Now that Air America is up and running can we blame talk radio?

Great comment, tachyon. There are plenty of real examples of Air America's hate speech.

I say, bring it on. I wonder just how well the peacenik, gun control crowd plans to effect such an act, but, ahem, whomping hippies is always fun. 12 gauges of hippy whomping.

Secondly, ever since reading this article, I can't help but notice the romanticized revolutionary fantasies behind these leftists. The thinking of your average upper class American lefty is along the lines of, why can't the peasants in America recognize their lives suck, they should be immizerated. Second, lets riot!

Go for it, Tennis.

It ain't gonna' happen because the liberals don't have the guns.

We do.

. . .I think they just find the idea romantic to contemplate. Small, marginalized cult movements often take to apocalyptic fantasies--they like to dream of that time, maybe not so far off in the future, when the angel will come down and point them out of the crowd and say, 'YOU are my elect'. But Tennis is no more actually serious about this than are those people who like to picture themselves as the sort of people who would have run the Underground Railroad or smuggled Jews out of Nazi Germany--this isn't the storing up automatic firearms kind of rebellion fantasy. More the, you know, perfectly safe but still exciting kind of 'dangerous' fantasy that you can pay good money in Amsterdam to indulge.

I think a lot of that Militia movement died down after 2000 when the Y2K bug failed to plunge the work into darkness and chaos. Can't take over a country that's still functioning. After that, with no new disaster on the horizon offering an opportunity to gain control, all the fun went out of it.

I keep forgeting.....

Which side is it--the left or the right--that has all the guns?

Well, APLV probably has his slingshot.

Note the process of justification in the excerpt: they are justified in dispensing with democracy (the political framework of the nation) because Bush is not "legitimate" or "properly elected" (I suppose to be properly elected, you have to carry New York) and because he has "discarded the principles that Jefferson and Co. espoused" (I wonder if these losers can even name such a principle, and how Bush has discarded it).

This is worrying. With a pseudo-justification, it is much easier to cross the line into action. We'd kick their asses all over the field, of course, but I'd rather not have to.

50 million conservative gun owners...

...versus 25 million progressive hippies armed with anti-semitism, Karl Marx and Flower Power

I would welcome it. Then I would make them move to Canada. And then bar them from using American medical facilities.

"nope, you love the Canadian healthcare system so much, you got to stick with it. We won't let you use our private system to get around that 11 month waiting period for using an MRI."

What is disturbing is that Tennis is still pissed off after 5 years. It demonstrates the mind set of his sort. Just another insane lefty, fantasizing about revolution.

3 parts of Tennis's article struck me as especially funny:

1) His absolute certainty that Thomas Jefferson's conviction was that the US Constitution authorizes a coup d'etat by any political party or faction that lost an election it sincerely believes it was entitled to win.

2) That punching a cop is an act of deep political brilliance and bravery. (2009 state of the union address to be given by President Rodney King)

3) That the "philosophy" (Marx? Negri? Foucault? Are you kidding me?) professor in question--who assumes a priori that our sad and bleeding world yearns for nothing more than for him to loft down from tenure and lead us to Arcadia-- is writing with apparent sincerity to an on-line advice columnist.

I find it amusing that these guys redefined "democracy" as "when our side wins elections." Well, it would be amusing if they weren't being batshit crazy at the same time.

It seems like there ought to be afterschool specials emphasizing how democracy works, including accepting the outcome even when it doesn't go your way. Christ, on that regard we were better off in 1960.

I thought espousing/encouraging/planning the violent overthrow of the US government by a citizen was treason?

It might not be treason, but I was under the impression that it was not protected by the First Amendment.

The first action of any successful revolution is to line up all the lawyers against a wall and shoot them.

Which is Tennis' case would be a mass suicide.

Another example of Jane's Law:

The devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant. The devotees of the party out of power are insane.
- Megan McCardle (aka Jane Galt)

And Oliver Willis is smug, arrogant, and insane.

O/T: Looks like there's more fighting down in Oz today.

To: Cary Tennis
From: The 1960's
Re: We Want Our Revolutionary Jargon Back

I guess it shouldn't surprise me that Salon runs this masterpiece of idiocy. What do you expect from a pig but a grunt? It's like Mother Jones in that respect: it caters to a rapidly-shrinking base of people who live full-time in an alternate universe where the 1960's never ended.

Cripes, I thought he was talking about Hugo Chavez at first! Somebody should buy this idiot a one way ticket to the worker's paradise in Cuba.

