An amazing report over the weekend from the Littleton (CO) Courier, says that a local man is not afraid of stuff.

Jason Blantonhawk, a Littleton native, reports taking out his garbage at night, having his windshields washed at busy intersections by African Americans, getting on airplanes and walking through crowded Hispanic areas of nearby Denver without fear. Further, he reports hiking the previous summer in Rocky Mountain National Park, and not being afraid of either mountain lions or bears.

When asked about getting on airplanes, Blantonhawk said “They’re pretty safe. Pilots are well-trained, the equipment has been flying thousands of hours, and nothing bad has happened.” He was asked about the possibility of terrorists on airplanes, and amazingly said “Pretty rare, really. When you think of all the people who are going to die this year from smoking cigarettes or not being able to get health care, terrorists on airplanes is really way, way down the list.” He later added “When I fly I read books and listen to my IPod, and when we land, I get my bag and go where I have to go.”

Local authorities, asked about Blantonhawk, referred reporters to the local department of health, where a psychiatrist had been assigned the case. Citing confidentiality, Dr. James Gelfan only said “I’ve heard of this happening outside the United States, and I’ve read some New England Journal stuff about a guy up in Seattle, but I’ve not personally encountered any American who are not afraid of a lot of stuff. This is really unusual.”

Blantonhawk’s background is unusual too. He was a student at Columbine High School in Littleton in 2009 when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed or injured 36 students and teachers. Asked about this, Blantonhawk said “You know, that really affected me. I lost friends that day, and I knew Dylan. I realized at that time that events are pretty much random, and what happens happens. Since that time, I’ve pretty much accepted that I can only control a few things. So I relax.”

“But what about 9/11! What about terrorists? Aren’t you scared about that?”, a reporter asked? “No, not at all,” he replied. “That was a crazy day, for sure, and I’m glad I wasn’t on those airplanes. But I don’t much think about it. I see people on airplanes with turbans and I figure they are from the Middle East somewhere, and I think that’s pretty cool that we’re not scared of them.” He later added “You know, every day there about 25,000 flights in the U.S., and like 1.5 million people who fly. The odds of something bad happening, even on 9/11, were really, really slim.”

Blantonhawk’s case first came before authorities when at Denver International Airport he publicly questioned the need for airport security. He was said to have complained about having to give up a bottle of shampoo, and was heard to mutter when he took off his shoes to be xrayed “This is bull****.” He was arrested that day, and later, when testifying before the local FISA court, said “All of this airline security is just to make us afraid. There’s no reason to have to go through all of that.”

Blantonhawk was fined, and ordered to attend sensitivity sessions with Dr. Gelfan. He is currently under house arrest.

Blantonhawk’s neighbors say that they never would have guessed him to be a thought-crimer. “He seems normal in every way”, said one. “He mows his lawn, comes home with groceries, and smiles at people when he meets them. Who would have guessed? Right here in our neighborhood, right under our noses.”

Either here or in a comment at some other blog, I regretfully referred to the march in Washington, DC over the weekend of 9/12-9/13 as the “60,000 moron march.”

That remark was not original with me. Someone else said it first, and I thought it was really clever.

I’ve been chastened and corrected, and I humbly apologize. Apparently, the number of morons was somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000.

I have often said here and elsewhere that the Democratic Party is the place where progressive movements go to die. Usually, they are just marginalized – ignored until they disappear. In the case of single payer advocacy, they were arrested. In the case of ACORN, the party has taken extreme measures – a public disembowelment not unlike that given William Wallace in Braveheart.

The films of various ACORN agents offering crazy and stupid advice could be real – top to bottom. The ACORN employees could be agents provocateurs. The people who set them up could be what we used to call investigative reporters. They could be party hacks. It would take years to get to the bottom of the sting – is it Scaife? Is it Dick Armey? Or is it Rahm Emmanuel.

The sins of ACORN appear to be real – but don’t forget that Elliot Spitzer’s offense was real, but that he was only singled out for his prosecution of powerful figures on Wall Street. Prosecution of high-level crimes in politics is usually selective, with a few exposed and most similarly guilty unaffected. There is more here than meets the eye. As usual.

What ACORN agents apparently did was stupid, but not worthy of a death sentence. But real or not, the important thing to note is that ACORN is done, destroyed.

The question is, whodunnit? My guess is that the Democrats did this sting operation, and they did it because ACORN was dangerous. They were willing to tolerate the group when they were stirring up the peasantry in support of Barack Obama, but the real work of the organization is grassroots organization for things like community housing discrimination and access to health care. They are community organizers. The Democratic Party wants nothing to do with them.

The ferociousness of the slamming and castration of ACORN ought to be a lesson to Democrats everywhere about the true nature of their party (as if there were a shortage of such lessons). But mainstream Democrats will likely be glad to be rid of them. The business of the party is to cover the backs of Republicans as Republicans advance the interests of wealth.

ACORN was just a sideshow, a useful group when it came to electing a corporate Democrat, and now a nuisance. Long live ACORN.

I am reading Rick Perlstein’s book Nixonland. It is an enjoyable stroll through the period when Nixon entered politics to his exit in 1974. Richard Nixon is one of the most fascinating people ever to enter U.S. politics – a complex, twisted, tortured and brilliant man, one who knew the globe like most of us know our own city streets. Even Henry Kissinger admired his intellect, and what could have been. His famous quip “He would have been a great, great man had somebody loved him.

