This is something that separates the Goposaur/Right-Wingnuts from everyone else on the web. On the blogs I read, anyone can post in the comments section. You don't have to ascribe to the basic tenets of the blog perspective. You can vary from the entire Left of Center dialogue and post just about anything you want, whether it is as a member of the extreme lunatic arm of right wingnut teabagging crazies screaming about birth certificates and Socialism, all the way to semi-rational if misguided points of view that center around the delusion the last decade was one of unheralded peace and prosperity thanks to the dumbest president who ever occupied that office.
As much as I disagree with some of these posters and think they're barking up a tree rotten in the center from decades of unregulated free-market thievery, I believe they have as much right as I do to post their opinion. This is a vastly different perspective found in most right-wing blogs that ban a poster at the first sign of thinking differently, at the first inkling that the talking points are not being swallowed whole and passed on in unfiltered chunks.
They are terrified that someone will come along and disturb the carefully tended group think they spent months cultivating. They are afraid the sheep will wake up and realize they've been manipulated and used. They do not want to take the risk that the talking points carefully written by their masters will actually be read and discussed in an intelligent and unbiased manner. So they ban all dissent, all ideas that are not locked into the party line and communal mind.
This kind of lockstep thinking is why I could never be a Goposaur, and most certainly never a teabagger who squeals about independence but spouts verbatim talking points that are so cut and paste cookie cutter, you can type them into google and find them all over the web without any variation. Where is the independence in such regimented thought control?
It is pathetic and sad. It is mind control that is robotic and unforgiving. It is stripping all individuality from the person and turning him or her into a piece of machinery under the control of corporate handlers.
I will never be the kind of person who can take orders from someone without question. I could never check my individuality and choke down talking points I'm then expected to go post verbatim on every "enemy" blog on the web. I couldn't ever let someone own my mind or expect me to be a voice for them and not ever speak with my own. That is not what I was put on this planet to do. It is not me.
I am someone who prefers to do my own reading, to do my own analyzing, to do my own thinking. And when I do post a comment on a blog it is because I came to it on my own with the information I gathered on my own. I would never ever let some clown like Rush Limbaugh tell me what to think and I certainly would never go and post his talking points instead of my own.
But then, as a Progressive, Liberal Democrat this kind of thinking comes with the territory. The umbrella has to make room for everyone or we foolishly don't feel we have a right to call ourselves a Democracy. We can't exclude people for any reason because that's not our right. It defeats the whole idea of America if we say only one class of people gets the rights and privileges of citizenship and the rest get only a token piece.
It is why we support equal rights for people of all colors, gender, sexual preferences, and spiritual beliefs or lack of them. We take Democracy seriously and we don't believe it benefits the sacrifices of our founding fathers if we give up our individuality to goosestep to someone else's ideology.
And those talking points? I'll write my own, thank you very much. It's my right and obligation as an American to speak with my own mind, my own words, my own beliefs.
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