You've got to love Glenn Beck's capitalizing on 9/11 with his 9/12 Project, considering he said this in 2005:
"You know, it took me about a year to start hating the 9-11 victims' families. … I don't hate all of them. I hate about, probably about 10 of them. But when I see, you know, 9-11 victim family, on television, or whatever, I'm just like, "Oh, shut up." I'm so sick of them, because they're always complaining. And we did our best for them."
At least he only hates 10 of the families, I guess.
At any rate, many photos from the weekend's 9/12 rally in Washington (which had somewhere between 60,000 and 2 million people in attendance, depending on whom you asked and when you asked them) are circulating on the Intertoobz. Some of the most extreme of them raise a question: Is there a difference between the tenor of right wing and left wing protests, or is it imagination?
There may well be evidence of left-wing protest past that equals the threats of the extremists below, but it does seem to me that a fundamental difference really is there–extreme left wingers tend to make dramatic comparisons (Bush as Hitler, etc.); extreme right wingers make dramatic comparisons (Obama as Hitler, etc.), but their fringers also explicitly threaten to take up arms against opponents (i.e., the large majority of the country who voted in Obama). As a man carrying an AR-15 assault rifle at a townhall protest in Arizona put it, "We will forcefully resist people imposing their will on us through the strength of the majority with a vote." Which, last I checked, was pretty much democracy.
If there is such stuff on the left, it certainly seems far rarer, to say the least.
I will find myself in uncomfortable (and no doubt temporary) agreement with the non-violent among them if they protest Obama's apparent plans to claim "preventive detention" powers, but it is no less frustrating to see that theirs is a party-centric loyalty, not an ideological one that transcends the partisan cause du jour. Because if it was ideological, they would have shown up to protest when George W. Bush was inventing that executive power to indefinitely detain whomever he wanted whenever he wanted without charge. And we might not be living in the age of repeated claims to absurd and innappropriate presidential powers (by both parties) that truly threaten civil liberties.
That said, here are some interesting folks who showed up Saturday:
There's more at this gallery, with lots of images from photographer Jeff Malet.
ADDITIONAL: Arkansas is a place I know very well–my parents and 99% of my relatives are Arkansans. I would never have expected this, from a Research 200 poll commissioned by the Daily Kos. Their numbers in other Southern locales have, significantly, not shown the same.:
QUESTION: Do you favor or oppose creating a government-administered health insurance option that anyone can purchase to compete with private insurance plans?
| FAVOR | OPPOSE | NOT SURE | |
|---|---|---|---|
| ALL | 55 | 38 | 7 |
| MEN | 49 | 45 | 6 |
| WOMEN | 61 | 31 | 8 |
| DEMOCRATS | 81 | 14 | 5 |
| REPUBLICANS | 22 | 71 | 7 |
| INDEPENDENTS | 56 | 34 | 10 |
| 18-29 | 59 | 34 | 7 |
| 30-44 | 54 | 40 | 6 |
| 45-59 | 56 | 37 | 7 |
| 60+ | 50 | 42 | 8 |
| WHITE | 51 | 43 | 6 |
| BLACK | 81 | 5 |
14 |
ADDITIONAL:
This is most assuredly some of the most interesting discussion I've ever seen ignited here. Good stuff.
To add to the mix:
David Brin (SF author) offers a really fine post about just what we've been discussing here: the various madnesses of the far right and the far left. Very interesting stuff. I'm excerpting some of it, but it's well worth a full read:
Of course we know what the biggest difference is, between liberalism and conservatism, these days. Both movements have their complete, gibbering monsters. Alas, one of these large American movements is now utterly controlled by its fanatical/crazy wing, and I'll start by aiming a harsh screed in that direction. The other movement is luckier; it is still run, overall, by its pragmatic problem solvers — but that doesn't mean there aren't psychopaths on that side, too! And so, in a day or two, I'll set an example in contrary evenhandedness and shoot down some really horrid lefty flakes.
…
Goldwater believed in discourse, in science, in negotiation, persuasion, accountability and adult behavior. Now? With regret, I am willing to call off attempts to restart civilized discourse with "decent conservatives." There don't appear to be any left. Just a pack of these grumpy (and loony) old white men who make clear, by their scorched-Earth approach to politics, that they would rather see America fail than Obama succeed.
…
On the other hand, I am also very unhappy with the playbook of the Democrats, who seem to think that they can reason their way out of Culture War. That has been their neurotic delusion, for a very long time, and it has made them very bad at playing the game.
…
Getting back to the overview: do mark my words, Culture War is the greatest overall treason committed against the republic since Secession. Perpetrated in very much the same spirit, with similar goals and methods, while tapping an identical thread in the national psyche. It is a deliberate, manipulative scheme to demolish America's enlightenment methods of deliberated problem solving. It has nothing whatsoever to do with safeguarding markets, capitalism or freedom. Indeed, those things can only survive by defeating it. This is the fight worth winning, but Democrats seem to be clueless about how to begin. SO it may be up to the rest of us. We should be focusing on how to separate the ground troops from their masters. Divert populism and its ire back toward the enemies who ruined every other renaissance in human history.