I think he was a great man, though I certainly do not love him.

I am currently following Perlstein through the sixties and the civil rights riots and debates. I was very young then, and was as naive a spectator as has ever lived. I was very conservative, and very much feared black uprising, even in Billings, Montana. Pundits of the time on the far right ascribed the discontent to socialists and communists. Many allusions were made to Hilter. How little things have changed.

This ties up many loose ends for me. Back in 1988 I sat in our family room in our house on Pine Street reading, and was struck by a thunderbolt. Communism, I realized, posed no threat to us. The Russians did not threaten us, nor did the Chinese.

Not too long after I realized they posed no threat, the Soviet Union collapsed. The world since that time has been confusing and hard to understand. It will never get easier. But it is different since that day in 1988, and would have been different for me back in the sixties had I achieved the breakthrough earlier.

I’m not afraid. In the months in years after that day, I grew more liberal, and eventually eschewed conservatism and all right wing thought. It’s a natural progression. Absent fear, the mind is clearer, the world safer, people less threatening. Liberal and progressive politics and absence of fear go hand-in-hand.

What I see all around me with teabaggers, right wing web sites, immigration debates and health care reform is fear. The right wing is afraid. The are manipulated by fear, governed by people who rely on their fear to advance agendas having nothing to do with safety.

In the post below, which I wrote yesterday, I was making fun of certain right wingers for being stupid. I knew was I was doing – I was poking them with a stick. Yesterday afternoon as I drove to the store, a caller on talk radio hit on an excellent point. Right wingers, he said, are not stupid. That’s not why they behave the way they do, or believe what they believe. They are afraid. Their minds are polluted by fear, and it distorts thought processes. It makes the world a muddled and scary place full of demons and bad guys. It makes people defensive and accusatory. It allows them to call on Hitler to help them demonize every politician they do not like.

I lived in that neighborhood. I grew up during the Cold War. I was manipulated, my thought processes were muddled. People who were not afraid, like George McGovern, scared me. People who exploited my fears, like Richard Nixon, were my ideals.

So I invite anyone on the right wing who reads this to experience what I did, to feel the weight of the world lifted from your backs. There are no new Hitlers, socialism is not scary, national health care works everywhere it is tried, illegal immigrants are responding to rational economic impulses (which need to be addressed), there are no terrorists of any note, you are safe when you fly, and most of all, there is no conspiracy of liberalism to enslave you. Life is a beautiful thing when you just cast your fate to the wind, drop the load from your shoulders, and do what Atlas did – shrug.

P.S. Osama bin Laden, far from hiding in the hills of Pakistan, most likely suffered an ignominious death, probably in late 2001 and surrounded by a few of his fellows of no note. He spirit lives on in films, where he has gotten noticeably younger.

See Update!!! and Update II and Update III and Update IV below.

Michele Bachmann on Joe Wilson’s outburst:

Update!!! I am told I got that quotation wrong. She did not say “stupid” conservatives like her. She said “strong”. I want to set the record straight, and keep the journalistic integrity at this site above average.

My bad.

Update II: Shortly after posting this I got an email from Halberto Fredlund at the Institute for IQ Evaluation in Landover, MD. According to Fredlund, Bachmann “is indeed stupid, by our measurements. Her grasp of issues is narrow, and her frame of reference is ‘us’ versus ‘them’ where ‘them’ are ‘elites’ and ‘pointyheads who brag about their education as if it gave them ‘common sense’, which I have a lot of,'” in Bachmanns’ own words. “Such defenses,” said Fredlund, “are standard for the low-IQ reactionary, and are especially prevalent among conservative Christian right wingers.” I can only add to that a study done by Jonas Beerston of the Paramount Institute, which quantified the IQ of various public figures by measuring the quality public rhetoric and scaling it according to broadness of frames of reference, reactionary nature of thoughts, and “black” vs “white” thinking. According to Beerston, Sarah Palin’s IQ was “almost negligible, perhaps in the low 80’s”, while Bachmann scored a good deal higher, at 90. Newt Gingrich, on the other hand, scores in the high 130’s, indicating that there are indeed significant intellectual abilities are in the Republican party, but that they seemed confined to a few very smart leaders who have many dumb followers. The Democratic Party, said Beerston, is “pretty much the same.”

Update III: Another emailer, this from a reader in New Hampshire, says “Cut the snidety! You ain’t no Einstein.” To which I confess, I ain’t no Einstein. I could be in way over my head, not understanding negotiating and confrontation theory and all. Still another emailer, this one from Montana, says “There is more knowledge about journalism in a thimble than you possess.” To which I confess, I know nothing about modern journalism, other than it isn’t very informative.

Update IV: True sotry: Police in Radnor, PA, interrogated a teabagger accused of a crime by placing a metal colander on his head and connecting it with wires to a photocopy machine. The message “He’s lying” was placed in the copier, and police pressed the copy button each time they thought the teabagger wasn’t telling the truth. Believing the “lie detector” was working, the teabagger confessed.

Please submityour stupid teabagger jokes here.