Remember the scene in Spiderman 3 when Eddie Brock (played by Topher Grace) goes to church and prays that God will kill Peter Parker? That probably got a laugh out of most viewers because, well, how over-the-top preposterous is it to pray to God to kill someone you don’t like? Jesus us a god of love, isn’t He? But hey, it’s Hollywood, it’s a superhero action flick, and villains in these films have to be, you know, a little over-the-top, right?
Still, if that whole scene set your plausibility alarms to ringing, you might want to brace yourself for this one.
Think Progress makes a great catch on C-SPAN this morning: Someone calls in while Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) is answering the lines, practically in tears because Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) missed this morning’s procedural vote on health care.
He was apparently concerned that — after following Sen. Tom Coburn’s (R-OK) instructions to pray that someone couldn’t make a manager’s amendment vote Sunday night — his prayers for Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) to die struck the wrong senator.
“Our small tea bag group here in Waycross, we got our vigil together and took Dr. Coburn’s instructions and prayed real hard that Sen. Byrd would either die or couldn’t show up at the vote the other night,” the caller said.
Let’s review. A teabagger, following the lead of his duly elected Congressfolk, gets together with his fellow Christians and prays that God will kill a political opponent.
WWJW? Sen. Byrd, that’s who.
There’s so much wrong here it’s hard to know where to start. But suffice it to say that these mouth-breathers worship one more hateful god. Further, this god is apparently a bad shot – if you’re aiming for Byrd and only manage to wing Inhofe, well, omnipotence is right out the window, huh?
Maybe in the next Spidey sequel they can cast Sen. Coburn and his drooling band of lobotomized Christian teabaggers as the villains. But while we’re waiting on the fantasy to arrive at a theater near us, isn’t it nice to know that these people are free to roam the streets in reality?
UPDATE: TPM wonders if the caller was a prankster. Could be, could be. Hard to say for sure, but it’s certainly plausible. It’s just a shame that we live in an age where we have things like “citizens” carrying assault rifles to political rallies to consider – makes it hard to sort reality from fantasy.
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Categories: Health, Politics/Law/Government, Religion & Philosophy
Progressive Culture | Scholars & Rogues 
We might be a bunch of idiot teabaggers, but this site by a bunch of pablum puking crypto-eco-femni-facist- liberals takes the cake. They want to kill their opponents en-masse. If some of the right was praying for Byrd to die, some of the left is praying for a new holocaust, with a touch of Soylent Green added
http://www.evolve.org/
So that makes it okay, I guess.
Quick, get me a thesaurus! I must say I am impressed with Jeff’s harmonious use of his social powers. 😉
Okay, Jeff, I give up. Can you point me to something on that site that illustrates ANYTHING you said about it? From what I can tell, it comes close to being the very OPPOSITE of what you’re saying.
Uh oh, Jeff just laid out the Facist-Liberal card!
For those of us not experiencing a rage-fueled adrenalin high, I believe that would more correctly be written as “pablum-puking crypto-eco-femi-fascist liberals.” Notice in particular that the ultimate epithet, “liberal,” is the noun of the phrase and should not be connected to one of its attributive adjectives by a hyphen.
Although I’m poking gentle fun at the verbiage, I can certainly see the point – and the reason for fear. After a quick look through Evolve’s website, I am utterly, terrifyingly convinced that only one of these so-called Conscious Evolutionists, if encountered unexpectedly and in a confined area, could annoy me to agonizing death in under an hour. Imagine the potential for destruction if a dozen or so converged on a large captive audience…
I believe I just pointed out the primary threat, Sam. If you would spend more time arguing about allegations of genocidal conspiracies and less time actually researching them, you might be able to keep up.
My bad. I know I need to be more contemporary in my mode of debate.
Funny that the term “teabagger” has become so accepted that it’s used self-referentially. Yasha Levine was the first to use the term (on Feb. 27, 2009) when he attended one of the initial “Tea Parties” after he and Mark Ames had already written the expose on Freedom Works and the astroturfing of the movement.
This: http://exiledonline.com/exposing-the-familiar-rightwing-pr-machine-is-cnbcs-rick-santelli-sucking-koch/ (note: it was published only 8 days after Santelli gave his famous little rant)
It was now 9:35 am and Katz was finishing, right on schedule. He invited people to throw their tea bags into a pot of water (throwing tea bags into the ocean would be littering and illegal) and yell out their anti-tax demands. The whole thing was pathetic and over very quickly, thankfully.
It was a total sham, a front in order to get TV facetime. It worked, too. FOX news sent a camera crew. So did NBC. Koch was teabagging the media, and the media loved it.
http://exiledonline.com/astroturf-revolution-dispatch-koch-activists-teabag-media/
Levine is not only making fun of the protesters for their fear of a littering ticket by using the term teabagger, he’s also very clearly employing the double entendre. And if you’ve ever read The eXile you know that it wasn’t an innocent mistake.
Do the proud teabaggers feel that they’re giving or receiving, i wonder…
These comments remind me of my theory about people like Jeff and the teabaggers. I like to call the theory “Don’t mess with Darwin”.
According to Darwin’s theory of evolution, stoopid people should gradually die off, slowing the replication of the stoopid gene. In the last 100 years as technology has improved, the smart people of the world have gone to great lengths to keep the stoopid people from killing themselves. The smart people have been so succesful at protecting the stoopid people from themselves that we have reached a critical mass of stoopid people and they are taking over.
Does anybody see any holes in my theory?
I see a massive hole. You’re making the assumption that smart is a survivability trait. In the wild, it certainly is. But within the context of a democracy – or at least the type of democracy we have in the US – there’s a better argument to be made that stupid is the superior survivability trait. It’s the trait that allies you with the greatest number of people in a social web.
Point taken. It looks like we’re doomed to mediocrity at best.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is tracked down and clubbed to death.
Yous Got Pwnd Kids, the caller is a prankster, he has done up Bobo and another (R) senator in the last couple of months. I f I find the links I’ll put them up.
Pwnd or not, it was still a very profound moment of auditory profundity.
As to teabaggers, I’d just like to be around when one of them calls themselves that and say something to the effect of “So you really do like putting your testicles into another person’s mouth” (or, for the female teabaggers “So you really do enjoy having men put their testicles in your mouth”).
Hey Jeff, your rant and link make no sense. But coming from a wingnut that’s not surprising.
Pale Scot–Where’s the linky? You’ve had all day. It’s way past the time to put up or shut up.
Majii: I think the links maybe on http://www.thehuffingtonpost.com. There’s three videos of three calls they think is by the same man. If they aren’t there, try http://www.themudflats.net.
We’re not sure it’s a hoax, but I think it seemed like a suspicious call from the git-go. The point, regardless, is this: do we believe there’s anything even slightly implausible about teabaggers praying for Democratic pols to die?
Now that the hoax idea has spread, I’m seeing a lot of “the issue is Barrasso’s non-response.” I don’t know – given that crazy-ass question, I can completely understand a deer in the headlights reaction.
Sam’s right: the real point is that the idea, based on actual experience and substantiated similar cases, is so plausible that we can’t know immediately that this is a crank call.