It’s been awhile since I’ve regularly checked Blue Oregon. Once Obama moved into the Oval Office, got rid of some dusty old bust of Winston Churchill, and made himself comfortable, the wind kind of left their sails. The zeal for victory that had seemingly been the trademark of all Democrats before January 20th faded and what replaced it was so much sore-winner chest-pounding and a sudden disdain for that “highest form of patriotism” which they’d long championed through those long, dark years of incipient fascism between 2000 and 2008.

Long gone were the optimistic slogans of “Hope and Change” and “Yes we can!” In their place are petulant demands for “haters” and “racists” to shut the fuck up and let the President do whatever he pleases and malignant smears like these posts by Blue Oregon’s own Carla Axtman. Carla’s “outrage,” if one can even dignify her mixture of disingenuous “have you no shame?!” posturing and political opportunism as “outrage”, is the result of a boneheaded attempt at a joke by two-bit “long-shot” Idaho gubernatorial candidate and political nobody Rex Rammel. Rammel apparently responded to some audience member’s comment question about the availability of “Obama tags” by saying he’d buy some of them. He later was quoted as saying that he “was just being sarcastic. That was just a joke. I would never support him being assassinated.” [emphasis added]

Classy? No. Clever? Not really. Funny? Only if you’re being really charitable. Still, the guy was pretty unequivocal about where he stands.

But never mind all that! Axtman sees right through Rammel’s smokescreen, detecting in his comments support for “eliminationism” (that is, assassinating the President), adding that “[i]n other words, these guys are stoking outright civil war in the U.S.” Then she goes on to rattle off a list of what people who are in favor of limited government actually want (“Basic law and order gets trumped by vigilante style old west “justice”: the guy with the biggest and baddest guns wins.”) and concludes that what they’re really after is a “national tear-down”.

Err. Alright, then.

Not content to attack just limited-government conservatives, she then attacks even “mainstream Republicans” (who’re not particularly known these days for their small-government sympathies) for not eradicating this festering, “eliminationist” cyst bleeding away at the core of the party.

Remember what I said yesterday about “clumsy and transparent attempts to de-legitimize people with different points of view”?

The game Carla is trying to play here is childish. By her own standards of, err.. . “logic”, she herself, Blue Oregon, and the entire Democratic Party spent the last eight years stoking the fires of civil war by their stubborn refusal to loudly condemn “eliminationist rhetoric” emanating from their own midst. Carla’s blade might be a bit dull, but it still cuts both ways.

But Carla isn’t really concerned about “civil war” or “eliminationists” in the Republican Party. She knows as well as anyone that it was a dumb, off-the-cuff joke by a powerless nobody and represents exactly nothing at all. She’s just feigning her horrified gasp and affecting a pose of “concern” and moral outrage because it’s politically convenient to paint Republicans and conservatives as an out-of-control mob of vicious lunatics itching for a bloodbath. It’s the tactics of the vacuous and the dishonest.

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On the other hand, I see that Jeff Golden is now blogging for Blue Oregon. While I certainly don’t agree with Jeff on a lot of issues, I was always really impressed by the way he hosted the Jefferson Exchange on Jefferson Public Radio. As far as I can tell, he’s a genuinely thoughtful guy who, if his radio style is at all representative, willing to have an honest, lengthy debate with people he disagrees with.

So kudos to Blue Oregon for bringing him on.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 28th, 2009 at 12:52 pm by Vincent and is filed under Blowing Stuff Up, Civil Liberties, Crazy, Free Speech, National, Politics, Stupid. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.