Packing Heat at Obama's Town Halls

You've seen the pictures:


There's more here and here.

After they shot Dr. Tiller, I wanted to say to them, "Put the gun down. Take a step back and take a deep breath."

Finally. someone beside me is getting a little concerned about this:

“I’ve been worried for some time, even before the events surrounding these health care town halls,” Rich told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Wednesday. “It began during the campaign, where people were shouting ‘treason’ and worse about Obama at Palin rallies — and, essentially, no one in the Republican Party would condemn it. … It’s just been stepping up ever since then.”

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“I think we have a problem,” Rich stated. “This has been going on for too many months. It always seems to happen when there’s a new liberal group taking over. It’s not coincidence that the militias started up again in the 1990s when Clinton came in — or, when Kennedy came in, the right-wing stuff in the early 60s.”

“It’s shocking to me that very few Republican leaders have really condemned this kind of activity,” Rich stated sharply. “In fact, they’ve sort of encouraged it.”

I remember all the right wing bruhaha after Waco. I paid attention to their stuff and even went to a rally in Marietta, Georgia and met Linda Thompson. I liked their view of the Constitution and distrust of government.

However, all their credibility with me went out the window over the last eight years and the Bush administration. None of these people raised an eyebrow when Bush was shredding the Bill Of Rights and saying the Constitution was "a god-damn piece of paper." They said not a word when the Bushistas were tapping our phones, disappearing people, torturing others, and in all ways throwing any semblance of fidelity to freedom out in the trash as "quaint" relics of the past.

So they can keep their partisan outrage. And by the way, I faced this kind of attitude forty years ago in an SDS meeting. It was just after the national guard had shot the students at Kent State and some idiot in the meeting was talking about how we needed to start getting guns. Being from Detroit and having seen them shut down the city in '67, bringing in tanks and armored personnel carriers with fifty caliber machine guns, and they were not reticent to use them, I thought any talk of arming ourselves was ludicrous.

The real lesson of Waco was that the government will in no way allow any challenge to its authority in an armed fashion. It will crush it like an ant.

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