kind of prophecy program coming up. Just what we need. More nonsense.)
Yes, the money to defeat health care/insurance reform is coming from major vested interests. But this is about more than social policy reforms. These kooks are dangerous, and we're just making jokes about them. We think that, if we don't take them seriously, they'll just go away. No they won't. They hate President Obama enough to destroy our country.
They have the power to block the president's address to school kids in millions of school districts across the nation. And they have the nerve to want to use the auditorium in a PUBLIC school, paid for by us "socialists" for their anti-government (read anti-Obama) message. THEY ARE NOT PATRIOTS. THEY ARE ANARCHISTS.
I'll bet they are getting their funding and marching orders from the same corporate powers that used other social issues in the past to enflame anti-reform passions. People who get their information from hate radio and faux news can easily be convinced of anything, no matter how absurd. But we can't just keep laughing at them. This is not a laughing matter.
Someone with a bigger megaphone than mine will have to rouse those of us who want to protect our country and our president from these extremely dangerous people. I'm very disappointed in what passes for "liberal" media such as MSNBC. They give air time to the kooks which, as George Lakoff keeps telling us, just reinforces their message. While we're doing a "reality check" on today's lies, tomorrow lies are already heading out the door.
We must go on the offense and "call them out." They want to dismantle the social safety net that keeps millions of us from sleeping under bridges. Where would many of us be without Social Security and Medicare? I remember the national outcry when Bush tried to privatize Social Security. That's the kind of organized effort we need right now.
Meanwhile, I'll do what I can to keep the local tea baggers from using a public school to preach their anarchist dogma.
Susan says she and other Franklin County Dems will be at the school board meeting this Wednesday to protest against allowing "the tea baggers [to use] a public school to spread their filth." Right on, Susan. Let the school board know that if it kept Obama out, the least it can do is keep The Crazy away.
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