Threats of Insurrection, Violence Are Common on the Right

By Clavell Jackson

It is clear to me that there is a large segment of this country which is clinically insane -- and much of this madness is motivated by the election of President Barack Obama. There is even a term for this -- Obama Derangement Syndrome.

There is plenty of evidence of this on FOX News and AM radio, but that pales in comparison to the hard-core lunacy on web sites such as World Net Daily and Big Government. World Net Daily, also known as World Nut Daily, is home to conspiracy theories which warn that Obama is a foreign-born Muslim and also publishes the embarrassing work or real-life ditz and Saturday Live vet Victoria Jackson (no relation). Jackson's drivel is so factually and grammatically incorrect that even a high school paper would hesitate to publish her articles. One of her recent columns accused Obama of being similar to Hitler, because Hitler "had a white mother, had a secret army and hated Jews."

Right-Wing Watch, a web site funded by People for the American Way, tracks inflammatory comments from the Religious Right, a group that has always mixed madness with political intensity. A recent article on Right-Wing Watch about William Gheen of Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, an anti-immigration group, said Obama is such a threat to White America that his group no longer accepts him as a legitimate president and was considering "extra-political activities that I can’t really talk about because they’re all illegal and violent." Yes, a political group just threatened a violent insurrection against the U.S. government.

Unfortunately, this is not uncommon. Over the last three years we have seen an increasing tide of disrespect and violent rhetoric coming from political figures and media commentators. Lunatic presidential candidate Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-Minn.) once said that she suspected Obama of having anti-American views and former Nevada senatorial candidate Sharron Angle suggested angry voters should take up "second amendment remedies" if the polls didn't work.

Is it any wonder that many media sources reported that Obama was getting 30 death threats a day stretching the Secret Service to breaking point. Yes, many people are upset about the recession, but this is more than economically-motivated frustration. This is refusal to accept Obama as the nation's leader. America has been through tough economic times before when Franklin Roosevelt was president, but we didn't see this level of violent rhetoric. FDR did face an attempted coup from a group of oligarchs, including Prescott Bush, who wanted to install a fascist government. You won't find much information about the "Business Plot," in American history books though.

I have to believe that much of this is racial. Although the myopic GOP continues to say that is not, the evidence is in plain sight. FOX News has a long string of racial slights such as accusing Obama of "having hoodlums in the hizzouse," and "chugging forties." Glenn Becks rants were so offensive, FOX finally had to let him go. And there is a long history of racist comments from GOP politicians which include comparing Obama to a monkey, using the phrase "tar baby" and sending cartoons of the White House lawns festooned with watermelons. If you want to see really vile comments check out the commentary section on Foxnews.com. A recent story about Somalia referred to the country as "Niggadishu." Note to the GOP, if you can't see it, that's because you don't want to see it.

Many of the Obama haters will call him a communist, a Muslim, a liberal, even if he is none of those things. Obama has pursued largely moderate positions, to the point of alienating his liberal supporter. But it seems that some white people cannot swallow the idea of a black man in the White House. How dare Obama address the nation, how dare he go on vacation, how dare he take off his jacket in the Oval Office and how dare he fly on Air Force One? Like the other presidents didn't do any of the same things.

This hatred has sunk deep into the core of the political system. We now have an opposition party that will vote against any legislation if it has the hint of making Obama and the Democrats look good. As the recent debt crisis showed, Republicans are willing to crash the economy to achieve their political point.

The future does not look any better. If Obama wins a second term, and I believe he will, the GOP will try to impeach him. Presidential candidate Herman Cain has already said this would be a good idea! It will probably fail and cost the nation a lot of time and money, but as long as it gives the Democrats a black eye, the GOP is happy.

We are only in the Summer of 2012, we have almost a year of political campaigning ahead of us and I am already exhausted. We've got a bumpy ride ahead of us.

Tea Party Monster is Choking its Republican Creator

It's a sign of how awful the mainstream media is when some of the best reporting is found in Rolling Stone. Yes, Rolling Stone, a magazine that is known for covering drug-addled rock stars, broke the story that took down former Afghan commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal. And Rolling Stone Matt Taibi has also done some of the most hard-hitting and insightful writing about the mortgage crash and Wall Street's shenanigans.

