The Watering Hole, Saturday, June 28, 2014: Crazy, Crazy World

Is it just me, or does anyone else think the level of Crazy has gone up exponentially in recent years? Conservatives, who for decades bitched because their message wasn’t being given equal play in the news media, operate under the false notion that all viewpoints are equally valid, even though the word “valid” means something has validity, which means it’s based on the truth, which we all know is not true of many Conservative beliefs (hence, one of the primary reasons their views were not being presented in the news media.) Consequently, we no longer have any deep level discussions about the fundamental precepts of our beliefs. We all agree that the world is a dangerous place, but where Liberals feel it can be made better, Conservatives believe it will always be dangerous and, therefore, we have to look out for ourselves first. And therein lies the problem. Our views on how the problems of the world, the things that make it dangerous, should be dealt with all stem from these fundamental beliefs, which are not compatible. Liberals have a philosophy based on altruism while Conservatives have a philosophy based on selfishness. So where Liberals try to advocate for policies that benefit the world in general, Conservatives tend to advocate for the things that benefit themselves (or their loved ones.) Yet we always presume that both sides in any political debate have valid viewpoints about what to do. Clearly this is insane. The ironic thing to me is that one of the reasons I think the world continues to be dangerous for everybody is because of Conservatives and their “Screw everybody else, I come first”-mentality. Fewer conservatives in charge would equate to less danger. And FTR, religious fundamentalism is largely a Conservative viewpoint.

So should I be surprised when the loser in a recent Oklahoma Republican primary contest to be the nominee to be US Representative claimed that his opponent was ineligible to run for office (an office he has held for several terms) and that he should get his opponents votes in that primary? Aside from the fact that that’s not how it works (the votes might be nullified but they wouldn’t just be given to the opponent), his reason for claiming his opponent was ineligible was that he wasn’t human. Timothy Ray Murray claims that current US Representative Frank Lucas is actually dead, and that the entity you see claiming to be Rep Lucas is actually a robot, sent to replace the Congressman, who was hanged on a stage in the Ukraine more than a decade ago (by the World Court, no less, which is more properly known as the International Court of Justice, and which usually operates out of the Netherlands.) I suppose I should be reassured by his promise to voters that he would never own a look-alike robot. (Murray ran as a Democrat two years ago, but I don’t think he’s Liberal. Another reason why one shouldn’t assume ideology identifies party affiliation.)

I suppose also that we should be grateful that Pete Santilli isn’t running for elected office. Santilli is a conservative radio host who in the past called for a rally to shut down Washington, DC (didn’t happen; low turnout), and for the members of both the Obama and Bush families to be killed, and for Hillary Clinton to be shot in the vagina because of Benghazi (didn’t happen either; Secret Service investigated). Now he wants to shut down the border crossing just south of San Diego because of all those Central American children who tried to enter the US illegally (Obama made them do it) and because of a marine imprisoned in Mexico for accidentally crossing the border with guns. He wants people to put a copy of the Constitution in their left breast pocket and drive down to the border and shut the crossing down because “We run this freaking place!” The funny thing is if he were to take that copy of the Constitution out of his left breast pocket and read it, he would find that we don’t really run this place, we elect people to run it for us. And when we don’t like the job they’re doing, we don’t kill them, we vote them out of office. I don’t think this rally is going to be all that successful, either.

Then there’s John Wallace, Vice President of the New York Oath Keepers, who is calling for law enforcement officers to disobey orders and to fight “socialist tyranny.” Their primary complaint seems to be New York’s SAFE Act, a law passed in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook massacre, that toughened gun laws. Anti-government types, who crap their pants daily in fear of the government coming to take away their guns (even the unregistered ones), don’t like laws limiting the number of bullets one can have in a gun. If they’re law-abiding citizens, what’s their problem? This idea that the primary purpose of the Second Amendment is to serve as a check on our own government, with the implied threat that if we don’t like what they’re doing, we’ll violently overthrow them, needs to be squashed once and for all. The authors of the Amendment never claimed this was its main purpose, just that it was a possibly beneficial consequence of having an armed citizenry. I’m sure most of these folks never heard of the Whiskey Rebellion, or know that President George Washington used the authority of the Second Amendment to form a militia to shut down the rebellion. But they’re convinced that our government is “communist”, and that President Obama has exceeded his constitutional authority with almost every action he takes.

These people are crazy. They have little or no connection to Reality. They live in a world of their own creation inside their minds, and they demand that we believe them and that we take the actions they claim are the only way to save this nation. They need psychiatric help, not an audience.