A day after congressional Democratic leaders announced their final legislative push to enact a bill to overhaul the nation's health care system, opponents rallied to send a noisy contrary message. Rally organizers said 4,000 people attended, but Capitol police estimated the crowd at 2,000 or fewer.Glad to see you're still lying about your numbers, wingers. Matt Osborne has the proper response to this nonsense.
Dozens of times, the crowd members, a combination of Republicans, social conservatives and Tea Partiers, chanted, "Kill the bill! Kill the bill!" urged on by a half-dozen speakers.
The headliner and clear crowd favorite was Republican Sixth District Rep. Michele Bachmann, who said Democrats "are spending us into bondage we can never dig ourselves out of."
Gazing out over the flag-waving, sign-wielding crowd, she said: "This is awesome. This is our country. We own it!"
Bachmann and other speakers urged listeners to vent their outrage to Democratic members of the state's congressional delegation in the days leading up to the final vote on the bill, potentially within a week.
Among the signs being waved was one that listed Marx, Lenin and Stalin, followed by Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Obama, Pelosi and Reid were repeatedly invoked as political villains.
"For some reason," said Second District Republican Rep. John Kline, "President Obama, Speaker Pelosi and Harry Reid can't hear you. I can't understand that."
Saying, "We need to start over," Kline was greeted with a roar of approval, causing him to rhetorically invoke Obama, Pelosi and Reid again: "Can you hear this?"
Word-salad garnished with nontroversy: “Obama…Pelosi…Reid…They don’t represent us…right now.” Because there was no election in 2008, or because elections do not have consequences? Congress has, in fact, voted on the bills and will now hold further votes on them in perfect legal order. The Constitution does, in fact, allow Congress to levy taxes (“mandate”) and appoint enforcement officers (IRS), and such laws are, in fact, binding. Either the representative from Minnesota lacks a basic understanding of civics, or she’s encouraging sedition.
The “post-American president” line invokes John Bolton. Having ripped the words from their context, “some” is a cowardly little word here that lets her invoke all the birther-deather-Van Jones nonsense without having to.
Absolutely. Remember the goal here is to attack the legitimacy of the government. No Democrat can ever legitimately win an election as far as these assholes are concerned. If the American people overwhelmingly kicked the Republicans out of office and elected Democrats to a solid 59% majority of representation in Congress and the White House itself, then they are illegitimate because they do not represent the views of the people who voted for those who lost the elections.
This is what I mean by Tyranny of the Minority. You guys lost. It is perfectly legitimate for you to protest the
political views of those who you did not vote for. It is required of us to do so in fact to maintain our government. But to call the legitimately elected Democrats in office traitors or worse for the crime of disagreeing with you is not alright. When you question the government's legitimacy, when you call for revolution, when you bring actual pitchforks to a political rally, when you proclaim the destruction of our country because your side lost the elections...that is over the line.
Yes, there are those on the Left who did that during the Bush years. They were rightly ridiculed, those who crossed over into tinfoil hat country. But there were legitimate constitutional reasons to be very frightened at what Bush was doing. He really was wiretapping American citizens without their knowledge or consent. We really did enter a war in Iraq on false pretenses. Obama by comparison is trying to expand health care coverage to millions of Americans and lower health care costs for all of us. What horrific tyranny that is compared to Bush!
Yet these are the same people who ignored Bush, and say Obama is destroying America, in fact they call him "post-American:" because as far as they are concerned, he has already destroyed the country. And they would rather do everything in their power to make sure he fails and that all of us pay the price than to see him succeed.
Obama. Derangement. Syndrome. Pure and simple. It is an irrational and sociopathic hatred -- truly and literally sociopathic, mind you -- that drives some of these folks. But all of them are convinced their best interest is to do nothing about health care reform...or wait for the Republicans to do it.
All these jagoffs care about is destroying everything that a Democrat could ever take credit for. It has to be destroyed, because its success proves that their ideas are bankrupt failures. In response, they must do everything they can to ensure its failure. If that means they must destroy America in order to save it, then so be it.
So as a result, we have a couple thousand people out at the Minnesota State Capitol comparing Democrats to Stalin and implying they are not our true government because they do not conform to the wishes of the "American people".
I have news for you. The American people made their choice in November 2008. You now have to abide by that. In November 2010 things could be very different. But what if the Democrats still control the House and Senate? What if you are rejected again, Teabaggers?
Will you have your revolution then? Will you take to the streets with pitchforks, or worse? Will you shake your head at the violence that you "of course do not condone" but turn a blind eye to it? Are you really so sure that the "majority" is going to back you on this one?
Or will you double down and threaten riots and violence now, in order to try to impose your will on the majority who voted in 2008?
Elections have consequences. If you don't like them, vote for someone else. But the Teabaggers are threatening to riot over losing an election. They don't live in a democracy, apparently. They live in a paranoid one-party rule fantasy, where only they qualify as "real American people."
The rest of us are the Enemy to them. Never forget that.
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