*kah-PWOOF*

That was the sound of my head exploding. "Hitler gave good speeches, too?!?" Obama with a Hitler 'stache!?!? WTF? Are you fucking serious?!?

This health care nonsense has gotten to insane extremes. As the clip below notes, associating our president and the congress with Hitler and the Nazi regime goes beyond the pale. It is dangerous, as it is a blatant and clarion clear invitation to violence, just as the rhetoric connecting abortion providers to nazis provided, to those extreme enough to heed it, a sanction to violence, even murder. But it is also a travesty to the memory of those who truly were the victims of the Nazis, both civilian and military.

Rachel Maddow: Maddow: 'Nazism is not a metaphor'

(Click HERE if the embed fails.)

Rachel Maddow: 'Time to bring facts to the health care debate'

(Click HERE if the embed fails.)

I spent nearly an hour on the phone with a relative who called to 'warn' me of the 'true' content of the health care reform plan. She believes the euthanasia scare. She believes that senior citizens will be forced to die. WTF? How insane has this country gone when this kind of outrageous crap is bought, wholesale, swallowed hook, line and sinker? When lunatic fringe elements and panicked big business put out ideas that don't even *sound* reasonable, and people believe them? When they rise up in the thousands to fight against the phantoms of the paranoid?

HAS THIS ENTIRE FUCKING NATION LOST THE ABILITY TO THINK??????????

And the hits just keep on rolling.....

I have known Blackwater (Oh, sorry, "XE," and I have no doubt there is some sooper seekrit Dominionist meaning behind that) was trouble for a looooong time. Now that they are getting outed as theocratic lunatics by their own members, I feel vindicated, if saddened. There are times, after all, when one desperately wants to be proven wrong!

It's not the case here, however. XE/Blackwater is proving to be every bit as connected to the domininist/theocratic movement as I have always thought them to be. Given the size and power of the group, and their very nature as a mercenary military, I find this deeply worrying. After all, we have seen how the money and influence runs a la C-street and its denizens, and it is alarmingly on the side of militaristic theocracy and reconstructionism. So clearly the Right is well funded. Now it seems there exists an entire army, as well or better equipped and trained as our own, already in ideological harmony with this dominionist tide. The possibilities are mind boggling.

I know we (myself included) want to say 'It could never happen, the constitution, democracy,' and so on. And I will personally craft and wear tinfoil my whole life long if it proves there is nothing to any of this. But yowza, if there is? Scary shit, folks, scary shit indeed.

(Geek moment: And to discover that they are actually using crusade references, invoking the Knights of Malta, the Templars? Insult to injury! And really, no matter how much our understanding of the crusades has changed, still not exactly a sterling recc.)

::EDIT:: Come to think of it, a bunch of end-times, rapture-ready, 'gotta rebuild the Temple' lunatics running around the Middle East fancying themselves Templars may be more than a geek moment; it might be the scariest aspect of all of it......