Why on earth are so many of the 'baby boomers' such insufferable jackasses?

I mean, my generation's no prize, but has any generation ever been as self-absorbed and absurdly nostalgic as those who came of age in the 1960s?

I note I'm not the first one to read this and think that the Left might want to do a study of gun ownership by political afilliation before they jump right in and start revolting (as opposed to start BEING revolting, in which case, too late).

They wouldn't be using guns. (That's like expecting a vampire to use Holy Water.)

Think 9" nails in trees, burning subdivisions down, burning hummer dealerships, releasing a scourge of minks from farms...

Wait, they're already doing that crap.

Tennis, if we were really in unthinkable times, we on the right would have joined you at the ballot box. snicker...

You know, it's odd: The Nation is in some ways a lot further out than some other publications ... but they don't often waste their time on spleen-venting like this. *Real* commies know that revolution is serious business, nothing to dick around about. *Poseurs* write inanities like this.

DO NOT QUESTION HIS PATRIOTISM

I suspect that when the civil war comes, Mr. Tennis will be found, not at the barricades, but with the supply wagons, along side of every other parlor revolutionary.

It's not a particularly intelligent piece (and the author strikes me as having a vocabulary several sizes too large for his intellect), but I don't read it as advocating violent overthrow, just the kind of non-violent civil disobedience that some people are prone to thinking will change the world. When you hear the phrase 'putting one's body on the line' in a left wing context, it'is typically code for being arrested (in my experience of these conversations).

Ultimately of course, the ends desired are anti democratic, since the "will of the people" substitutes for actual elections, but they are typically, in this fantasy, accomplished non-violently. Sometimes there are flowers and patchouli oil, sometimes not.

From the article: It may then be necessary for many people in many walks of life to put their bodies on the line.

Mastiff: With a pseudo-justification, it is much easier to cross the line into action.

Mastiff's got it right, I think. The author's language only seems vague unless you think in terms of inciting action. Which is to say the people whose bodies on the line won't be his (the author's). Guaranteed.

This is the same sort of White-revolution talk that accompanies every communist (little "c") uprising in the past 140 years. And it will be the same thugs and gangsters getting killed while the bespectaled author sits back and urges more fighting "for the people.". This is vile in the extreme for a host of reasons, not least of which every thinking person in America has seen examples coming from Israel in the form of homicide bombers.

You can almost see the vile, pathetic worm typing at his keyboard, fomenting the glorious revolution. Such is the intellectual progeny of Lenin - not a real man, but the intellectual son of a whore in an orgy of misguided and evil evolutionary humanism that has been coddled and respected for too long. He cares nothing for decency, and believes that "good" and "evil" are mere abstractions that only fit classes of people, not classes of actions. Values are for chumps, virtue to be used as a propoganda tool of the bolshevik elites running the show. Capitalism is a tool of the other guy, the marketplace evil precisely because it rejects what passes as work from intellectual gas bags.

Unable to find a productive job, he takes on all revolutionary comers, just like his curricular mother. If they spout the right kind of filth, then he's their's, at least for a paragraph or two. "Long live the proletariat!" "Long live the glorious worker's revolution!" "Long live the glorious farmer's revolution!" "Long live the Black Pathers!" "Down with Bush!" But words mean things, and if some thug actually reads this trash and takes up arms against his oppressors and commits foul murder, why, it isn't little Trotsky's fault. At least until someone asks which side he's on, and then it'll have been his idea all along.

It may be necessary for many people in many walks of life to put their bodies on the line, but it won't be mine that'll be laying down in the end. The thug at the door has an intellectual master, just as the homicidal bomber has a intellectual master. Make no mistake.

If the Republicans were the Facist bastards the left thinks they are, this guy would have been "dissapeared" to a concentration camp by now, not sitting comfortably in his ivory tower.

Hey, when the right wing does Revolutionary Crazy, it is at least scary. Those militia types looked dangerous enough to garner respect.

But who can really take these lefty shitwits seriously? Oooo, big scary man on stilts with a paper-machie head - I'm sooo intimidated!

The reason most people don't care is because they're all talk. These are the same people that have demanded gun bans because they're SCARRRY!

Let 'em revolt. I hope for it. It'll be like target practice. It'll be like the Civil War, but if the south went to war without cannons, guns, or Robert E. Lee.

Man, that would ROCK.

Let 'em revolt.

Here's what bothers me about this notion: This guy, and his revolutionary cousins, are still getting a pass. "Ignore them," goes the common wisdom, and they will go away.

