[Vision2020] 'Obama Tags' Called a Joke

[Kenneth Marcy]

On Friday 28 August 2009 11:47:01 Tom Hansen wrote:
> BOISE - An Idaho Republican gubernatorial hopeful insists he was only
> joking when he said he'd buy a license to hunt President Barack Obama.
>
> Rex Rammell, a long-shot candidate slated to run against incumbent Butch
> Otter in the May 2010 GOP primary, made the comment at a Republican rally
> Tuesday in Twin Falls where talk turned to the state's planned wolf hunt,
> for which hunters must purchase an $11.50 wolf tag. The hunt is due to
> begin Tuesday.
>
> When an audience member shouted a question about "Obama tags," Rammell
> responded, "The Obama tags? We'd buy some of those."

Good grief. Yet another generation of insular ignorance presents itself to the 
world. Unfortunately, this is not a new story. I can remember in the early 
1980's, while the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh was driving Rolls Royces and 
otherwise holding forth not so far away in Oregon, driving north from Boise 
to attend a family holiday gathering. I stopped by a snowy roadside pancake 
house, relatively recently constructed from large logs, within which I saw on 
the restaurant wall a sign exhorting hunters to hurry and buy their Indian 
hunting licenses so they could "bhagwan today."

> Rammell told the Associated Press on Thursday he sees no reason to
> apologize because the comment was just a joke.

It's not a joke at all. Individual and collective tags will amount to 
instances of willful and concerted delay of progress, with (limited) respect 
to the President's program legislation and policy proposals, aggressive and  
counterproductive advertising, and an attitude of resistive non-cooperation 
toward solving national problems. 

> "What I would say to all my Democrat Idahoans: Take a deep breath and
> relax," he said. "We're not going to go out and hunt Obama."

1) Slavery is over. The use of the possessive with respect to people is at 
least a century and a half out of date. Neither Rammell nor anyone else owns 
any Idahoans.

2) With creatures able and willing to say such things outside of a zoo, no one 
can relax.

3) That's a lie, at least with respect to resistive non-cooperation.

> Threatening the president can be a felony punishable by five years in
> prison and a $250,000 fine.

Unfortunately for some, the stakes are a lot higher. To the extent that the 
tactics of delay and fear-mongering are successful, millions of persons may 
be denied billions of dollars of effective benefits at the same time that the 
economy is hindered from optimal recovery and fine tuning to yield more 
socially constructive and energy efficient productivity.


Ken