Given the crazytrain we've been on for the last eight years, I really don't want to dignify these people with anything approaching actual analysis. They don't rate it and their views honestly aren't coherent enough to even try.

Nevertheless, clearly they're afraid. Afraid of what, you ask? No freaking clue. I notice that many of them are what I've come to call "born again fiscal conservatives," who had no issues adding eleven figures to the deficit each month for more than six years to fund our military adventures in the Middle East, but cry and dress up as colonial era Minutemen when our new President tries to spend a much smaller figure on things like education and critical infrastructure. I can appreciate fiscal conservatism, but if you weren't out in force in 2003 protesting against a preemptive war on borrowed money, then you simply have no intellectual credibility to protest now. QED.

I hear much ado about race, but I am admittedly not calibrated to understand these issues. I grew up in a very multi-ethnic community in Northern California, and in spite of having visited the deep south (and lived there on a military assignment), I still just don't think in these terms. Perhaps people really are afraid of him because of his race. I don't know, and if that's all there is to it then I'm even more determined not to dignify them.

Having now spent more than six years wandering the Earth (including two OIF deployments), and having lived in Japan and now Europe, I think Americans need to collectively, as a people, Get Out More™. The American political dialogue has long since passed the point of absurdity, culminating most elegantly in the recent allegations that Stephen Hawking could never survive in England because the NHS would let him die. At this point, I'm all for simply ignoring these people and their idiotic blather and moving on with the many important things we need to do as a nation, which include finding non-fossilized ways of powering a modern economy, extracting ourselves from our wars in the Middle East and reforming our healthcare and educational systems, which are sub par compared with the rest of the developed world.

The danger here is that they seem to want to carry guns at the wrong times, and they counter their own feelings of powerlessness and confusion by threatening others. The song has no lyrics, but they can play it loud at least. I'm a gun owner myself, and I reserved a special kind of contempt for our last President, but it would never have even occured to me to show up at one of Bush's speeches packing heat. When does that ever start sounding like a good idea?

Then again, I'm not a freakity freak freak like some of these people, which I'm afraid probably constitutes the most technically accurate description of this crowd that I can muster.

:-)