Oba + Lbr ... ... = (October 23, 2014)

     I implore you to read this all the way through, then think about what was said, because no BS, domestic terrorist "Fellow Patriot" Robert "Bob" Beierle of the insipidly named Creative Insight LLC is back with a heaping helping of fear and paranoia.  Bob's campaign of terror this week focuses on ebola, and how illegal immigrant Muslim terrorist atheist Hollywood liberals are going to spread it to everyone and destroy America by using political correctness to make the government so big that it will destroy everything. You may think that last sentence was facetious, but I assure you that every single one of those groups gets not only mentioned but blamed for the coming plague.  And just to prove that Godwin's law doesn't apply only to the internet, we even get a comparison to the Nazis in this article.  It's a true Fox News libertard circlejerk of epic proportions.  I can't believe Alex Jones and Glenn Beck haven't found this guy yet, I'm sure he's their biggest fan.

     Bob's abortive attempt at a title shows us that his math skills are just as bad as his writing and punctuation skills.  In his fevered brain, "O^ba + L^br ... ... =" is the mathematical formula for the end of America.  Let's break that down: apparently, "O^ba" is supposed to represent Obama, because if we can't blame him, who can we blame?  "L^br" stands for liberals, those dastardly politically correct, unqualified, big government loving red herrings that Bob and his ilk love to blame for everything.  I'll at least give him credit that he's stopped using the pejorative "LIEberals," but I still maintain that Bob doesn't know what a liberal is, only that Fox News says they're bad, so he hates them.  The doubled ellipsis is a mystery, except for the fact that Bob really seems to love them and have absolutely no clue how to use them, peppering his "editorials" with them.  And  is, of course, Death!  Because when Obama and liberals get together, it means death! So be afraid, because politically correct liberals are keeping the border open and Obama is lying about it so that Muslim terrorists can bring ebola into the US and kill us all.  I wish that was a sarcastic joke and not the actual summary of Bob's essay, but sadly it is not.

     In what can only be described as a stylistic choice, Bob gives us a list of the kinds of people there are when a "true, honest to God danger is approaching," as opposed to all those fake, made up dangers that are blown out of proportion by a 24 hour news media and idiots with pennysaver magazines who consider themselves "patriots" but are in fact domestic terrorists.  First you have the "preppers," the morons "patriots" who stockpile food and ammunition for the coming apocalypse.  They're nothing new, they've been around for centuries carrying a sign that says "The End is NEAR" and taking every comet in the sky as a portent of the apocalypse, it's just that they now have a TV show.  Every once in a while an actual disaster does come and they use that as a twisted justification of their paranoid delusions.  They're the people who are constantly crying "the sky is falling" every time something they don't like happens.  Any time society changes, the world gets a little more accepting of lifestyles and people of which they do not approve, it's the beginning of the end.  They're rigid, small minded people who cannot think of anyone but themselves and live their lives in constant fear.  Bob seems to count himself among these people, and it's really not surprising.

     Next there's a few classes of people who basically live their lives, until we get to the "most dangerous," the people who downplay the coming dangers and alter facts to deceive you into thinking there's no danger for political reasons (as opposed to the ones who blow every sneeze out of proportion for political reasons).  These people are the ones who keep the sheep in line (yup, sheep).  They twist facts and tell you that the "preppers" are "extreme whackos ... racist, homophobe, anti-American, closed minded, paranoid people."  Well, Bob, excuse me for calling a spade a spade, but you are an extreme whacko.  Your writings are racist, homophobic, anti-American, closed minded, and extremely paranoid, not to mention ignorant, asinine, dangerous and incomprehensible.  Anyone with a whit of intelligence can see this, yet somehow your rag winds up in hundreds of businesses across my state.  

     Finally we get to the "sheep," the fifth class of people on Bob's list.  These are the ones who, I kid you not, "during the reign of the Nazis, turned in their neighbors."  They blindly follow the propaganda spread by the evil media and Hollywood, by professors and teachers.  That's right boys and girls: don't listen to educated people when they tell you that there is no danger, listen to Pennsatucky white trash!  Clearly Bob knows more about infectious diseases, illegal immigrants, radical Islam, and political science than all those dirty, corrupt, politically correct liberals at the CDC, the NIH, Harvard, Yale, and Holly-weird, amirite!  After all, according to the government's own statistics around 125 people fly into the US from West Africa every day!  It's a mass migration, and they're all carrying ebola! Panic! Fear! The sky is falling!!!  Apparently, there's a government up Bob's ass that is making up statistics, because that's the only place I can figure he got that number from. 