Well, hopefully, that's true. God knows, they don't deserve to be taken seriously on any given day.

But the truth of the matter is that this philosophical thread has gained a lot of ground in all of the usual places: academia and the media being the two most prominent. These folks are sparks looking for a flame. And in the same breath that we dismiss them for the retreaded filth that they are, they are at the same time gaining a bit of intellectual capital and ground.

Look, there was a time when people like this would get taken out behind the woodshed and beaten, either figuratively or really. But here you have a guy, not on the boards, but in a highly visible, respectable left-leaning publication making the call. And the only people stirred up are on the boards.

I will feel better if I see an article by Kaus or Krauthammer obliterating this moron. The woodshed will have served its purpose yet again.

But understand that it is exactly this type of insidious, incendiary jargoneering that has served the modern left for so long, and so well, all things considered. Bill Clinton, a President of the United States (who certainly did not get my vote) is advocating openly for global warming. Forget legitimacy, forget honesty. That says something.

It's all very well and good to blow it off and consider it another flash in the pan. Maybe.

DeeDaGo, you're making feel all tingly.

OT - Andrew Sullivan has an "ethical revelation" at the new NR:

From: Marty Peretz [mailto:online@tnr.com]
Sent: Monday, December 12, 2005 3:31 PM
To: MarcH
Subject: What's New at The New Republic

Dear Reader,

By almost everybody's reckoning, Andrew Sullivan is one of the great political and philosophical essayists of our time: controversial, rigorous, sensible. He also writes like a dream, like some of the other extraordinary essayists in this magazine's history: Walter Lippmann, Rebecca West, Edmund Wilson, and Alfred Kazin. Educated at Oxford (where he was president of the Oxford Political Union) and at Harvard (where he earned his PhD in political theory), Andrew served first as an intern, then as an associate editor, and finally for more than five years as editor of The New Republic. Since then he has been a writer of books, his own blog, articles for The Sunday Times of London, and, of course, essays in TNR. No one who has read his last essay in our pages, "The End of Gay Culture," will soon forget either its sweep or its attention to the significant details of his narrative. Subscribe today to read Andrew's past powerful pieces.

Sullivan has written for this issue of the magazine a devastating attack, both moral and political, on torture and its defenses in the United States today. This long essay is an ethical revelation. Some people would have thought that he, being somewhat conservatively inclined and generally a foreign-policy hardliner, would reflexively argue for torture against terrorists as a special case in this time and in this place. There are, in fact, some writers we very much respect who have made that case. But not Sullivan. His argument is subtle, passionate, and mind-bending.

It will surprise many readers. But The New Republic always surprises readers. None of our writers is predictable, although, I have to confess, that some are more predictable than others. Sullivan is not among these few.

…

You don't want to miss any of Andrew's or Leon's writings or, for that matter, the essays of master intellects like Paul Berman and Sean Wilentz who appear often in TNR. The only way you can guarantee that you won't miss these political and literary gems by these giants of our culture is by becoming a subscriber to The New Republic. And while you're at it, you can give friends, relatives, and colleagues gift subscriptions for Christmas or Hanukah or simply just because. There, you've solved your gift-giving problem, at a tremendous savings!

Best,

Marty Peretz
Editor-in-Chief

Sue, that's what I'm here for. Glad I could help.

Sullivan is unpredictable?

Ace should have a field day with that assertion.

The left lack two major ingredients to a successful revolution:

1. Guns- which has already been discussed.

2. Men- aside from a dwindling pool of union thugs- who would prefer to have at least 5 to 1 odds in their favor- the left has bred a class of sensitive girly men who are afraid of #1.

As the great Ronald Reagan once said, "If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with."

When I read this kind of crap from leftist writers, I lapse into the fantasy where I wait for them in the parking lot after work when it's dark.

Ski mask covering my face and shotgun in hand, I ask innocently, "So when's this revolution thing going to start? You will let me know, won't you? 'Cause I'm coming to your office first."

Nobody's up in arms over this because, as stated many times, it's just a libshit venting. Just as so many said they'd leave after W's reelection, so they say they will revolt now. They're a bunch of pussies, everyone knows it, and nobody cares.

Though the rightwing revolutionaries of the '90's were a wacko fringe, they did mean what they said, and had the means to carry it out, at least in a small localized way, and so needed to be taken seriously.

Two questions for Cary Tennis:

Given that you're allegedly living under a "regime":

1. Why aren't you already "sleeping with the fishes?"

OR

2. Why aren't you rotting in a corrective-labor camp down in Loo-zee-anne?

Hmmmmmmmmm???