Taibi also did one of his trade mark acerbic pieces about the Tea Party. Taibi says, "A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can't imagine it."

The article features an illustration where a Frankenstein-like monster, representing the Tea Party, is being stitched together by Sen. Mitch McConnell. It's interesting because the Tea Party, which was a creation of the Republican party, is beginning to look like it's eventually going to choke its creator.

The fiscally conservative Tea Party was supposed to have sprung up in opposition to President Barack Obama's health care reform legislation. But where were these people when President George W. Bush was waging two unfunded wars, giving tax cuts to billionaires and pushing the Medicare prescription drug benefit? According to figures from the Congressional Budget Office, Dubya increased the deficit by $5 trillion, while Obama has only increased the deficit by $1.4 trillion so far. (In spite of their reputation for fiscal conservatism, Republican presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush increased the deficit, while President Bill Clinton left a budget surplus.)

In reality, the Tea Party is a triumph of branding. It was the same GOP repackaged in a new shiny box, kind of like the new coke. The Tea Party, a supposedly grass roots movement, is actually funded by Americans for Prosperity, a group that is headed by former Republican Congressman Dick Armey. It's sponsored by the Koch brothers, some of the wealthiest political backers in the country. The brilliance of the Tea Party is that it managed to get middle-class Americans to get out and march in the sun for policies that benefit billionaires!

But then something unexpected happened, the Tea Party began to get out of control. The Tea Party's popularity let clueless politicians like Christine O'Donnell, who has never won a race in her life, and Sharon Angle, who became famous for running away from the media, and mistaking Latinos for Asians, get a national spotlight. O'Donnell and Angle were so wacky, that voters ended up electing Democrats, even though the mood of the nation was supposed to be turning against them.

But it didn't stop there. The Tea Party movement also swept up politicians like Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who bragged about secession while balancing the budget with Obama stimulus money, and the idiotic Rep. Michele Bachmann, who claims she is for small government, even though she has received millions of dollars in federal money, and used to work for the IRS!

Now we have a lot of angry, white people who are pushing for the Tea Party's fascist mantra. The Tea Party is steering the Republican party even further to the right. So what happens when you push a party that is already pro corporation and anti-regulation even farther? You get fascism. As Benito Mussolini said, fascism occurs when the state and corporate interests merge.

Mainstream Republicans are worried. Former White House adviser Karl Rove actually said Tea Party presidential candidates were coming across as too far right. In an interview with Rev. Al Sharpton on MSNBC, Dallas Tea Party leader Phillip Dennis called Karl Rove, "a big-spending, big-government moderate!" Now when Karl Rove, the man who was nicknamed "Bush's brain," is called a moderate, the crazy train has left the station.

The thing is politicians like Speaker John Boehner and Karl Rove, are old-time insiders. They know how the system works, and they realize that Republicans can't get elected if they let a bunch of lunatics, who say they want to let the U.S. default on its debt, who don't believe in global warming and who want to turn Medicare into a voucher system, get elected, the Republicans are screwed. Senior citizens vote en masse, and they won't take kindly to politicians who want to eliminate the programs that keep them alive.

And it seems the American public is finally waking up to the fact that by voting in Tea Party politicians, they essentially handed the lunatics the keys to the asylum. Tea Party governors Rick Scott, John Kasich and Scott Walker are already facing revolts at home as voters realize they are trying to cut essential services and go after teachers, cops and firefighters. According to a recent New York Times article, the Tea Party is less popular than Muslims and atheists.

But the genie seems to be out of the bottle. The Tea Party has unleashed a wave of wild-eyed ideologues who are going to drive the Republican party right off the cliff. And right now the Democrats are pulling up a deck chair and grabbing some pop corn.

Bachmann campaign means the joke's on us

Bachmann

If you want to read some really depressing writing, read some of ex-New York Times writer Christopher Hedges' work. Hedges writes some of the most insightful and frightening articles and books documenting the gradual descent of America. One of the central arguments of Hedges' book, "Empire of Illusion," is many Americans are so poorly educated they can't tell fiction from reality. During the last Mid-Term elections this became increasingly clear as many Americans, clueless about the true causes of the financial collapse opted to vote in members of the same party who had been largely responsible for the economic disaster.

