While We Were Laughing

Easy Prey

While the wingnuts are staging their incoherent rants, hypocritical protests; those with clearer minds and perhaps the essential "common sense" ingredient, are pointing and laughing.

Clearly it is a thinly disguised Obama bashing fest. It's bringing in the racists, the reactionaries and the hysterical fringe.

"The definition of 'stupid'," I was once told, "is someone waking up in a brand new world everyday." In other words, nothing is learned from experience, much less history.

It appears that these fringers, overwhelmingly comprised of loud, angry types, whipped into a frenzy by Right Wing Extremist rhetoric spewing from the orifices of Faux News and their ilk, only the past few months, became aware of the economic situation and the crushing debt the failed policies of the previous Administration. Naturally, they blame the new guy. Well, he IS black you know!

They direct their anger at him. These are the same people who wildly cheered on the dangerous deregulations of the Reagan Years, wherein all the rules that prevented economic meltdown were removed, allowing thieves to run wild, without fear of investigation or consequences.

Those same wild-eyed cheerleaders are now booing and hissing the outcome, the logical result of taking the rules out of the game. Worse, they are arming themselves and want to be viewed as dangerous. They then get paranoid about being viewed as 'dangerous' while advocating killing, assassination, violent overthrow, "by any means possible" chants and rhetoric.

Clearly, the mob mentality is taking hold. That is where a mass of people will act, sometimes violently, but overall without thinking of the consequences.

There is no consistent theme to the meme other than misdirected anger, pointless hate, fueled by the rhetoric of a wealthy fatman and his wealthy cohorts.

Bottom line: The people protesting, IF they are in the upper 10% bracket of $250K+, sure don't look it. IF they are so successful and wealthy, how did they manage to accomplish that with what appears to be an appalling lack of education or mental connection to reality? They cannot even define the term 'fascist' (and some could not spell it correctly), but they held up posters with that in bold letters.

If they are the ones making less, and I strongly suspect they make a lot less, I think they should, if they feel that strongly about it, give back the tax cuts/extra refund that they get this year. They should give it to a cause they firmly believe in. Give it to some Rich guy who 'really knows how they think.'

For those who are taking Ayn Rand to the extreme and are against ALL taxes, look around you. Without taxes, who will pay for the roads, the schools, the hospitals, the military, the congressman, the President, the police and the firemen?

Before taxes, the wealthiest people owned the towns. They paid for the cops. Whom do you think the cops protected? If that is your idea of Democracy, go ahead.

Without taxes we will have no military capable of defending us against those other countries that will invade us and steal our resources for themselves. It will, very quickly, become a moot discussion.

We need taxes. We need taxes to be fair. We have a massive debt incurred mostly by the unfairness/imbalance of how the wealthiest were allowed to hide their assets/income and pay the lowest tax rates on top of that. It became fashionable to not pay taxes if you were wealthy enough. Patriotism be damned. Getting away without paying, that was heroic!

And now, they don't want to pay their share of taxes. If they don't pay them, how does anyone expect the debt to be paid off, ever? Hold up that baby. Yup, $30k in debt already. Whom do you think laid that debt on your child, moron?

We need to be able to come together to undo a whole lot of damage and to save ourselves. But as long as the fringe can suck the air out of any discussion, nothing will get done.

Point and Laugh

We are laughing at the teabaggers. I like to call the Right Wing Fringe "The neverending clown car". Just as you think you have seen the last of the wild-eyed mob mentals spill out, out pops another rhetoric fueled phlame throwing extremist.

We are laughing at them. The wealthiest extremists who flog them on are laughing at them as they get them to rant and protest having the wealthy pay their share of taxes, even though that share is less than the proportion that any of the protesters are paying.

The purpose behind extremism is to prevent us, as a nation, from coming together for our common good. Divided we fail. Division is the goal of extremism. Either side. The intent is to tear away from the center.

While we are all laughing, watching the insanity parade snake its way to the sea, bigger issues go unaddressed. There are bigger issues we NEED to come together on. We need to regain our rights and our standing in the world as having at least a foothold on the higher moral ground.

We need to address Health Care, Market Regulation, Corruption and Infrastructure. Those have all been neglected and we are paying the price, daily. We need to address the War Crimes that were committed under the last administration. We need to investigate and try those who committed torture. We need to get our rights to privacy back and end the domestic spying.

There are enough things about the current administration that need to be looked at and fixed before it is too late. But it won't happen because we are constantly being distracted by the parade of clown cars, some driven by mavericks and former mavericks, and fueled by mindless extremist networks.

Apparently, being stupid is a virtue to the Teabaggers. They are opposed to, among other things, educating our young. Clearly a lack of education has made them the legends they are today.

Not sure how we will look back at this time in our history. Will it be remembered as the last desperate throes of fear mongering pile of hypocrites, smoldering in their own stench?

Or will it be a time when we turned away from the extremism, disengaged from the battles with the mentally skewed, and came together to overcome the damage done.

At some point, the amusement of the insanity will fade. What real damage will have been done during our mock swordfights with cynical sloganeers, that we missed completely?

While some of us engage and disengage in these skirmishes, there needs to be a greater part of us that keeps our eye on the ball that is our nation, and our Rights.

While we are laughing at the Teabaggers for their hypocrisy, and their wealthy sponsors are laughing at them as lackeys, I can't help but sense that an even more dangerous situation is brewing and someone is laughing at all of us, as we self-implode on distractions, as they strip away our Rights.