Another Conservative apologizes for an anti-Obama stunt, but do you really believe the apology? Read and decide for yourself:
Shooting gallery apologises for using Obama as a target
A carnival game that offered fair-goers the chance to win prizes by shooting a black man has been axed after complaints that the target resembled President Obama.
“I voted for the man. It wasn’t meant to be him,” Irvin Good Jr, the president of Goodtime Amusements, which ran the attraction, told the Morning Call newspaper. “If they took it that way, we apologise.”
Here’s the local newspaper’s story:
Roseto carnival game message: ‘Step right up and shoot’ Barack Obama
Kathryn Chapman took a trip to the annual Our Lady of Mount Carmel Big Time celebration last weekend, and she was shocked to see a shooting game with President Barack Obama as the target.
“I just can’t believe how far things have come that now on church property you can shoot the president and get a prize if you hit him in the head or heart,” said Chapman, a Medford, Mass., resident who last lived in Roseto the year President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. She was in town for a family reunion.
Even though the game shows a black man dressed in a suit, holding a scroll labeled “health bill” and wearing a belt buckle that features the presidential seal, Goodtime Amusements President Irvin L. Good Jr. said the image does not portray President Obama. […]
Chapman confronted the game owner, who claimed “freedom of speech,” she said. Her husband, Richard Shultz, said he would have complained no matter the political party of the president depicted.
So first the Carnival Owner says it’s not Obama (right, I believe that one) and then the game owner says its a freedom of speech issue. Well at least he was honest. But here’s why you shouldn’t believe either man is really sorry or that their “apology” is sincere:
The fairground shooting gallery, named “Alien Invasion”, appeared at the Our Lady of Mount Carmel Big Time Fair in Roseto, Pennsylvania, last month, and attracted complaints for using using a lifesize figure of a black man in a suit, wearing a belt buckle labelled “The Prez” and clutching a rolled-up sheaf of papers marked “Health Bill”.
Once, you get the benefit of the doubt, but twice? And after this “attraction” had elicited prior complaints at the first venue? Sorry, but that apology for a “mistake in judgment” is just impossible to swallow. They knew what they were doing was promoting hatred for profit.
The real question is why would anyone think that a picture of the President as a target to be shot at in the head and heart would be profitable unless they knew that some people are bigoted and hateful enough to want to kill the President, even if its only a fantasy?
Obviously they knew it would make money in rural and small town Pennsylvania. Which means the right wing media machine of Fox, Beck, Hannity, Limbaugh ad nauseam, has accomplished its goal: ratcheting up the latent racism in certain individuals and promoting hatred against an African American President such that assassination is just another “joke” to increase their audience. In fact to them, its a chance to make money off all that stirred up hatred. So why shouldn’t a small time carnival owner get in on the action by offering people the illusion that they can assassinate Obama.
Well decent people like Kathryn Chapman don’t find this kind of thing funny. I bet Obama’s daughters and his wife don’t either. Or the Secret Service for that matter. But for the Becks and Limbaughs of the world, its just another day at the office.
And that is the true horror of this. That we as a country have devolved so low so quickly that incidents like this are becoming commonplace everyday events. And that there are people out there who think shooting President Obama in reality would be perfectly okay with them.
Rush Limbaugh and other right wing demagogues have taken to calling the federal government “our enemy.” They know what they are doing when they say that. They never said those things when Bush was in office despite the many broken laws, lies, violations of civil liberties, outing of a covert CIA operative, torture, corruption, etc. that occurred on his watch. But now that a Democrat and a Black man sits in the Oval Office the gloves have come off.
This shooting gallery is just one more sign of the times, one more bit of proof that the radical conservatives who own the Republican Party lock, stock and barrel don’t give a damn about democracy or our country or for the rule of law. All they care about is money and power. And if it puts the lives of innocent people at risk, what’s that to them?
