Sam, honest engine, you are way ill-informed here. Like totally, five minutes noodling on the net will advise otherwise. I’m not going to rub your nose in it, 'cause April 16 is Give a Canuck a Break Day, so this is yours.
But not everyone is as nice as me.
What makes the hatred for Bush and hatred for Bush different is that Bush clearly deserved to be hated ( and performed the actions to prove it ), whereas the accusations against Obama are simply nonsense; and that the more fanatic hatred is far more mainstream on the right than the left. For Obama and for Clinton as well; this is simply how the mainstrem Right thinks.
You get that when you gloat over and mock the people who get executed. “Please don’t kill me ! Please don’t kill me !” < smirk >
Why ? The Left, what there is of it doesn’t even like Obama much, far less worship him.
Here’s a link from the CSM that says the Chicago Tea Party refused an invitation from GOP Chairman Steele to speak.
Sam… in any case, you are missing the point. It doesn’t matter whether the GOP, the Libertarians, or the Mennonites are behind these Tea Parties.
These people want the government to take less of their money. Clearly, that is the stuff of wacko right-wing nutjobs. The official organization behind them is irrelevant.
We weren’t talking about “all those people willing to attend a protest on tax day for any of a list of possible reasons”. These people are billed as mainstream America, not members of lunatic fringe and/or avowedly revolutionary organizations like those **Sam Stone **lists.
We were talking about hatred. The kind of hatred demonstrated by some of those mainstream people at said protests. That spittle flecked venom seen in many of the signs, and heard from many of the lips.
If the bell curve has been moved so far that psychotic hatred (Obama is a Muslim terrorist, Obama is just using the financial crisis to make paupers of our grandchildren, Obama = Hitler, et cetera) has become mainstream, then his approval rating shouldn’t be in the 55 to 66% range (your numbers, Sam, since you quibble with my approximation). But it hasn’t. The middle is pretty much where the middle has been. There is just no comparison to left wing revolutionaries.
Fringe lunatics have certainly existed for a long time. And the more lunatic the group calling the meeting, the farther flung the outliers may be. But never before have so many, many clearly deranged people come out to play at a gathering of the mainstream.
The fact that Obama won has made them crazy. Or, in the words of the OP, “flat out nuts”.
I takes me some issue with anyone slappin’ “irrational” on my feelings about Bush. which were grounded in reasons so solid you could build a new World Trade Center on 'em.
But ya know he wants to…bad. 
OKAY, LETS!
I leave it to you to be the OP, since I plan to be the first post in response.
True. Although some of the signs are the giveaway: the anti-abortion crowd seems to be big. There was one sign, I’m not going to look it up, but it was funny because the guy just seemed to hate all presidents, since he had a footnote bitching out Bush and Clinton too.
Wait, let me restate that: bitching out all the people who have occupied the White House recently.
Not to mention that the extreme left hero worship of Obama is more of a fantasy in the minds of the right than something that actually exists.
The families of the hundreds of thousands of dead in Iraq over Bush’s lies would like a word with you. They want you to know they’re people too. Even if they aren’t American.
He is a seriel killer, and war a criminal. If you were American I’d call you traitorous scumbag because Bush’s policies and his conservative supporters, like you, did more damage to America’s liberties, economy, and world standing then Al Qaeda ever could even in their wildest dreams.
Thanks for helping to trash America, bro.
Never mind.
There is a difference. Bush had been in office four years and actually did things to justify a protest, but even his first election was decided by the Supreme Court and deserved more public protest than it received.
The sitting President has been in office three months and passed a stimulus that was widely supported by respected economists. He hasn’t increased taxes on anyone and based on statistics not many, if any, protesters at those rallies will have their taxes increased under President Obama. What are they protesting? The stimulus?
I went to 2 tea parties yesterday which were within a fe minutes of my house just to observe and learn. At the first, the average age looked to be about 50 with lots of retirees. Lots of signs - the most popular one was B.O. STINKS. Very clever in a
3rd grade sort of way. There were a few that said “No Taxation Without Representation”. I asked one of them if they knew that our taxes today are passed by the peoples representatives in Congress. They looked at me like I was from Mars and walked away. No speeches - no songs - just 200 people milling around on a sidewalk next to a busy street.
At the later one there was a person with a similar sign. I asked them if they were from Minnesota and they said “no Michigan”. The vitriol against Obama was thick in the air. This one was in a park and there was a sound system, several singers, lots of speeches and was very well run. Average age was a bit younger but not by that much.