     From here, the "editorial" turns into this foolish rant about how the government is somehow downplaying ebola because of political correctness.  Clearly, Bob has as much a clue about political correctness as he does liberals: Fox News says it's bad, so he hates it.  Never mind that you can count the number of ebola cases in the US on one hand, never mind that you have a better chance of being struck by lightning than contracting ebola, never mind that reason, logic, history, or common sense dictate that freaking out about this is about as productive as running around the street screaming "ebola" at the top of your lungs.  It's all a government conspiracy to, what, exactly?  Maybe if Bob had some kind of rational conception of say, why the government would downplay ebola or what possible gain could be achieved by deceiving the American people about this disease there might be a case here.  Instead, Bob uses this as yet another opportunity to bitch about the things he hates: Obama, liberals, political correctness, the IRS, illegal immigrants, the government, radical Islam, etc, etc.  If aliens landed tomorrow, he would probably blame that on the same things.  

     If anyone doubts what Bob's true purpose is in these "editorials," I would like to direct your attention to his closing sentence. "Love God, protect your family, defend the Constitution, pray for the best, prepare for the worst, and lock and load."  That's right: yet another call to domestic terrorism in the name of "defending" the Constitution.  Espousing violence for the furthering of a political ideal; that's terrorism to the letter.  The real virus we should be worrying about is people who continue to spread fear and paranoia, who continue to write seditious lies and call for insurrection against us.  Inoculate yourself and your community by letting the businesses who display and advertize in the Our Town pennysaver know that you will not patronize their business as long as they continue to support a domestic terrorist.

The Second Amendment - October 8, 2014

     Well, it's official.  Mr. Robert Beierle, of the fatuously named Creative Insight, LLC, publisher of the Our Town pennysavers circulated throughout Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and parts of New York and Maryland has now officially moved from seditionist blowhard to full on supporter of domestic terrorism.  That's really the only way something like this can be interpreted.  When we have a man running around the woods of Pennsylvania, killing police officers and another writing about how the Second Amendment guarantees our right to rise up in violent revolt against our government, what else could he be?  Incredulously, Bob actually has either the gall or the total lack of self awareness (based on his past writings and his insistence on referring to himself as a "patriot," I'm going to go with the latter) to try to disassociate himself from this violent psychopath; as if his brand of rhetoric and vitriol is not the exact sort of encouragement that would lead someone to shoot at the authorities.  I'm not saying Eric Frein was one of Bob's readers, because I can't prove that, but would anyone be surprised if he is?  Hell, for all we know, Frein was at the "Patriot Connectors" meeting where Bob spoke, and it was Bob's misappropriation of the phrase "If not YOU, then who? If not NOW, then when?" that encouraged Frein to set up his little duck blind in the woods and kill the 38 year old father of two.

     Let's do a little break down of Bob's misguided attempt at explaining the Second Amendment. As you might expect, it's nothing but NRA fairy tales, half truths, and insurrectionist wet dreams. For starters, Bob is convinced that the Second Amendment is second because the hallowed Founding Fathers believed that the right to own a gun is second only to the right to free speech.  Even a cursory inspection of the Wikipedia page on the Bill of Rights shows that not only was the right to bear arms the fourth proposed amendment to the Constitution, but James Madison (you know, the Founding Father who wrote the damn thing) didn't even want it included.  Hell, even Bob's sacred freedom of speech was the third proposed amendment. There's some reality for you.  By Bob's reckoning, the Founding Fathers thought that how much money Congress got paid was more important than freedom of speech.  There's your truth, Bob.  Open a damn history book once in a while.

     Next, I have to address this insurrectionist fairy tale that Bob is so hot for.  First, I want you to download and read a paper called The Hidden History of the Second Amendment. It is an eye opening, scholarly paper that explains exactly why the Second Amendment was included in the Bill of Rights.  I'll get to the crux of that paper in a bit, first, let's address the problems with what Bob is saying.  For about 40 years now, the NRA and the firearms industry have been promoting this idea that the Founding Fathers included the right to bear arms in the Bill of Rights for two reasons: first, they wanted to be sure that they could raise a militia to defend the US from invading British or Native American forces, and second, they wanted us to violently overthrow the government every 25 years or so and rebuild it.  This is so wrong headed and ignorant it hurts.  Anyone with a cursory knowledge of history, especially the American Revolutionary War and post war period, knows that this is a flat out fabrication, and a damaging one at that. It's not surprising that Bob would perpetuate these lies, after all, he probably does not know any better.  They play to his world view and support his twisted, destructive reasoning.  Unfortunately for Bob, history, and the facts, do not bear him out.

