Sick Simper Tearanus

Christ, this Angle broad is worth her weight in comedy gold. Not that Harry Reid should get cocky, because people rarely go wrong in assuming that voters are reactionary mow-rons, but shit, she can't get out of her own way:

"Our Founding Fathers, they put that Second Amendment in there for a good reason, and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government," Angle told conservative talk show host Lars Larson in January. "In fact, Thomas Jefferson said it's good for a country to have a revolution every 20 years. I hope that's not where we're going, but you know, if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies."

Sigh. "Lars Larson", is he from the same inbred Scandiwegian fjord-hole as Erick Erickson or what? Here is the original Jefferson quote, by the way:

"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ...And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."

Now, if you really think about what Jefferson is implying in the complete quote, it is at best opaque in some parts. The teabaggers certainly live up to Jefferson's phrase "The people cannot be all, and always, well informed"; rarely has there been such a spectacularly overheated yet befuddled "movement" in the spotlight, incoherent, self-contradictory, rudderless. Yet Jefferson acknowledges implicitly that because of their slack-jawed ignorance of the facts, they are the most likely to bray their long-simmered, cognitively dissonant grievances.

The quote is from 1787, from a Jefferson still flush with the success of a hard-won victory, and the establishment of a new and grand experiment in self-rule. It is not something Jefferson would have reiterated even a dozen years later, and indeed, none of his later writings (at least that I've ever read) burn with the same revolutionary fervor. I'm not saying that Jefferson got in on the top floor, liked the layout, and pulled the ladder up after him; I'm saying that he and the rest of the founders understood that ruling and keeping the ship of state on an even keel is a different game than revolution. Constant revolt -- especially when incited by the most ignorant, regressive, and temperamental elements of a society -- is as sure a recipe for disaster as sitting on your thumbs whilst a true tyrant is ahoof.

More importantly, no matter how hard they wish and squint, TJ's "blood of patriots and tyrants" money quote does not apply to them. This three-corner-hatted fever dream of theirs is a mirage, a sham, a cozy fantasy to tuck themselves into at night. Barack Obama is not a tyrant; Kim Jong-Il is a tyrant. Fat fucks who take their Medicare-subsidized Rascals on public roads to public parks are not patriots; they're lazy assholes who need a week in North Korea to set their stupid shit straight.

I think Mark Lilla has correctly sussed the heart of these preening goofballs' wafer-thin plaints:

The new Jacobins have two classic American traits that have grown much more pronounced in recent decades: blanket distrust of institutions and an astonishing—and unwarranted—confidence in the self. They are apocalyptic pessimists about public life and childlike optimists swaddled in self-esteem when it comes to their own powers.

....

Now an angry group of Americans wants to be freer still—free from government agencies that protect their health, wealth, and well-being; free from problems and policies too difficult to understand; free from parties and coalitions; free from experts who think they know better than they do; free from politicians who don’t talk or look like they do (and Barack Obama certainly doesn’t). They want to say what they have to say without fear of contradiction, and then hear someone on television tell them they’re right. They don’t want the rule of the people, though that’s what they say. They want to be people without rules—and, who knows, they may succeed. This is America, where wishes come true. And where no one remembers the adage “Beware what you wish for.”

This is exactly right -- this is a group of people whose aim appears to be to cut off their collective nose to spite their face. They rant about self-sufficiency and the unwanted interference of government regulation, because their self-selected feedback loop tells them they are self-sufficient, even as they waddle to the Costco, instead of going Galt as they frequently threaten, and they have been too coddled all their lives to know what Third World shitholes without government regulations are like.

I've seen this phenomenon first-hand locally, and it perplexes and bothers me deeply -- people whom I know for an empirical fact are on the fucking dole, writing foaming screeds to the local news outlets about their wretched go of it under the iron fist of Barack Obama and his meddling government minions. Negro please.

It is of small comfort to recognize that if the best these dipshits can muster is the likes of Rand Paul and Sharron Angle, then their bench is even thinner than one supposes. Yet the twin stupidities of a decade ago -- the selection of Fredo Arbusto and the usurpation in Gullyvornia of Enron-backed Rainier Wolfcastle -- have probably soured me for a lifetime on being even cautiously optimistic about my fellow votard.

One last indefensible quote from Sharron Angle, and woe betide the media flunky who brings it up and fails on the easy follow-through:

"The nation is arming," she told the newspaper. "What are they arming for if it isn't that they are so distrustful of their government? They're afraid they'll have to fight for their liberty in more Second Amendment kinds of ways. That's why I look at this as almost an imperative. If we don't win at the ballot box, what will be the next step?"

[emphasis mine]

Um, the next step is that you field a better candidate for the next go-round, shit-for-brains. Someone needs to call this crazy bitch on this bullshit -- the logical, practical implication of what she is saying is that if a bunch of heavily-armed retards with delusions of being oppressed don't get their way, they will violently overthrow the majority.

They presume too much if they're assuming that they're the only ones with guns. Not that these goons would or could ever seriously organize to a meaningful extent in that regard, but inspiring angry loners is another matter, for which their thinly veiled threats of armed insurrection should be held accountable.