Socialism, Scrota and Tea Party Ridicule

Cite my sources for....what, for my opinion? Pfffft!  As though you citing the Daily KOS as your source lends credence to yours?  I am not responsible for waking you up.  Like I said below, I understand blind spots the way the sky understands blue, and it appears to me that you're (a) too smart for the day-to-day stuff and (b) too lazy to research outside the scope of your own narrow interests. Good luck, kid. I still  have faith in ya.  You'll figure it out eventually.

It seems that the Left has accrued a deficit of critical thinking skills.  I wish everyone would just detach, kick it up a notch from heightened emotionalism, party brand loyalties and ideological brainwashing but that pretty much describes me perfectly up until late October, 2008, so I'm like an ex-smoker who now wishes that my cohorts would all quit smoking.  It takes a lot less effort to just blather on about change than it is to actually implement it.  What we see in this administration is not change at all, it's simply an acceleration of the slide into a tightly controlled centralization of power. 

the problem is, the people who might not be "wingnuts" don't speak up and march right in lockstep.

Matt, I appreciate the fact that your rebuttal was logical, civil and rational. There are a few other aspects of the critiques and mockery on the Left, sexual and otherwise, that I wanted to add to the mix before we close up this thread.

Fortunate citizens that we are, we live in a participatory democracy where the right to assemble is guaranteed to us by the First Amendment.  Rather than celebrating the fact that conservatives of several 3rd parties and the two larger ones came out in significant numbers - not gigantic numbers, but significant numbers - to express themselves in ways that they've really not done in my lifetime, the Left instead seeks to mock, marginalize, and denigrate conservatives.  In some instances, as with CNN Reporter Susan Roesgen, they seek to shut down our free speech and talk over it with their own agenda while managing to look rather whiny and pathetic in the process.

I remember the Black Panthers blocking polling places and intimidating voters with nightsticks in Pennsylvania during the 2008 election, and physical attacks during Tom Tancredo's speech this week at UNC Chapel Hill (warning: this video is unconscionable) along with David Horowitz, Ann Coulter, et al when they are invited to speak on college campuses as a prime example of First Amendment violations by leftists behaving in the manner of Hitler's brownshirt thugs.

Keith Olbermann and Jon Stewart use mockery rather than violence, but rather than mocking all politicans in the manner of the professional comedians on Saturday Night Live or other late night comedians, their goal appears to be to shut down all opinion, expression, or points of view with which they disagree.  They've become propaganda tools of the State.  This may play well to the terminally historically unaware in 2008 or 2009, but it's quite possible that history will judge these gentlemen a bit more severely for skewering moms, dads and dogs protesting overspending and high taxes instead of shining their illumination on the Central Bank and the State's corporatism and military/ideological profiling during this period.

Whenever we're discussing the First Amendment repression issue with a conservative, we typically tend to hear things like I would say about Ann Coulter (who drives me nuts), such as "I personally can't stand Ann Coulter, but I'd defend her right to say things that often offend me or strike me as idiotic and reactionary."  To be fair, I feel pretty much the same way when MeggieMac holds forth on the Daily Beast and Rachel Maddow, so there it is.  Two more anti-intellectual representatives of conservatism I cannot imagine on either end of the spectrum, but I would not dream of yelling "Shut them down, no dumb blondes in our town!" were they invited to speak at my alma maters. 

Conversely, whenever we're discussing the First Amendmant issue with a leftist, we inevitably tend to hear things like "shut the f**k up" and beyond.  I've seen several leftists on Twitter threaten conservatives with promises such as "I'll blow your head off during the coming civil war, retard." While it's refreshing to see leftists who support the 2nd Amendment on the one hand, it's quite disburbing to hear them employing it to blow the heads off conservatives with whom they disagree. I seriously doubt that my colleagues on the left will attribute these violent threats to Glenn Beck on Fox News, which circles me back toward my position on personal responsibility which has apparently has fallen on "deaf eyes" who will neither see nor hear beyond their own paradigm.

If it were only the reflections of little minds (or the lack thereof) we were dealing with, I'd say "oh, whatever."  But we're potentially dealing with various mobs, ochlocracies, of little-minded vetos which are liable to spark violence on both sides at some point.  This represents far more than mere small-mindedness, that somewhat charming and naive staple of the small-town some of us recall with a mixture of nostalgia and "meh" from yesteryear.  There's a sinisterism to it, a lack of empathy, a low emotional IQ in this mob thinking - the kind of sinisterism that ultimately lent itself to what was poetically referred to as The Terror followiing both the French and Russian revolutions. 

I think we will all come to long for the day when liberals represented peace, free love and rock 'n roll instead of the leftist totalitarian shut-down machine they're rapidly evolving into (or being overridden by?).  That is most assuredly not change I can believe in.