      Let's start with point one: the Founding Fathers wanted a ready militia to defend the United States.  This is one of those truly damaging lies that continues because it has the ring of truth to it.  We've all heard stories of the brave Minutemen, farmers who were ready to fight the Redcoats in under a minute and win our freedom.  It's a great bit of American folklore, and not much more.  The reality is that the militias were not held in very high regard by the Founding Fathers.  They were the reason the Americans were driven from Breed's Hill (you may know it as the Battle of Bunker Hill) resulting in a British victory.  They failed to protect Washington's regular army as the British drove him from Brooklyn all the way across New Jersey in the fall and early winter of 1776.  In fact, Washington didn't have a very high opinion of militia at all. The fact is, while the Founding Fathers were no fans of a standing army, they didn't put much stock in the idea that your average untrained farmer was going to be much worth if the British regulars came calling again either.  The truth is, the militia question was one of the driving forces behind the Constitutional convention in the first place.

     Under the Articles of Confederation, the Federal Government existed to defend the United States from outside forces like the British or Native Americans, but had no power to deal with interior problems.  Which is why, when a group of farmers lead by Daniel Shays decided to rebel in 1787, the leaders of the new United States got together and wrote the Constitution, which provided the new Federal Government with the powers to call up a militia to deal with such insurrections.  In fact, the first time the Federal government called up the militia was to put down just such a rebellion. Mostly, however, the militias were called out to put down slave rebellions, like Nat Turner's, Harper's Ferry, and the German Coast Uprising in 1811. The truth, which racists like Bob Beierle don't want to acknowledge, is that the Second Amendment exists not to provide for the defense of the United States from external threats but to provide for the defense of white slave owners from their slaves.

     See, as The Hidden History of the Second Amendment explains, the only Founding Fathers concerned with the right to keep and bear arms at the Constitutional Convention were Southerners like Patrick Henry:

"If the country be invaded, a state may go to war, but cannot suppress [slave] insurrections [under this new Constitution]. If there should happen an insurrection of slaves, the country cannot be said to be invaded. They cannot, therefore, suppress it without the interposition of Congress . . . . Congress, and Congress only [under this new Constitution], can call forth the militia."

The Southern delegates were worried that Northern representatives, who would outnumber them due to the higher populations of northern states, would use Article I, Section 8 as a way to destroy slavery by not arming the Southern state militias.  Without arms, they could not control a slave population that outnumbered them in some states almost 3 to 1. The Founding Fathers were less worried about defending the country from the English than they were about the monster they were creating in slavery.  This, and not the fairy tale Minuteman ready to defend the United States, was the reason for the compromise that is the Second Amendment.  During the 1970s and 80s, however, with the threat of the Soviet Union hanging over the world and rising crime rates, gun manufacturers realized that they could sell a lot more guns if people thought they would be defending their homes from the Red Army or some cracked out inner city "thug" (that's Fox News code for "black person," BTW), so they spread this fairy tale of the American duty to own a gun and protect their homes, despite mounting evidence that homes with guns were more likely to be victims of gun violence. (Also here, here, and here. I know these come from "liberal" sources like Harvard, Yale, and the National Institutes of Health, but hey, science is science and facts are neither liberal nor conservative. So take your bias strawman and shove it.)

     The second, and possibly even more dangerous, fairy tale that Bob perpetuates here is the insurrectionist fairy tale: the idea that our Founding Fathers wanted us to have the ability to violently overthrow the government.  Not only does this confound all logic and reason, but it is simply not supported by anything.  Most famously, the proponents of this delusion quote Thomas Jefferson as saying "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." Not only is this always taken out of context, but it was a sentiment almost universally opposed by Jefferson's peers.  For starters, it was part of a private letter Jefferson sent to the son in law of John Adams which was never meant to be made public. The statement is in response to an inquiry about Shays' Rebellion, which every other Founding Father decried as treason.  Jefferson took a great deal of criticism for his position, with no less than Samuel Adams saying "in monarchies the crime of treason and rebellion may admit of being pardoned or lightly punished, but the man who dares rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death." Clearly, the Founding Fathers did not want bloody rebellion once a generation.

     If you doubt this, think on this: the Americans had just spent the better part of a decade fighting a bloody and costly revolution that they had only barely won.  It left them deeply in debt and left the populace war weary and distrustful.  What possible reason could they have for wanting to do this once a generation? This quote from John Adams sums it up nicely:

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

Finally, the Constitution of the United States creates a system whereby the government can be peacefully changed every 2 - 6 years.  The men who wrote this document set this system up in such a way that the States would determine who could vote for Congressmen and other representatives.  In most states at time, the only people who could vote were land owning white men. So answer me this: if the Founding Fathers set it up so that less than 1/3 of the population could change the government through peaceable means, what kind of twisted, idiotic logic makes you think they wanted everyone armed and able to do it violently?

