Guess we're lucky I don't own any but I have to tell you that for once in my adult life, I actually considered buying and stashing one had the last election not shown citizens regaining a bit of sanity.

My aversion to violence is exactly why I fight the fights here in the battle of words. My guess is that possibly Nazi-dominated Germany could've been averted had the citizenry collectively and loudly cried "Bullshit!" early in the process. That's when you have the possibility of nipping it in the bud before critical mass has been reached. (wow, two cliches in one sentence).

I understand the lure of conservatism and libertarianism. I've had to tear down an old travel trailer on a piece of land I own out in the middle of nowhere that I'd built a side room onto when Universal Building Code was implemented in the area, never mind that the side room could stay and looked horrible by itself. I've seen the idiocy of union management who railed against management of a company that truly cared about its employees. I've known welfare and insurance cheats who feel they're entitled to it simply for being alive. I've witnessed the abuses of animal rights advocates and environmentalists that have no sense of balance in their causes and create faulty science to back up their beliefs. But almost always, the worst of those abuses by liberal and excessive government, has created no more than a nuisance to my lifestyle. Never did any of those things make me feel my life or that of my family was threatened.

Now I wish I could say that about the abuses I've witnessed from the right. They ruined the lives of creative people during the McCarthy era, sending some magnificent artists to suicide and others to prison or exile. The conservatives were in power when the deaths at Kent State occurred and riot police beat peaceful protesters with clubs. We've been led by them into a horrific war of aggression and dominance that has turned the world against us and created countless new adversaries. They've attempted and sometimes succeeded in removing those very Constitutional guarantees that you so aptly talked about spilling blood to protect. They have imprisoned for long periods people who's only sin was to enjoy taking an occasional toke in in the privacy of their homes. The far right, if not restrained would love to make our country a fundamentalist Christian nation with little tolerance for other views. A local talk show host who leans more right than left on most issues has often said that when he pissed off the left, he got cussed at in heated debate. When he went against the war in Iraq he got death threats and fired.

And then some pissant like TB posts something about something dumb Nancy Pelosi did like it can even rate against the abuses we've witnessed over the last 6 years. I just won't back down from that kind of idiocy and I can't view it simply as a high school debate. We're in no way locked into the side we're handed on a slip of paper.

Were we back in colonial times guys like him and his cronies would rate being publicly embarrassed in the stocks in the town square. I throw a mean tomato.

Art