Attending teabagger rallies and town halls where teabaggers were in attendance the past couple of months, I just couldn’t help noticing how teabaggers can’t quite get their -isms straight.
There’s communism/Marxism. There’s fascism/Naziism. There’s socialism. And in their minds these are BAAA-AAAD!!! And as far as they are concerned, liberalism is just one more of the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad IsmsTM.
Why? Because these doofuses are all too young to remember when these -isms really DID represent a threat to our country. But they DO remember from their history classes that all of them were a threat. So, in their tiny little minds, they have equated the three to the point where you even see them on the same teabagger sign.
I had a conversation with a technician at a client’s laboratory one day. We were talking about gardening and I mentioned that I have a huge garden. Here’s how the conversation went:
Doofus: So you have a garden?
Eclectablog: Yup, a huge one. Tons of tomatoes and peppers and stuff…
Doofus: I do, too. Glenn Beck said we should all grow our own food “just in case”.
Eclectablog: Well, that’s a good thing. I think everyone should grow some of their own food.
Doofus: Me, too. ‘Cept Obama will probably outlaw selling seeds pretty soon.
Eclectablog: …
Eclectablog: …
Eclectablog: …
I really didn’t know what to say. It took me a minute to recover. This guy was a customer so I couldn’t really say what I wanted to say. I had to really think about it.
Eclectablog: I don’t think that’s going to be a problem. I mean the president’s wife, Michelle, has a really big garden on the lawn of the White House, right? It’s organic, like mine is, too.
Doofus: Organic? Why do you do that?
His tone suggested that he was sure it was for nefarious reason, something threatening to him as a conservative. I assured it him it was “because I was able to garden without chemicals so why use them?” then let it go.
Why tell this story? Because it’s just another example of Beck Worship and a confusion of liberalism with fascism. This doofus actually thinks that the Obama administration is going to impose fascist policies that will outlaw the sale of seeds to people and prevent them from growing their own garden.
He’s about my age and, like most of the people that I see at the teabagger events, he appears a bit too young to remember World War II where we fought the fascists around the world. And he was probably too young to remember the events surrounding Joe McCarthy other than to recall that at that time the communists were our mortal enemies. His first political memories are probably of his Conservative lord and savior Ronald Reagan vanquishing the Evil EmpireTM.
And socialism? Well have you ever heard of a little something called the Union of Soviet SOCIALIST Republics??? Those were commies, fella, and they were socialists, too, apparently and, well, that means it’s bad.
So while these doofuses accuse us of Obama worship and of not being informed, they walk around, worshipping at the altars of Ronald Reagan, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. And they show up at events carrying signs that literally have swastikas, pictures of Hitler AND hammers & sickles on the same poster. I have even seen some that had Nazi, Communist and Socialist all on the same sign. Seriously.
The real question is why nobody with a public voice (like [ahem] the media) is calling them out on their obvious stupidity and ignorance. I think it’s time to point out what it patently obvious to any thinking person with two brain cells to knock together: these people are too stupid to be shaping the public debate.
Loud ≠ Informed. Pretending that they are intelligent enough to have a valid viewpoint ignores this obvious fact.
I’m just sayin’…
