The few, the proud, the brave

I've gotten kicked off a few chatrooms. Mostly conservative (or beyond): Stormfront, Ann Coulter's "official" board, linked from her on-line column, a spin-off of that board when Ms. Coulter decided to dump the moderators (followed by a defection of many of its members), Covert Conservatives (a tolerant bunch, to be sure), and I'm barely hanging on at another spin-off, Outcast Conservatives. (I also got kicked off the chatroom of the Society for Women in Philosophy, which is not all that conservative; I think one of the moderators didn't like the attitude I adopted when I pointed out with an example just how ridiculous one of the posts was. A long story.)

I like going there to see what people think. As at most chatrooms, there are some really smart and/or informed people, some sort of feeling their way through reality, some just there to find others with whom they agree, and some jerks. (Hence, as I've mentioned here, on one of the earlier boards, one guy kept offering to fly to anywhere in the US to fight me at a "dojo or gym" of my choice.)

The current batch of those tolerating me are really, really worried about William Ayres, Jeremiah Wright, and a few others who are less frequently mentioned in the mainstream media (this term seems to be media that these folks disagree with: hence Limbaugh and the WSJ op-ed page seems to be "non" mainstream, while FOX and especially FNC is sometimes mainstream, sometimes not, depending on what is being said.) They are also very concerned that Obama's birth certificate is illegitimate.

Recently I was told that if Obama is elected, America will change from what it was to something completely different. It seems to me that this is a tautology, in that whoever is elected will change America. Their point, however, is that Obama is the greatest threat to America ever posed; that he either embraces terrorists or is himself a terrorist, that he hates America, he especially hates white America (and Americans), that he has accomplished nothing, that he is a Socialist, or a Marxist, or a Communist, or all three (in spite of some conceptual incoherence this may generate.)

This comes from people who I actually respect (although they don't think I do). I don't agree with them on much, and some of them are a bit over-the-top. But I fear that they are being a bit hypocritical, in that some of them were absolutely adamant that Democrats were undermining America by being so critical of the President, and that he (W) deserved a great deal more respect because he was the President. I don't see this respect being afforded Obama if or when he is elected.

I also fear that in spite of both Obama and McCain saying warm fuzzy things about unity, working across ideological divisions, etc., that this group will be even more alienated than they were during the Clinton era, an attitude exacerbated by the relative weakness of those who would carry out their desires (the Bob Barrs, the Henry Hydes), as was done in bringing impeachment charges against Clinton.

I don't know how many Americans my fellow chatters represent. But sometimes I worry about a group of people (many with guns) being so full of vitriol and antipathy toward Obama, and what this tells us about various scenarios (political and otherwise) that may play out in the next few years. I hope I'm wrong. And given how often I am, that's some solace.