Someone's creating false memes: "Obama putting 20,000 troops on streets in case of civil unrest"

The far right have truly lost their minds this time: do a Google search of the keywords "Obama" and "20,000 troops" right now. Good.

Now, you can see the same endlessly replicated articles and the resurrection of old clips from wacko-demagogues suggesting that President Obama is placing 20,000 military personnel in the streets of America, implying at a very fragile moment here when Congress is flirting with a debt default and economic disaster that they're for an expected uprising, "civil unrest."

Why, even the neo-Nazis at StormFront have cut-n'-pasted this misrepresentation of fact, a blatantly conscious re-framing of a contingency plan for those very troops to train state law enforcement how to deal with unrest in the incidence of an attack by weapons-of-mass- destruction, otherwise known as WMDs during the run-up to the war in Iraq. They're at it again.

One of the links went to a states rights group, so in looking at all the rest, it was obvious that this was a fixation of the right, the lunatic fringe. Indeed, FEMA is once again being invoked with their stunning array of concentration camps--never mind that they couldn't find their asses during Katrina--they're cunning and evil, quite competent, that lot. Actually, they're as dumb as the paranoids further to the right of them.

Here's the problem with the claims of many of these kooks: it's not a new story. The program, while troubling to be sure, was begun under George W. Bush in his last month in office. Barack Obama had won the 2008 elections, he was a president-elect, not president. But look at the articles and the links in your Google search, and you will find that it's all framed under Obama placing 20,000 federal troops on the streets of America in case of civil disorder coming from a debt default, one created, mind you, by these very same wackos on the right and the candidates they voted into office recently.

Is this denial of one's responsibility in creating a total mess of things or what? Instead of logical compromise, they want it so many ways that they've lost it, all of it. "Troops will patrol the streets," says one of the slavering, semi-literate authors of a caption that emanates from a December 1, 2008 Washington Post article titled, "Pentagon to Detail Troops to Bolster Domestic Security," since all of these moronic captions spreading this meme were born from it, consciously, by a pack of hysterical idiots who cannot cope emotionally with a black president...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/30/AR2008113002217_pf.html/

WHEN: why doesn't the right call Bernie Sanders a socialist?

WWW--Oh right, someone, somewhere, did. I don't care about those other obscure assholes, I mean some famous asshole like Glen Beck, Limbaugh, or the whole Lollipop Guild chiming-in--even skirt chasing Jack Burkman and his desire to...uh, his desire.

Goddamned if I ever thought I'd miss William F. Buckley Jr., but I do. Do they even know what a socialist is?

Buckley did, and even though he himself was prone to red-baiting and calling people who weren't communists communists, and all the other permutations, he tended to have a higher accuracy count. No, whatever isn't socialist is socialist to the "New Right," throwing their tantrums and having their own 1960s. Luckily, it's going to end about the same way for them: a dystopian move towards hard drugs (already there!), cults (ditto), and even disco (not quite there yet). This is more a matter of profound ignorance about virtually everything.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is an acknowledged philosophical socialist, like myself. But how often has anyone called him that? Name that person, I defy you. Best of luck!