When you watch these clips on Glenn Greenwald’s site, I want you to play a little game. When you see “Glenn Beck” and the “FOX” logo, imagine “Keith Olbermann” and “MSNBC” logo. When they talk about “President Obama”, imagine they’re talking about “President Bush”. Once you’ve got all that, imagine the kind of right-wing backlash that would occur if the “liberal media” were discussing logistic of a revolt against the US government.
That’s the context for this Glenn Beck “War Games” show on Fox News this week — one promoted, with some mild and obligatory caveats, by Michelle Malkin’s Hot Air. In the segment below, he convened a panel that includes former CIA officer Michael Scheuer and Ret. U.S. Army Sgt. Major Tim Strong. They discuss a coming “civil war” led by American “Bubba” militias — Beck says he ”believes we’re on this road” — and they contemplate whether the U.S. military would follow the President’s orders to subdue civil unrest or would instead join with “the people” in defense of their Constitutional rights against the Government (they agree that the U.S. military would be with “the people”):
Thomas Jefferson once did indeed say that revolutions should occur every 13 years or so to keep a government honest. A famous quote of his is that when people fear their government there’s tyranny, but when a government fears their people there is liberty. I’m not inherently questioning the rights of people to rise up against what they deem to be injustices and all that happy nonsense.
No, what’s bothering me is that such an idea was positively blasphemous until January 20th this year. The right didn’t even think criticizing Bush was allowed, let alone to take arms and storm the White House, further still to suggest the US military would join in the uprising.
Thus we have another divide between the left and right. There’s a reason for the change of attitude: the right genuinely acts as though only their side is patriotic, the others are patently anti-American and must be stopped at all costs. If they’re in power, don’t you dare ask questions or by god you hate America. If they’re not, then they have to stop the evil terrorist-loving communists before they destroy the country from the inside. A battle of ideas? Hardly. A battle of good and evil? Certainly.
As Will put it, this mindset is what led to the Unabomber, the Atlanta Olympics, and OKC bombings.
It’s time someone steps up and calls for the arrests of these people that are calling for civil war because we have a Democratic president and the assassination of our Black persident. If any of the air personalities of Air America called for the Murder of George Bush or called for a civil war because of the ineptitudes of his administration Rush and the other talkingheads would be going ape crap crazy.