Sharks in the Water

Lots of people are openly carrying guns to political rallies.  It’s something of a big deal at the moment, what with a Chief Executive blatantly ignoring the will of the people.

Still, overlapping the Open Carry movement with other causes is a bit disingenuous.   These rallies are about health care, taxation and debt rather than the 2nd Amendment.  The signal is lost in the noise, and the media doesn’t hesitate to ask the hysterical question, “what’s that weirdo doing here with a gun?”

Fortunately, the whole thing has gone on without incident or accident.  When the media has gotten snippy, the rebuttals have been heard.

Let’s just be very careful, folks.  We need to be sure that none of this ends up being interpreted as threat rather than demonstration.

And we need to be wary of those among the ranks harboring less-than-noble intentions.

Take Josh Hendrickson.  He decided to jump the bandwagon in Minnesota this week.   Turns out, he’s done time recently, due to an incident in which he used pepper spray on a female customer at the Cub Foods where he worked security.

Looking at his website, it’s hard to miss the obvious: Mr. Hendrickson is a member of We Are Change Minnesota, a group of 9/11 “truthers.”

Liberals aren’t the only ones with truthers in their ranks, and no matter what political stripes someone may wear, there is no place in civilized society for someone who will cheapen the deaths of 2,993 American citizens to forward a malformed theory in service of a cheap political agenda (*).

I find it unspeakably offensive when these sorts of people take on the mantle of pretension and claim to be speaking for us.

Then there’s attention-whore Chris Broughton.  In theory, I should be all sorts of supportive for the guy. African Americans are one of the fastest-growing segments of the shooting community, and people need to see them represented.

But not like this.

His little display in Arizona wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing, but a preplanned stunt organized by radio show host Ernest Hancock.  Broughton, along with William Kostric, is a member of the We Are the People Foundation.  Among other things, they’re Birthers, a movement nearly as persistent, but not as vicious, as the truthers.

They also count Birch Society John McManus as one of their supporters.  You may remember the Birch Society as the guys who poured gasoline on the whole One World Government fire in the 1990s.   William Buckley spent years distancing himself (and the Republican party) from their agenda following an article they published in which President Eisenhower was accused of being a Communist plant.

Broughton is a parishioner at the Faithful Word Baptist Church, whose pastor Steven Anderson said in a recent sermon: “I don’t want him [President Obama] to be a martyr, we don’t need another holiday. I’d like to see him die, like Ted Kennedy, of brain cancer.”

Or this happy tidbit (serious language): “God wants me to hate Barack Obama.   God hates Barack Obama. (…) I’m going to pray that he dies and goes to hell.  When I go to bed tonight, that’s how I’m going to pray.”

The Left has Jeremiah Wright.  We have this guy.  Is there really any difference?  This sort of hatred and distortion should never be tolerated, regardless of political affiliation.

Broughton himself does nothing to distance himself from Anderson’s rantings, affirming, “I don’t care how God does it, I’m not going into further detail than that.”

Still feel like cheering Chris B. on?

Remember, this was the man who said he was planning on “watering the tree of liberty” while carrying a rifle to an Arizona rally.  Put together, those statements could be taken way the heck out of context by someone with an axe to grind.

Mark my words: one of these people is going to be the next Timothy McVeigh.  Brought up on a diet of spoiled suburban living, free-floating discontent, bad Emo music and Alex Jones’ claptrap, somebody’s going to brew themselves up a conspiracy.

Hopefully, nobody will get hurt.  Of course, when the Secret Service busts up their little bunker, the lens will fall squarely on us.  By “us,” I mean anyone who’s been vocal about their opposition to the current administration’s policies.  They’ve already tried to brand us as racists and counterrevolutionaries.  Let’s not give them the ammunition they’ll so desperately need to maintain momentum next year.

We don’t need the taint of this sort of fringe element.  We’ve got to excise them among our own ranks, or they will overtake and destroy the causes we believe in.

(*) Charles Krauthammer summed up my opinions on the truthers perfectly:

(…)this is no trivial matter. It’s beyond radicalism, beyond partisanship. It takes us into the realm of political psychosis, a malignant paranoia that, unlike the Marxist posturing, is not amusing. It’s dangerous. In America, movements and parties are required to police their extremes. Bill Buckley did that with Birchers. Liberals need to do that with “truthers.”

You can no more have a truther in the White House than you can have a Holocaust denier — a person who creates a hallucinatory alternative reality in the service of a fathomless malice.