Ignorance is bliss. Until it becomes embarrassing.

Operation American Spring: ten million protesters

Now we know how many holes it takes to fill the Capitol Mall

When is a revolution not a revolution? When it's fiction. 




Operation American Spring was sprung today. A Right Wing event in which ten million conservatives/libertarian and or paranoid/crypto-fascists were supposed to converge on Washington and take our government back from The Man (and by that I mean, "the Black Man"). They were supposed to arrest all the usurpers, such as that Niarobi Usurper in the White House, and restore our government to its original principles. The ones that included slavery and the ethnic cleansing of the Native Americans, busting unions and allowing the wealthy to form an oligarchy. (I would say that everyone gets to carry a gun without question, but that was never before a principle in the US until Conservative revisionists got a hold of our legislatures and courts.

I had to scoff just to hear the estimated turnout. Just from the promotion, the organizer of this event, a Retired Colonel Harry Riley, seems to have not realized just how much ten million people would be. I'm surprised anybody who'd been an officer in the military can't imagine the logistics, or lack of logistics of that turnout. Did he think about the humanitarian crisis in Washington DC if ten million people showed up (not to mention thirty million)? Roads would be clogged for a hundred miles. People clog the streets day and night. Hotels would be booked. People would be sleeping in the streets, and in some places, curb-to-curb. Port-o-Potties would be overwhelmed. Food deliveries couldn't be made. Sewers would be backed up and there would be shit in the streets. It would be ripe for an epidemic, maybe of cholera. It would shut down the government all right, but the government wouldn't have to shoot people.

In fact, it's impossible for Washington to have even one million people descending on it without the city essentially being shut down, but that doesn't matter because today probably not even a thousand show up. The pictures and livestreams couldn't lie. For those paranoids who think that these are phony, there haven't been any pictures or livestreams to show the multitudes. One would think someone among the protestors would bring an iPhone. To add insult to injury, it seems more people showed up to have lunch with President Obama and VP Biden than showed up for the revolution. 

The Do Not Enter sign photobombs Obama/Biden Lunch

   

The Tea Partiers and associated nutcases are probably wondering now: if Egyptians and Algerians overthrew their governments, why can't Americans do the same with Obama? I mean, how difficult can that be?

I'm certain there's a lot of paranoid fantasies about the wrongful federal government infiltrating the Right and undercutting them. I'm sure there's a lot of blame about the laziness of the public "unwilling to stand up for their rights." However, I have a much simpler answer: President Obama just isn't unpopular enough.

Yes, that Kenyan/Communist/Socialist/Fascist/Nazi/Muslim mixed-race usurper with a birth-certificate deficiency, the one who occupies the White Man's Presidency without even the common decency of being properly installed like George W. Bush just isn't that unpopular. Not nearly as unpopular as Mubarak was in Egypt.

Even though the lunatic Right has called Obama all those listed above, and many times in the same sentence, none of them stick. First, despite what Ayn Rand declared about totalitarian governments all being collectivist therefore all alike, there are some real ideological differences between communists, socialists, fascists, Nazis, and a Muslim is a very specific thing. You can be a Kenyan and any one of the others, but you have to be born in Kenya to be Kenyan.

Therefore, few people believe the lunatic right when it comes to President Obama. I mean, it's one thing for a wingnut to be an ignorant liar, but when he's so ignorant that he doesn't care if his lies contradict each other as he tells them, that tends to self-defeat the falsehood.

And when it comes to things that actually violate our freedom, spying by the NSA, prosecution of government whistleblowers for leaks, continued (if mostly theoretical) suspension of habeas corpus, the poor RW extremists can't say much because they agree with all of that. Fact is, they have no problems with those violations, they just don't like the man in charge of violating them, especially his race. In fact, they had little to say about President Obama's drone attacks killing children and American citizens overseas. Except they did say today that they had it on good authority Obama would order a drone strikes against their revolution.

Maybe he would have if there were any serious challenge, but like other RW attempts at fantasy revolution, this one failed on its own. 

The real problem, or saving grace, is that the radical right wing in the US lives in its own environment of self-generated paranoid propaganda, all of which has been too influenced by TV and adventure fiction. They've been drinking their own Koolaid too long, and now they're too detached from reality, even the self-apparent reality of its own membership, to overthrow the government.

That's not to say they can't be damaging or deadly, but they're not a threat to the government.

No, if there's anything that will change this system, it will come from the Left.