It also explains the success of Rep. Michele Bachmann, who recently won the Iowa Straw poll. According to Rachel Maddow, she managed to pull this off after she bought and handed out about 6,000 ballots.

Bachmann is the type of candidate that makes the rest of the world scratch its head. Is it any wonder why Standard and Poors decided to downgrade the United States' triple A credit rating, when you have people like this in charge of this country?

Bachmann is a sad joke of a politician. Almost everything she says is a lie or wildly incorrect. If Bachmann tells you she is going to the bathroom, double check it. Bachmann tells so many untruths that one must assume that she not just fact-challenged, but a shameless liar.

She claims to be a small-government conservative, but has spent years sucking on the government teat. Bachmann used to work as an attorney for the IRS, where her job was chasing down Americans who didn't pay their taxes. While she was at the IRS, Bachmann also took liberal use of their maternity policy. Yet in spite of this, she has cast herself as a Tea Party favorite, a party that is supposed to stand for taxed enough already!

Bachmann's family farm has also received more than $250,000 in government subsidies and her husband's Marcus, an unlicensed psychologist, has received more than $130,000 in Medicaid payments, even though it has been accused of using reparative therapy, which aims to make gay people straight. And while she brags about serving as a foster mom to 23 children, she fails to mention that she also received money from the government for her generosity.

The Bachmanns also used a federally-backed loan program to finance their home, even though Bachmann later criticized the program. Basically, Bachmann's believes it's great for me, but not for anyone else.

And there is the issue with her problem with facts. But here are just a few whoppers:

• She confused the home towns of serial killer John Wayne Gacy and actor John Wayne.
• She said the Founding Fathers, fought against slavery, even though most of them were slave owners, and there was that whole thing about the Civil War.
• She also signed a pledge stating that black families were more intact during slavery, even though slaves could not legally marry.
• And most recently she confused Elvis' birthday with the day he croaked on the toilet.
• Last weekend on "Meet the Press," she denied calling for the United States to default on its debt, yet on July 28, CBS.com featured video of Bachmann vowing not to raise the debt ceiling.

In addition, there is her frightening fundamentalist views. Former Evangelical Frank Schaeffer describes Bachmann as a dominionist, an extremist sect, which wants to turn the United States into a Christian theocracy. While she was still a home maker in Minnesota, she tried to get the Disney carton "Aladdin" banned from her Christian school, because she though it promoted witchcraft.

With her extreme views, her faulty memory and her blatant hypocrisy, Bachmann, should have trouble getting elected to the local school board. But somehow, she has not only been elected to Congress, now she is among the front runners in the Republican presidential race. This is not without controversy. The conservative Wall Street Journal, recently wrote an editorial where they essentially said of Bachmann and the other GOP presidential candidates, "Isn't there anyone else?"

Why do some Americans support Michele Bachmann? Maybe it's her religion, it surely can't be for her spotty resume and her legislative achievements. In a Politico article, a Minnesota Democratic legislator said Bachmann had no significant legislative achievements.

Maybe it's like what Hedges says, Bachmann supporters can't tell fact from fiction. They are attracted to Bachmann's fervor and religiosity, even if she is a pathological liar and doesn't believe in half of what she says. Consider this quote from a Daily Beast article: "Donna Fouts, 73, doesn’t seem to care that Bachmann planned to vote against the debt-ceiling compromise that would ensure the arrival of her Social Security check and the military benefits owed to her sons and nephews. 'Well, I’m sick of all them other politicians that tell me what to do with my life, she answers. 'Something about her tells me to follow her.'"

So people like Fouts want to vote for Bachmann because she sounds good, and makes them feel warm and fuzzy inside. And they trust her to solve the Middle East crisis, fix the nation's economy, and track down terrorists? God help us!

