Right Wingers Ready for Violence to Defend the Rich, White Way of Life:
Lost amid the sublime delights of hearing Glen Beck totally lose his shit and screech like a wounded weasel in a bear trap on his radio show was his suggestion on the July 13 edition of his Fox "news" show, The Cleveland Steamer with Glenn Beck, that people should arm themselves for a coming revolution. No, really. In a conversation with NRA CEO Wayne "That Is a Gun in My Pants and I'm Not Happy to See You" LaPierre over whether Sonia Sotomayor would interpret the 2nd Amendment the way they believe it ought to be interpreted, Beck offered, "Would you say that our president or our government's stock market really is gun sales. That when gun sales go down -- everybody wants to say, 'Well, I protect guns for hunters,' even though -- I mean, look, I came from a family of hunters. I get it. But that's not -- the Founding Fathers weren't like, 'Well, we might want to go out and, you know, shoot some squirrel.' They did it because of an out-of-control government. And as gun sales go up, that's because we don't trust the government. That is -- that is the fundamental guttural understanding of the Second Amendment. People don't trust the government, they go out and buy a gun."

Did you get that? If you don't trust the government, go out and buy a gun. Because why? Because you can use the muzzle to push the buttons in a voting booth? Or because you can use it to shoot and kill any government motherfuckers who are going to...well, do what?

See, all the savage (and Savage) talk on the right that has inspired wackanoids to go out and shoot up unitarian churches and Holocaust Museum guards is for punk ass reasons. Glenn Beck, who may truly be straitjacket-and-rhino-tranq-his-ass crazy, and his ilk on markets large and small are whipping their frightened, underinsured, teetering on the brink listeners and viewers to a peaking froth because of their idiots' understanding of policy and history. They've reduced the American Revolution to being about taxes. Well, sure, and when a foreign government at the point of a gun and bayonet forces them to pay their tribute to the king, join their military, and quarter their soldiers, then we can talk.

The nation is always filled with wannabe revolutionaries. Usually they crop up when the actual physical well-being of themselves or others is threatened. Like, you know, back during 'Nam, when the federal government used troops to stop protests and a draft was sending people to a war they didn't want to fight. The Weather Underground (who have, indeed, had their welcome worn out for them) and other groups used violence as a tool because they saw the government violently oppressing them, through bullets at Kent State, through police clubs in Chicago. In other words, if the government was going to enforce its will and suppress the people by drawing blood, well, the thought goes, why not draw some, too? (Aside: it's one reason why non-violence is a truly revolutionary method of protest against those who are violent. Our visceral response is to want to kick some ass when someone tries to kick ours.)

So what is driving the good right wing to talk more and more openly about arming themselves for some coming uprising? Has Barack Obama sent the FBI to break down law-abiding conservatives' doors, take their guns, shoot their women, and rape their dogs? Did Joe Biden start an enemies list and had a handcuffed Sean Hannity dragged to a prison where he can be beaten until he gives the whereabouts of Steve Doocy? Holy shit, an ignorant outside observer might think, what is so deadly that a media figure like Beck is, in essence, telling people to buy guns now?

And the answer is a slight raise in the marginal tax rate on the wealthy? An attempt to provide health care to uninsured Americans? A legally-elected government in a representative democracy spending money in the way those campaigning said it would be spent? If Ben Franklin were around, he'd scoff, "Pussies," beat Glenn Beck unconscious with his cane, let Thomas Paine sodomize him, and head back to Paris for more time with whores.

(An uncomfortable tangent: Sometimes, within the rhetoric of insanity, violence can seem logical. Randall Terry and his pro-life legion of Jesus toesuckers believe that abortion is murder. The Rude Pundit's said it before: if you are so deluded as to think that women's health providers who do abortions are baby murderers no matter what the trimester, then you better be throwing your ass in the way to stop it, taking whatever consequences come like a good terrorist. Randall Terry is an attention-craving slugfucker whose cause should end up with him in prison, but he at least seems to think there are lives, not pocketbooks of the wealthy, on the line.)