A friend stopped by this morning on her way to work and told The Lion what happened at the gas station a few moments earlier.
The Lion notes that most of the gas stations in town are owned by a fellow who is either Middle Eastern or of Middle Eastern descent. Many of his workers have similar backgrounds.
The woman was filling her gas tank when a fellow drove up, grumped out of his car and went inside, apparently to prepay. She said he seemed in a bad mood.
Moments later he came out muttering angrily, and then the clerk ran out and shouted at the guy, “You’re a racist,” and then they jawed at each other angrily, with the customer at one point telling the clerk to go back to the country he came from.
Even at second hand it’s ugly.
But this is what Newt Gingrich and Glen Beck, both ugly, ugly personalities, and the Republican/Tea Party have brought to just about every town in America. Those two and their compatriots in the hate-wins-power movement are doing their best to destroy the United States in order to satisfy their voracious, narcissistic egos and win political power. The Republican Party/Tea Party are doing their damndest to ride their ginned-up hatred back into power, where they promise to shut down the government.
Of course it does make perfect sense that they would shut down the government if they got into power. They’re not competent, not capable of governing. They just want power so they can destroy the social fabric that holds the country together, based on some ignorant and thoughtless idea of what they call ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’.
These are evil people. They are soulless and murderous.
Gingrich is stumbling all over himself over the Islamic center planned for Lower Manhattan, a couple of blocks from the construction at the World Trade Center. His latest plan calls for the Federal Government to make the WTC a ‘national battlefield memorial’ so that the government can deny the Islamic project.
From TPM:
"I think the Congress has the ability to declare the area a national battlefield memorial because I think we should think of the World Trade Center as a battlefield site; this is a war," he said, apparently thinking that if Ground Zero was a national park, Park51 would be restricted from building near it.
Just for the record, the WTC was not a battlefield. It was the scene of a vicious and clever mass murder carried out by a determined band of religiopolitical thugs under the noses of a Republican administration that deliberately and arrogantly ignored the warnings of experienced anti-terrorist experts that a terrorist attack was going to happen soon. ‘The war’ was what followed, when the American political and military establishment, aided and abetted by a compromised press, initiated two wars of choice, carried out by an arrogant, bumbling, ignorant bunch of Republican ideologues whose emotional and intellectual development stopped when they were twelve years old. Two countries have been destroyed, millions of people displaced, and untold tens or hundreds of thousands of innocents killed. By American arrogance. By American stupidity. By American lust for power.
But Gingrich, the anti-government maven, doesn’t care about that. He wants American government to commit suicide.
And if that fails, he said, the state government should step in and use its considerable power to stymie the development.
"The Attorney General of New York, Andrew Cuomo, could intervene because frankly he has the ability to slow it down for decades if he wants to."
Remember that Gingrich is a fellow who once shut down the government, and who believes government should stay out of people’s lives and business and religion.
But here he is, not only cheering the movement to shut down the government if the Republicans regain the House this Fall, but insisting that all levels of government should stop a peaceful religious project for the basest of reasons: that ‘those people’ are different.
There are no legitimate moral, ethical, or legal grounds for stopping or objecting to the project. The Gingrichian motives are base and evil, stemming from nothing more than a sociopathic attempt on the part of the fear-crazed, power-hungry Republican/Tea Party to gain political power and use it against the majority of Americans and to favor their corporate masters, who take taxpayer money and rake in consumer money and lavish the wealth of princes and kings on themselves while they rip apart the country and the people that made their success possible.
The great evil is not Islam (or Judaism or Catholicism or Hinduism or whichever Protestant sect the other Protestant sects disagree with). The great evil comprises those who proclaim their patriotism and love of country while they do their best to shred the foundations of democracy and freedom. The great evils are named Gingrich, Beck, Limbaugh, the Koch brothers, and others among the nation’s wealthy, the princes of Wall Street, the vampires and bloodsuckers in their mansions and limousines.
They have sown the seeds of hatred and violence, even here in a small local gas station, in search of personal aggrandizement.
If they succeed, The Lion fervently hopes they reap what they sow, in spades.
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