History will Not be Kind

Some of the radical right-wing emails made their way to me via a friend in Pennsylvania who's not always judicious about what he sends on (and sometimes sends silly things just to see what I think of them.) I remember a quote from one such, "... health care is a privilege, not a right."

When a Care-2 journalist wrote that tea-party protesters who tried to label the president as "Fascist" and "Socialist" should probably get it together and decide which one, one of the people said journalist referred to as "wing-nuts" wrote to his comment space saying, "Fascism leads to Socialism. What part of that do you not understand." Then it clicked -- right wing propaganda began to make some sort of sick sense to me. To these people, any government powerful enough to implement a healthy dose of Socialism to help the people is more powerful than it has a right to be.

I walked into a barbershop the other day and saw a pastel portrait of the Gipper on the wall. On the opposite wall was a picture of the relatively benign Mrs. Reagan, whom I actually kind of like. In any event, it seems to me that the radical right uses the Gipper like the radical left uses Che Guevera -- they use it to offend any moderate who comes through the door.

History will not be kind to the radical right.

(How do you spell Gipper, by the way? And where did he get the moniker -- from a movie, perhaps?)