Why A Black Spider-Man is Important

A small ripple occurred in the Marvel universe, when it was announced that following the death of long-running Spider-Man Peter Parker, he would be replaced by a Black Latino teenager named Miles Morales.

Now, I should add that this happened in the Marvel Ultimate series, which updates long-running super heroes with a distinctly more modern spin. By the way, Col. Nick Fury, head of the S.H.I.E.L.D. spy agency, has also be been "retconned" (retroactive continuity) as an African American, which is why he is played by Samuel. L. Jackson in the movies. (The original Nick Fury's image was based on Dean Martin.) Peter Parker is still alive and kicking Marvel's other lines.

Changes like that are not unusual in the super hero universe, which has some of the most creative writers in the world. Characters are regularly killed, resurrected, sent to alternate universes and sent back and forth in time on a regular basis. In addition, there is a central idea that a super hero mantle is like a crown that can be passed on to different people. Several characters have worn the cape and cowl apart from original Batman Bruce Wayne. And other super heroes such as Captain Marvel, Captain America, the Green Lantern and the Flash have been played by different people over the years.

But with Spider-Man becoming black, it is a turning point. Spider-Man is one of the most recognized characters in the comic book world and some would call him the flagship of the Marvel line.

While some people have applauded this bold move, it has also becoming politicized. The right-wing noise machine, which tries to pin anything bad on President Barack Obama, claimed this was another incidence of the politically correct media run amok. Right-wing lunatic Glenn Beck said that "Michelle Obama had lead to a gay black Spider-Man." And of course, he got 80 percent of the story wrong.

The First Lady had nothing to do with this choice. The writer of the new Spider-Man line had merely said that in the future there could be a gay super hero. But when did the right-wing media ever let the facts get in the way of a good story?

There are many critics who wonder why the need to change Spider-Man's race, but to me it makes a lot of sense. The world is changing and diversity is becoming the norm, the president is black and so is Will Smith, arguably the world's biggest movie star. And the music world has long been dominated by black artists. The public has different expectations, and Marvel realizes that. Today many young people have black idols, so why not a super hero?

There are many black, Latino and Asian super heroes in the pantheon, but most of them are minor and not on the level of Spider-Man. The comic book world has been surprisingly progressive with pushing forward ideas of racial inclusivity. The super hero genre has always had a subversive message. While many might see Superman as American as apple pie, he is actually an illegal alien trying to blend in. Critics have pointed out that Superman's creator Jerry Siegel was Jewish, and that is where much of the Man of Steel's dual identity comes from. Siegel also had to deal with having to live a double life as a Jewish person in a largely Christian country.

In addition, Marvel debuted the character Black Panther, an African super hero, before the political movement, also named the Black Panthers, was born. Comic book legend Stan Lee said that his creation of mutants like the X-Men was a way of trying to explore issues like prejudice. And what could more be like racial prejudice than people being discriminated because of the way they were born -- an issue that Marvel's mutants constantly struggle with.

But a Black Spider-Man can also lead to a host of new story lines. Spider-Man has always struggled as the everyman super hero. Sure he can climb walls, but he still has to struggle with paying rent and a demanding boss. Now, with Miles Morales, he can deal with host of other issues such as racial discrimination, profiling, immigration, ect.

And this is an important message to all those people of color who still read comic books. As corny as they are, with their spandex costumes and ludicrous plot lines, super heroes are mythical, idealized figures. Children look up to them.

Many black celebrities and even politicians say they were comic book fans. President Obama is said to be a Spider-Man fan. My theory is that comic books have always been a fairly cheap art form, so whether you were a kid living in the American ghetto or a kid living in an African village, you parents could afford a comic book.

And when kids opened those pages, they found a world where people, who had many of the same problems as them -- discrimination, bigotry, poverty -- were struggling against the odds, and sometimes succeeding. This is a powerful message.

As a kid growing up, I read comic books and pretty much all of the heroes I followed, Tony Stark (Iron Man), Bruce Wayne (Batman) and Clark Kent (Superman), were all white.

I think it's great that the billions of people around the world who still read comics can look at a super hero and see someone who looks like them staring back. Just like seeing a black president, it says that someday you can be the most important person in the world.