One sign said “Cut My Taxes”. I asked her if she knew that Obama had just cut taxes for over 90% of taxpayers and she got angry and asked me what I was doing there if I “love him so much”.
One person had a sign that said TEABAG OBAMA. It would have been far too easy so I let it pass without comment or question.
The hit of the rally seemed to be a man dressed in colonial garb who pretended to be Patrick Henry. In a faux Southern accent which came and went and came back again he read his famous “give me liberty or give me death” speech. I wanted to cash in on the suggestion but he vanished after his performance.
Not that I can be assed to search for. They all had threads on this board. Do a board search or google search for any of them.
I’ve never heard of them, nor have I been shown any reason I should be alarmed about them.
You can’t be serious. Maybe they don’t show you all the news in Canada. Do a Google News search for “Rick Perry,” for just one example of a major GOP elected official not only speaking to the teabaggers but threatening to secede from the US.
There’s nothing remotely “grassroots” about ity. This event was completely created by the conservative arm of the US media. Fox News was a major promotor and sponsor. Far from being “organic,” it was, as I said in another thread, essentially just a glorified, local radio fan event.
It was also pretty much a fail. Despite weeks of relentless hype by Fox News, talk radio and right wing blogs, attendance was a fraction of what was predicted, and the events were not taken seriously by the legitimate media or the non-dittohead public. Rather than the “powerful” moment they hoped for, they became basically a PALATR event instead.
T.W.I.N.E. - Troglodytes Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything
(With slight apology to Al Capp, who was a good 'un till he became an asshole…)
I think your “only difference” is rather significant, first of all.
Second of all, I’d like to propose a new rule (which I’m sure won’t be adopted, but hey, gotta try) - anytime anyone, on any side of an argument, but very most especially and particularly the arguments about political right vs. left, who says anything resembling:
“It’s the same, shoes on the other foot now is all”
or
“Your side (or “the other side” if the speaker is cough neutral) did the same thing”
or
“The other side is just as bad”
or anything that smells like the above, they have to cite at least two examples that are actually equivalent, from a reasonably credible source.
Or they instantly lose.
Because I’ve been watching this crap for years and years and I just don’t buy it. It’s a copout. It’s a lie. And if it’s not a lie, then you can prove it’s not a lie.
And if the “proof” offered is debatable…well, thats what we’re here doing: debating.
If the rule were in place right now, I think it would be quite the challenge, because I’d call “foul” on any examples of left-wing nutjobs who went anywhere near this level of hate and viciousness at any point in the first 9 months of Bush being in office. (I kinda think you’d be hard-pressed to find examples this vicious at any point at all, but I’m ready to be proven wrong). Examples of lefties calling Bush a warmonger in 2007 are not “equivalent” to calling Obama Hitler before he’s had 90 days in office.
And if the examples aren’t there, that’s really telling about exactly how brimming with bull this argument really is: as I said in my OP, Bush entered the office under a really terrible cloud following some very unsavory behavior from his team. Not to mention he was coming into office this way following a President who, in spite of a non-stop campaign of hate and smear that began the minute that HE took office, was still very popular overall, making Bush’s icky assumption of the office even more galling.
All to say, the Left had a whole bunch of really solid motivations for being hateful towards Bush and the Right from the very beginning, WAY more than the Right has against the Left and Obama now. Obama’s taking office is the reverse of the circumstances under which Bush took office, but you’d never know it from the hard right. (Yeah, I say “hard” not “loony fringe” - they may not all be calling Obama the new Hitler, but they don’t have to.)
Also, I think the overall support for the crazytown hate from supposedly non-crazytown media and politicians has to be factored as well. Show me professional politicians in office in 2001 supporting anything like this against Bush. Show me major media outlets.
And if you do…well, good on you.
So… shut me up, folks. Or at least support your argument. Because as of now, I think it’s no argument at all.
Keep dreaming. You’re dealing with people who are SO reality-challenged that they’ll say something like this:
The SAME DAY that there’s thousands of people standing around in the rain with posters of Obama as ADOLF FUCKING HITLER.
-Joe
Thousands? Well, maybe they wish, but no…
I have never heard of any of these groups. They aren’t mentioned in any of the progressive news sources that I read, and I don’t recall them ever being discussed in mass media. These groups are not part of the mainstream left. There is no comparison to the right wing nutters because they are legitimized by mass media and represent GOP voters.
Well, they are now, but give the guy some time. Sooner or later he’ll have to make some decisions that are guaranteed to piss somebody off for a legitimate reason. At the moment, the trillion-dollar bailout is still a bit vague, but the aftereffects, good or bad, will be felt soon enough.
Of course, this is true of any president.