     Now, I know there is no convincing people like Bob that these facts prove him wrong.  He has feelings on his side, so he doesn't need facts.  But this is reality.  This is the truth.  Bob actually says at one point that he doesn't have "an issue with opposing viewpoints that are thought out, well debated, and use facts."  Well, maybe Bob should try some of those things some time, because none of his arguments are thought out, well debated, or remotely factual.  He talks about extremists as if he isn't one.  He talks about a domestic terrorist as if his own writings do not support and encourage the very actions that man took.  He acts as if letting a gun manufacturer spread his lies and fear mongering in his magazine doesn't make him a shill.  Bob is truly the most despicable type of human being.  He makes me ashamed to be an American.  You can lie to yourself, Bob, but you're not fooling the rest of us.  We see you for the treasonous terrorist you are.

     One final thought: Bob has a pullout in this week's rag advertising a party he's throwing this weekend for all the other bundhists.  In a truly tone deaf and disgusting bit of irony, there's a bit about how they're holding an auction to raise money for the family of the PA State Trooper who was murdered in cold blood by one of Bob's "fellow patriots." I really hope his wife throws your money back in your face, Bob, but I doubt she even knows who you are or what you stand for. How about this Bob: instead of raising money for a real Patriot who gave his life in the line of duty, you stop printing your seditionist lies and insurrectionist fairy tales?  How about instead of encouraging people to take shots at the police and the government, you act like a real patriot and support it?  Like another great patriot, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson once said: "The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either."

A republic is a government of the people, Bob.  Maybe start acting like one.

Wait ... Where the Heck Are We? - September 23, 2014

     Well, Bob, good for you.  I'm glad to see you're not such a stereotypical American male that you won't stop and ask for directions once in a while.  Though I will say that if you often find yourself driving around and disoriented with no idea where you are, you might want to see a doctor.  That could be early onset dementia, and while I'm pretty sure you are demented, I would hate to see you cause an automobile accident and hurt an innocent person.  So get that checked out.

     Thanks for the shout out, by the way.  At least, I'm guessing that's me you're talking about when you mention getting letters from "some guy in New Jersey." Did one of your kids teach you how to use the Google so you could find me? This isn't a letter, though, Bob, it's a blog.  You're not worth the cost of the stamp to actually send you a letter. I'm sorry I have to write to you in crayon, but I want to make sure I keep it on your level.  I'm sorry about the big words I use, too, but maybe if you look them up in the dictionary you'll improve your vocabulary without even realizing it.  And terrorist lite, that's clever, really clever.  Maybe look up the definition of terrorist, though, Bob, because it really describes you more than it does me.  See, I don't use fear and the threat of violence to intimidate and coerce people into accepting my political views, whereas your writing is almost nothing but fear mongering and calls for violence.  Say "hi" to the FBI for me, ok?

     So, back to the dementia thing: I don't know where exactly you get this idea that there are Muslim terrorists coming to kill you (I mean, I have a pretty good idea, but I don't know exactly), but you really do need to see a doctor.  Paranoid delusions are a real problem, and a symptom of schizophrenia.  I really don't want to see you hurt someone else.  I do find it humorous that you can, in the space of a few paragraphs, spread fear of Sharia law and then call for laws based on Christian morality, as if they're somehow not equal.  Oh, and I did Google "extremist Muslim training camps in America," and all I found was a bunch of reactionary websites blathering on about conspiracy theories.  Not one credible source in the entire bunch, Bob, but I know that doesn't matter to you.  Maybe you should ask your kid how to use the Google again. In fact, the only terrorists I see training in the US are the sovereign citizen jerks you so ignorantly refer to as your "fellow patriots," the Eric Freins, the Cliven Bundys, the Jerad and Amanda Millers, the Wayne Lapierres. You know, the people using fear and violence to coerce people into following their delusional political and religious views. People like you, Bob.

     Now, I have to ask: do you think that the man who shot State Trooper Cpl. Byron Dickson is a Muslim terrorist?  Because you don't seem to understand that this madman is actually one of your "fellow patriots;" a survivalist sovereign citizen nutjob.  I bet he's a "faithful Our Town reader."  He probably likes all the misogynist jokes.  Or maybe the Bible verses. Nah, I don't think he's much of a Bible reader, except maybe for Leviticus and any other passage that justifies hating homosexuals and people that "aren't Christian." (sound familiar?  Not even a little like the Sharia law you're so scared of?)  I mean, do you really think this guy is so different from you?  That you haven't encouraged him with your hate and rhetoric?  Are you that deluded? 

     You can attack me all you want, Bob, but it does not change the fact that I'm not the one espousing domestic terrorism.  Think on that the next time you want to accuse me of controlling "what you can read."  This isn't liberalism, Bob, it's straight up humanity.  You're a monster.  You're the worst kind of person, the kind that wraps himself in the flag and calls himself a patriot while encouraging people to fight the government, not realizing that the people are the government so really they're just fighting themselves.  You insult me and every other American every time you print your trash, and I'm sick of it.  The same freedom of speech that lets you print your "Creative Insight" lets me tell you to get bent, Bob, and the horse you rode in on.