I think just about everyone still breathing realized that the election of Obama would mean a rise of right wing militia groups. Still, the reality is disturbing. Time magazine states the obvious in a new article The Secret World of Extreme Militias:
None of these movements are entirely new, but most were in sharp decline by the late 1990s. Their resurgence now is widely seen among government and academic experts as a reaction to the tectonic shifts in American politics that allowed a black man with a foreign-sounding name and a Muslim-born father to reach the White House.
Perhaps the most frightening example was not working as part of a para-military group, but was a good example of the lone deranged plotter. James Cummings was planning to create a “dirty bomb,” a mixture of high explosives and radioactive materials, and set it off at the inauguration. He had the money – a $2 million inheritance – and all the advantages of the internet and the modern world. There are some painful absurdities:
On Nov. 4, 2008 — Election Day — Cummings placed his last two orders for uranium, at a total cost of $626.40, from United Nuclear Scientific Equipment & Supplies. The Michigan-based company, which declined to answer questions, offers uranium for sale online in “medium, high, super high and ultra high radiation” blends. In an ironic twist on customer service, United Nuclear wrote with regret to inform Cummings that one of the samples he ordered that day “was already purchased by Homeland Security for training purposes.” By way of apology, the company sent a larger quantity, in two chunks.
Cummings was not stopped by the authorities, but by his own abused wife. After suffering years of torment, she finally shot him in December 2008. As one investigator said, “If she didn’t do what she did, maybe we would know Mr. Cummings a lot better than we do right now.”
well someone read too many tom Clancy novels
I’d never read that story before, but I’m sorry to say I’m not shocked. The racism from the right is visceral. Would a white, male democrat in the Whitehouse have to endure the sudden inability of the republican party to vote yes to anything (even policies which they proposed themselves in the Bush years)? Would the Tea Party have formed if an uppity negro hadn’t got himself elected president? I hear a lot of people say that the left play the bigot card too often, that they don’t like the man, that it has nothing to do with race. Honestly – I call bullshit. When you ask for specific aspects of policy that they dislike (other than universal healthcare), most can’t name one thing he’s done or stands for. They dislike him because he’s black – and why that isn’t being exposed in a high-beam media spotlight is a mystery to me if the media aren’t also racist bastards.
Perfectly said!! Thanks!
I suppose that’s true to some extent. However, I believe there’s a much stronger factor that makes people rally to the Tea Party movement, and it’s the simple fact that there’s no actual unifying policy for people to get behind.
The teabagger cause is – apart from some very general common themes like “I don’t like the healthcare reform, for whatever reason”, “I don’t trust the government”, and “America is headed towards socializm” – completely malleable to people’s personal preferences. It’s a sanctuary for disgruntled republicans who may not really have any specific ideas as to what they want, but by joining the teabaggers they’re at least part of a protest movement, however ill defined.
I suppose it’s much like the Christian fundies who go on about getting back to the roots of some Christian nation which never actually existed. Similarly, the teabaggers have a notion of getting “back to the roots” of some ideal pre-Obama, pre-Clinton society that never actually was. The Tea Party is the embodiment of self-deluded conservatism, which appeals to many, apparently.
Would a white, male democrat in the Whitehouse have to endure the sudden inability of the republican party to vote yes to anything (even policies which they proposed themselves in the Bush years)?
Yes. See, e.g. Clinton.
Would the Tea Party have formed if an uppity negro hadn’t got himself elected president?
Almost certainly.
How would all this have played out if Hillary had gotten elected instead?
Bill Clinton had more shit thrown at him in the hope of something sticking that it turned the way we watched the news. Popping popcorn and waiting for the next lurid detail seems all the norm now. Yes, he screwed up by all standards as a husband, but so what? It made no difference in policy that ran this country……
Every democrat has been vilified by the right for decades. It’s all they got. The economic policies since Nixon have turned our economy on it’s ear.
