March 26, 2010

So the Washington Post interviews this Tea Party leader and former militiaman, the one who urged people to break Democratic party office windows, as if he were just someone with another reasonable point of view that's not worth examining. It's the old "he said, she said" that's just what we've come to expect from the corporate media.

They don't even mention that he's calling for an armed march on Washington for April 19 - a favorite of extremists because in addition to being the date of the first shots fired at Lexington in the Revolutionary War, it's also the anniversary of the last day of the government siege in Waco and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. No implied threat there, though! If you listen to the above radio interview, his stated position boils down to: Don't make me shoot you.

And in the final irony, of COURSE he's on government disability:

Vanderboegh said he once worked as a warehouse manager but now lives on government disability checks. He said he receives $1,300 a month because of his congestive heart failure, diabetes and hypertension. He has private health insurance through his wife, who works for a company that sells forklift products.

Born in Michigan and raised in Ohio, Vanderboegh said he was not always a libertarian. He once was active in the Young Socialist Alliance and the Progressive Labor Party. "In my youth, I was a communist," he said. But in the mid-1970s, Vanderboegh read Friedrich von Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom," among other books, and had an epiphany.

"From that point on, I could never take Marxism-Leninism seriously again," Vanderboegh said.

He said he long opposed President Obama because he believed the president has "collectivism" tendencies. But he became especially energized during the health-care debate.

"Collectivism" tendencies. You mean, like government disability?

Vanderboegh said he advocates breaking windows only of Democratic Party offices, not congressional offices, and that he does not condone the death threats and other incidents of harassment that some Democratic lawmakers have faced.

"Obviously I not only deplore or decry that, but I denounce that vigorously because it has nothing to do with what I was advocating," he said.

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