Is he still talking about the "Iraw "War""?

Geez.

Grow up Tennis.

Maybe one day you will be told what is going on, but not one second before you are prepared to accept reality.

Is he still talking about the "Iraq "War""?

Geez.

Grow up Tennis.

Maybe one day you will be told what is going on, but not one second before you are prepared to accept reality.

Sullivan is unpredictable?

Ace should have a field day with that assertion.

You know what we need? To have one of the disingenius, self-righteous outrage factories over the torture issue come out against gay marriage. THEN Sullivan might get a little unpredictable.

Nah, who am I kidding?

"The left lack two major ingredients to a successful revolution:

1. Guns- which has already been discussed.

2. Men- aside from a dwindling pool of union thugs- who would prefer to have at least 5 to 1 odds in their favor- the left has bred a class of sensitive girly men who are afraid of #1.

Posted by Mike at December 12, 2005 05:35 PM"

We talk about civil war, but for the Left there's always the dream of invasion by France, Iran, Chavez and in a pinch even North Korea.

Coming soon - an invasion financed by billionaires (we know who they are) and applauded by the big media quislings.

Hmp. This Cary Tennis person sounds to me like somebody who likes to do a little too much daydreaming over too many after-work-hours vinos.

Well, well....... Little boy wants a revolution?

Well, I own a gun, a truck and a backhoe......and I've got 5 acres to hide the bodies.

The revolution is occuring and this slimebag is on the wrong side. Take your tofu loving, latte drinking, no job having ass to Canada if you don't like this great nation. These girly men are all talk and no action.

Having discarded the principles that Jefferson & Co. espoused, the current regime seems capable of anything.

I have three words for liberals who say shit like that: F D R.

Rebecca H,

You sure his vino intake was off the clock? He did turn that call-to-arms in as his assignment for the day, after all...

Gee! I love this place.
(Note to Self: Never piss off DeeDaGo.)

May I remind the gentle reader that the "revolutionaries of the 90's" were created (well, enlarged, actually) as a response to the Leftists. One of the first actions of the Clintonistas was to slaughter 86 innocent men, women and children at Waco.

One of the first actions of the Clintonistas was to slaughter 86 innocent men, women and children at Waco.

Yeah, and the Branch Davidians were as nice and happy and peaceful and wonderful as a bunch of kite-flying kids in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, right?

Waco was a collossal screw-up by the ATF. But that's all it was. It wasn't a big conspiracy, and the Branch Davidians weren't innocent. I don't understand why the right feels the need to do a Michael Moore number on this (and the Ruby Ridge) incident.

(P.S. Sorry to sound so argumentative, LarryLion. Nothing personal.)

Waco became an ATF screw up simply because that gutless POS Clinton tried at first to blame it on Janet Reno and that didn't sit well with his media cronies. Clinton was too gutless to stand up and say "I take responsibility for the actions of those in my administration". Typical Liberal assbag, it's the fault of everyone but themselves.

Waco and Ruby Ridge became big deals because of the Nazi Stormtrooper finesse with which they were handled. I guarantee you if agents in ski masks surrounded my place, fired shots at me, and besieged me in my home, I'd take as many of them with me as I could. Ruby Ridge especially proved, with the deliberate murder of Vicki Weaver at only 200 yards by a world-class shooter, that the Feds are nothing but fascists and enemies of the people.
Why is it, anyway, that when it's white Christians, they send in the snipers and tanks, but when it's muslims openly speaking of treason and terrorism, they handle them with kid gloves? Screw the FBI, BATF, and CIA, and may Janet Reno and Billary burn in hell.

I refuse to argue with someone who refuses to identify themselves.

http://www.planet-mu.com/phorum/read.php?f=1&i=232449&t=232449

As always, the moonbat left confiscates the language of reality and turns it to their own nefarious purpose, to destroy our great country.

Since when did this become a "regime"? Did Jefferson advocate the silencing of the majority, or even the wishes of the majority? Jefferson would croak if he could see the anti-Christian activities of the America-haters. I am real sure that he would have problems with the constitutionality of the darling of the lib agenda, the income tax. And I'm sure he would croak if he saw all the government giveaways.

The guy needs to get a life. And a dose of reality.

I think Cary tennis has a very high fever!

The reality about "direct action" is, conservatives and red-necks have most all of the guns and practice long and often.

Liberals think "keyboarding" is agressive!