The audacity of being elected and a democrat is bad enough on its own…..
add to the fact that he’s half-white (I did that on purpose for the T-baggers)..
well
I agree with Elemenope. We would be facing a very similar US today had we elected Hillary Clinton or Denis Kucinich. I do think that racism is still alive and well in the US, but so is misogyny and classism. The Rethuglicans have an excellent ability to paint people as evil, and they use any stereo type that fits.
The racist thugs are also predominately Evangelical Christian, anti-union, anti public health care, etc etc.
I would almost call it racism by convenience. Contrary to popular external belief (*ahem* Custador*ahem*), the well of racism in the US may be fairly more visible than elsewhere, but it is also fairly shallow. The real problem, if it is that, is the political dialogue always lends itself to dividing people into opposing groups, and people more comfortably and quickly slide into categories their minds are already familiar with. Even with a straight, white, Christian male like Clinton was, other hooks were found (“he’s too educated”, “he’s too liberal”) to divide him from how people identified themselves.
Sorry Nelly, I was more responding to Custador. I thought you were spot on.
Elemenope, have you read up on the Stanford Prison experiment, and the Milgram experiments? I’ve been kind of obsessed with the results of them, and how they relate to real world events like Rwanda, Bosnia, and of course Nazi Germany. It seems that all we need to start killing each other is a line of demarcation between ‘us’ and ‘them’. And we seem to crave that line. Joyously we find it in our political party, our nation, even our favorite sports team, and all it takes is one tiny push to turn ‘them’ from being adversaries to being enemies. All it takes is that authority figure (that’s how I tied Milgram to the Stanford experiment) to show who the enemy is.
I look at the times in our history where the US was really united as a people. Those times invariably have a common enemy for us to hate. Todays ‘War on Terror’ is simply to nebulous to identify a specific threat, so we’ve begun to turn on each other again. I’ve begun to fear that humanity can’t exist without an enemy to demonize.
Racism, public health care, Monica Lewinsky, et al, anything they can pin on ‘us’ to create a divide. Anything to create that imaginary line of demarcation that we can fight over.
Don’t get me wrong, ‘Nope, I could name places in Europe which are more racist than almost any place in the USA with no difficulty at all. There are places in Spain and Italy that make Deliverance look like a Disney movie. I think I’m slowly coming around to the idea that I’d rather those phuktards were out in the open than underground, too.
I was agreeing with Elemenope too
I guess I didn’t articulate it well
Shorter Tea Party: “There’s a NIGGER in the WHITE HOUSE! EVERBODY PANIC!!!!”
(Please note, I rather abhor the word “nigger”, and only use it here for accuracy.)
What Custador said.
He had the money – a $2 million inheritance
Another argument in favour of inheritance taxes.
So if Iran have just ordered uranium online instead of trying to buy it on the black market they would have had their nuke by now.
There are a lot more radioactive materials around than most people realize- anyone remember the “radioactive boy scout?”
http://www.dangerouslaboratories.org/radscout.html
Well, people like this have always been around. Societies always contain antagonisms within themselves but they represent only a small percentage most of the time. During times of social stress though they tend to flare up and gain more prominence.
But the cause of these right-wing extremists has little to do with religion. They simply use religion to rationalize their racism. They are after all reactionaries, they react, sometimes violently, to what they perceive as outsiders, immigrants, “invading” their community. Or in the case of Obama he is labeled a usurper because in their eyes he must have used dirty tricks to achieve a status in life that in their minds blacks are not permitted to have.
He got what was cumming.
*groan*
This is all wrong… The woman should be in jail for life for killing a man. As the xtians claim (wrongly) ‘Thou shalt not kill’. So the woman not only killed but killed a male who was her husband!!!!
3 way damnation!! She should have taken her punishment from her husband to help her become a better wife and supported his efforts, like a good xtian wife should.
Just think if she would have supported him, then we could have a lot of radioactive republicans out there because some guy bought into their BS. And a bunch of radioactive democrats who are to wishyWashy to oppose the republicans. Yes killing is a bad thing, she should be jailed.
