Sean Hannity was evidently distraught about Logan's post last Thursday about the teabagging Glenn Beck fan Katy Abram, who showed up at Arlen Specter's health-care town hall to spout Glenn Beckian nonsense. Logan remarked:
Granted, Abram isn't a professional pundit, but when questioned it became clear that she is the poster child for the entire undereducated, under-informed mob that make up the right wing town hall protesters.
Hannity gulps at this:
Hannity: Lovely. I guess the tone in Washington has really changed.
Of course, it hasn't. It hasn't because Sean Hannity and his Fox compatriots -- particularly Beck, who has even characterized President Obama as an anti-white racist -- as well as the Limbaugh-Coulter sector have seen to that.
But of course, on Planet Wingnuttia, it's been the liberals who are mean and nasty:
Hannity: Now what do you make of -- now we've watched all these politicians attacked. We've seen how Gov. Palin was treated, we saw how George W. Bush was treated. This is the first time, though, American citizens are being attacked by a party. Are you part of a mob? Are you a political terrorist? Do you like Tim McVeigh? Uh, any sympathies toward the Nazi Party?
Abram: No! [giggles]
Hannity: No racist views in your life?
Abram: No.
Hannity: No. What do you think when prominent Democrats have been making these charges?
Abram: I think it's ridiculous. I have heard Nancy Pelosi say, you know, we're a mob, swastikas, and all that stuff. I'm sorry. I'm a stay-at-home mom. I take care of my kids. I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing. And you've got these people that are in charge of the country calling the people of this country ... awful names. Awful names! I mean, my original question to Arlen Specter was going to be, "I want you to denounce what Nancy Pelosi has said about the people of this country. It's ridiculous! It's ridiculous!
Yep, that's what we mean when we say "undereducated and under-informed." Pelosi didn't "call the people of this country" Nazis; she called out the morons who bring signs with swastikas -- comparing Obama to Hitler, as has been done frequently by prominent figures on the right in recent weeks, from Beck to Limbaugh. You know, awful names!
Of course, you can go back and look at what she said on Donnell's show for more evidence of this kind of blithering idiocy:
...You know, yeah, I mean, there are programs in place that the founders did not want to have here. I know there are people out there that can't afford health insurance, that can't afford a lot of different things, and, you know, with the founders, they thought and hoped that the goodness of the people would allow the people to take care of those who are doing without. And I know that may seem naive in today's, you know, world...
Ouch. My head hurts. Another wingnut who has read Glenn Beck but hasn't read Thomas Paine.
The real Thomas Paine -- one of those "founders" Abrams revered -- actually argued for a system of "socialism" in which citizens shared their wealth. This could be found most clearly in the essay :
Nothing could be more unjust than agrarian law in a country improved by cultivation; for though every man, as an inhabitant of the earth, is a joint proprietor of it in its natural state, it does not follow that he is a joint proprietor of cultivated earth. The additional value made by cultivation, after the system was admitted, became the property of those who did it, or who inherited it from them, or who purchased it. It had originally no owner. While, therefore, I advocate the right, and interest myself in the hard case of all those who have been thrown out of their natural inheritance by the introduction of the system of landed property, I equally defend the right of the possessor to the part which is his.
Cultivation is at least one of the greatest natural improvements ever made by human invention. It has given to created earth a tenfold value. But the landed monopoly that began with it has produced the greatest evil. It has dispossessed more than half the inhabitants of every nation of their natural inheritance, without providing for them, as ought to have been done, an indemnification for that loss, and has thereby created a species of poverty and wretchedness that did not exist before.
In advocating the case of the persons thus dispossessed, it is a right, and not a charity, that I am pleading for. But it is that kind of right which, being neglected at first, could not be brought forward afterwards till heaven had opened the way by a revolution in the system of government. Let us then do honor to revolutions by justice, and give currency to their principles by blessings.
Having thus in a few words, opened the merits of the case, I shall now proceed to the plan I have to propose, which is,
To create a national fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property:
And also, the sum of ten pounds per annum, during life, to every person now living, of the age of fifty years, and to all others as they shall arrive at that age.
