Are some hippie leftists calling for mass protests and mobs running wild in the streets of Washington, D.C. to stop health care reform? Not exactly. To be more precise, leftists like Michael Moore aren’t calling for mobs of people to force Congress to pass what they want (single payer health care) rather than the watered down version of health care reform that may or may not be passed by Congress this week.
Instead, it’s one of our favorite Republican Congressional Members (and yes, that particular description was chosen specifically for its double entendre meaning), Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), who is calling for mobs of right wing citizens in the streets in order to intimidate Democrats from passing Health Care Reform (from The Huffington Post:
Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) urged a smaller-than-expected crowd of Tea Party protesters on Tuesday to launch a Velvet Revolution-style uprising against the federal government, saying the parallels are striking between America’s current government and Eastern European communist rule. […]
… King implored the crowd to bring the nation’s capital to a sort of paralysis. Warning, erroneously, that the health care bill would fund abortion and fund care for 6.1 million illegal immigrants, he demanded that concerned citizens “continue to rise up.”
“I look back 20 years ago in the square in Prague… when tens of thousands showed up there and they shook their keys peacefully and they took over their country and they achieved their freedom back again,” he said. “If you can keep coming to this city, fill up the congressional offices across the country but jam this city. If you can get on your cell phones, and get on your Blackberries and your email, and ask people to keep coming to this town. Storm this city, fill up Washington D.C., jam this capital so they can’t move. And if tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of you show up, we will win. We will defeat this bill and you will have your liberty back.”
Funny, but I never thought that the peaceful election of a Democratic majority in Congress violated anyone’s liberty, or that the Democratic party had suddenly turned the United States into a Eastern European Style Communist Dictatorship that destroyed anyone’s “freedoms” (unlike, say the warrantless wiretapping and torture a certain Republican President authorized during the years 2001-2008). But I suppose anytime the Republicans are not in power, the party that defeated them, by default, must be Neo-Bolshevik Marxist-Leninists who are instituting a Dictatorship of the Proletariat and imprisoning dissenters and political opponents, at least in the delusional minds of people who take Rep. King seriously.
Of course, this is not the first time Steve King has said something patently absurd and outrageous. It’s sort of his schtick. Recently, he had this to say publicly after a lunatic homicidal domestic terrorist crashed his plane into an building that housed an IRS building in Austin, Texas:
Rep. Steve King (R-IA) told a crowd at CPAC on Saturday that he could “empathize” with the suicide bomber who last week attacked an IRS office in Austin, and encouraged his listeners to “implode” other IRS offices, according to a witness.
Here he is on You Tube explaining his comments at CPAC regarding the IRS:
So, it’s not like this is the first time (nor is it likely the last) that King has made incendiary comments suggesting or implying that violence and mob intimidation were acceptable responses to federal officials or legislative proposals he didn’t like. Ins short, he’s Glenn Beck without the fake weeping, the Fox TV show, and the minor fact that, unlike Beck, he’s an elected official of the very same government that he hates (at least when its controlled by those terrorist loving, Commie-Fascist-Muslim loving-America hating Democrats).
I doubt King’s remarks are going to lead to hundreds of thousands of angry conservative “tea party” protesters arriving en masse this week to shut down the government. But his rhetoric is exactly the time of language that encourages the “lone wolf” radical right fringe crazies who in the recent past have taken out their frustrations violently on federal employees and anyone they perceive to be too liberal.
The last time a Democrat was president, the Federal Building in Oklahoma City was bombed by a radicalized Timothy McVeigh whose actions killed and maimed hundreds of innocent people. I’m not saying that King wants another Oklahoma city bombing to occur while President Obama is in office, but the extreme political rhetoric he employs to attack Democrats, liberals and agencies of the same Federal Government which cuts his pay check and gives him better health care than 99% of Americans could be viewed in that light.
At the least, his reckless behavior as a public official is dangerous to the safety of his fellow Americans because it fosters a climate of hatred and fanaticism which in the past has bred political violence in our nation. For that he should be roundly condemned by the saner members of his own party. I doubt that they will repudiate his remarks, but if they were true patriots and responsible Americans they would do so immediately and publicly.
Whatever the merits of the current health care reform bill before Congress(and I for one don’t think much of this watered down proposal because it does too little to address the real health care needs of millions of Americans), it threatens no one’s fundamental rights under the US Constitution. It’s high time the Republican leadership and their friends in the conservative media stopped inciting anger and hatred among their followers by falsely claiming that it does.