I don’t know myself, but the sad part is that she probably is in jail for murder because she did not kill him because of the bomb but because she was pissed off about some silly minor beatings. Because she is suppose to run off and seek legal help and we all know how effective that can be.
There’s no such thing as a “minor beating.”
“Sarcasm” ring a bell?
DV survivor. Excuse me for not picking up on the oh-so-obvious sarcasm….
As the recipient of both minor and major beatings, I have to disagree. There is definitely a scale that you can measure them on.
That said, none of them were acceptable. All of them humiliated and scared. But there were definitely some that were worse than others.
Props to the wife for taking her life back from that asshole!
+1
+2 :)
First of all, that picture is absolutely priceless. The thing that boils my blood is how these groups claim the title of “true Americans” – some referring to themselves as genuine Patriots. We’re getting to a point in a digital world when everyone thinks their opinion is equally valid. All you have to do is type some “push button” search term issues on YouTube and some of the videos are truly horrifying. As for solutions, well, I don’t have any yet. Still working on that…
The ironic thing is, Obama is only “black” by social definition. Genetically he’s probably pretty close to 50% Caucasian. The actual mixture is likely to be something like mostly European Caucasian with a little bit of Asian blood (thanks to the medieval Mongol invasions) on his mother’s side, and mostly African Negro with a little bit of Arabic Caucasian blood on his father’s side. It is entirely possible that his Caucasian ancestry is greater than his non-Caucasian ancestry. My money is on a pretty even split.
Of course, “African Negro” is a genetically problematic term too. Any “race” I could name has a demonstrably mixed ancestry.
So, how “white” do you have to be before the militiamen relax and stand down?
How does he self-identify?
I’m not sure how Obama self-identifies. But self-identification does not change one’s genetic makeup. And if he self-identified as white (which is as valid/invalid a claim as black), I don’t think it would change the minds of any militiamen.
Outside of the realm of biology, Obama self-identifies as Christian, but that hasn’t convinced a lot of people that he isn’t a secret Muslim.
The fact that he ha dark skin, regards himself as being black, has always been a member of black communities and has always been regarded by pretty much the entire planet (including his friends and family) as black – that makes him black. The whole “He’s 50% white!” business that the right keep chirping whenever it suits them smacks of consoling themselves – like there’s not really a black president, only half of one. He’s black. He’s president. End of.
Race does not exist. At least not in any scientifically meaningful way.
It’s a fuzzy thing. Politics and political correctness aside, there definitely are genetic traits and clusters of traits that identify many ethnic populations. But despite the fact that we tend to make so much of perceived racial differences, the genetic variability between human populations is pretty minor compared to that found in most other mammals, thanks to the fact that we went through a genetic bottleneck roughly 60,000 years ago. We are an unusually homogeneous species, but not to the point where you can’t distinguish a Tibetan from an Irishman if you have enough genetic data.
That´s certainly true, which is why I added the qualifier “meaningful”. But what´s meaningful to one person (perhaps in this case some sort of Nationalist) and what´s meaningful to another, will be different.
Differential predisposition for genetic disorders (like sickle cell anemia or cystic fibrosis) based on ancestry is meaningful, and medically useful.
I know Daniel is a shooter, and Custy said he’s had some trigger time. Im wondering when were going to start putting together atheist militias…
Im going to go clean my guns. And no, thats not a euphemism :)
It’s been more than a decade since I last unloaded an SA80 mate – might need some range time to get good again considering the most I’ve fired since are twelve gauges and .22 rifles :-)
I own a gatling gun that fires teflon coated stinger missiles at 10,000 rounds per minutes.
For duck hunting, of course.
Heh! Heh! Heh!
http://gogaminggiant.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/DuckHunt.jpg
Ummm… is no-one else asking why Uranium should be freely obtainable by private citizens? I can’t think of a reason why this shouldn’t be an absolutely controlled substance…