Anti-Obama Paranoia Leads Man to Kill His Family

I'd like to start this, by expressing my very sincere condolences to the friends and family of the slain. This was a terrible tragedy, no matter your politics or creed.
It should also never have happened.

As it says in this article, a Virginia man named Albert Peterson -- a defense contractor with a history of mental illness -- was so paranoid about the prospect of Barack Obama winning the November election, that he not only killed himself, but his wife and two sons. I'm prepared to be wrong about this, but I can't recall ever hearing about this happening before, at least in North America.

Clearly the man was already unstable, but I can't help but wonder if his paranoia was fed to an extreme degree, by the sort of insane rhetoric that we see from Fox News, right-wing talk radio, and the Tea Party. On Blogspot ALONE there are bloggers who blather about Obama being a scary Muslim socialist, out to kill grandma and retarded babies, who has already driven people to suicide over the economy, and who will "rightly" be kicked out in the election -- despite not a single one of those statements being true to date (and HIGHLY unlikely to ever be true). It is also why I find it galling, that Google has been slow to take down an anti-Muslim hate film that played a direct part in a global crisis that has killed 50 people to date, why it took the FBI several weeks to arrest any of the people responsible, that various blog moderators refuse to penalize users that post inflammatory material, and that the Tea Party is almost never held accountable for its long history of violent threats.

How many people have to die? When is enough, enough?

If you're not a liberal, fine. If you would never vote Democrat, fine. But remember, when someone says "I'd rather die, than see _____ in the Oval Office!" it's not supposed to be taken literally. As much as I loathe Mitt Romney, Stephen Harper, Tim Hudak, etc. it would take a lot more than their usual antics, for me to consider killing myself over them. I'd much rather try to vote them out.

And please, to anyone reading this, who knows someone THIS upset over the election, GET THEM TO A HOSPITAL RIGHT NOW. I don't care if they rave about "socialized health care", or if you normally don't trust it yourself -- it's either that, or more of THIS bullshit happens.

It's LONG past time, America, for you to get your act together. Your people's lives are now quite literally depending on it. Enough said.

Conservative Standards

I can't help but notice, lately, just how low conservatives like to set the bar for themselves -- and their peers. In Canada, the Conservative Party is just fine with having its move to strike hate speech laws, applauded by skinheads. The Republican Party -- with some exceptions -- has been perfectly fine with being taken over by incompetent wingnuts who are so livid with a black man being the President of the United States, that they have flat out stated that their first priority is not fix America's sagging economy, but to get rid of him at all costs.

For that matter, they have little apparent problem with hitching their economic hopes to a presidential team that was respectively near-to-dead-last in job creation, and whose only economic idea is to raise taxes on the middle class while cutting upper-class taxes even more. This goes against any kind of financial sense, never mind the overwhelming view of the people the Republicans are trying to convince to vote for them.

For that matter, Republicans -- by and large -- seem to have no problem with being associated with people who wear their utter hatred of blacks, gays, and women on their sleeves... and yet are so stupid and juvenile that they will still insist they aren't bigots. This is despite campaigning on voter suppression that targets blacks, revoking most gay rights, banning women from military service, and forcing impregnated rape victims to carry the offspring of their attackers (and probably give them visitation rights, as is already the case in many states).

This is the company that conservatives today keep -- either by their direct support, or by their compliance. It's true that not all conservatives are like this... but it begs the question of where they were, when the extremists were given the keys to the car. It also begs the question of why so many of them are still counting themselves among the number of these people who are not just offensive and inept, but borderline terrorists. Was there truly nothing you could do to stop it? Is there nothing you can do now?

If I were a member of any political group that engineered or condoned open bigotry, sabotage of the country for no good reason, election tampering, violence against people who simply want to help others, or even assassination of an elected leader... not only would I be putting as much distance as possible between myself and them, but I would be publicly speaking out about it. It's admirable that there are groups calling themselves "Republicans for Obama" -- but if it were me I wouldn't even want to call myself a Republican.
I would be far too ashamed.