Over the weekend, Dave Neiwert posted video of Glenn Beck and Sandy Rios discussing hate crimes legislation, with Beck seemingly not understanding the need for it because he wouldn’t personally beat up a man in a dress … or something – it’s almost impossible to figure out Beck’s point (which, I suspect, stems for the fact that Beck is clearly losing him mind.)
But while Beck’s point was rather unclear, Rios was quite insistent that this was an effort by the “thought police” to “control how we feel … about the homosexual lifestyle.” That sort of claim is nothing particularly new, but Rios’ appearance alone tells you something about the depth to which Beck and the entire movement have sunk in their unhinged panic about the state of the nation during the Obama administration’s first one hundred days that people. It’s strange to hold up as the voice of reason, considering that her most recent column accuses Obama and the Democrats of attempting to destroy George Bush, Dick Cheney, and others just as the Nazis, Stalin, and Pol Pot did to their enemies:
Totalitarian movements have always destroyed their enemies. Peter the Great of Russia murdered members of the Streltsy military corps by taking the ax of the executioner to cut off their heads one by one himself. The Bolsheviks murdered the last Russian Czar—along with his wife and family—by telling them they were going to have their picture made. As they smiled into the camera, they were shot, buried and had acid poured over their remains.
Stalin continued the blood bath of the Russian Revolution by murdering thousands of his own who didn’t agree with Marxism. The Nazis had their gas chambers, not just for Jews, but also for dissenters. Fidel Castro turned his popularity into tyranny and brave Cubans gave their lives trying to free their beloved island. The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia tortured and murdered the intelligentsia in the S21, the regular folk in the Killing Fields. The slightest lack of support for Pol Pot and the new regime earned one a place in a mass grave.
There was a dreadful logic in all of this: By killing the opposition, you eliminated any possibility of future resistance, and you eradicated any personality who could possibly remind or rally future generations to any other way of thinking. Power was—at least for a time—absolute in each situation.
…
Now the president, however coyly, and the Democratic leadership, boldly, are seeking to prosecute the last administration for political disagreements by calling them crimes. They want to punish Bush officials who gave legal advice and permission to proceed with interrogation techniques including water boarding that documents show most assuredly saved American lives.
They have released top secret documents, jeopardizing American safety further by making the people who protect and defend us worried sick both for fear of retribution and the very real potential harm that could be done to the nation as a result.
Former President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Rice, Karl Rove and attorneys at Justice and the CIA won’t be lined up and shot, but they will, if this insidious method of taking power has its way, be destroyed financially and personally—with their reputation in shreds.
And then who will stand up to speak against the dominant left? No one. And that’s the point.
We have come to point where the Right is claiming that exposing the use of torture makes President Obama just as bad as actual torturers and mass murders, while the people responsible for the sanctioning the use of torture are held up as the real victims.
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