Why is it that when some people try to do good, others simply want to dismantle that good? When someone tries to promote peace, others are ready to stir up trouble and unrest. It’s almost like peace and tranquility are dull and boring and disturbance is exciting and fun. What we are seeing in the United States at the moment is not just a case of the mischevious school child being sneaky behind the teacher’s back. What we are seeing is nothing short of promoting and inciting a new civil war.

Under former President George W Bush, we saw eight years of incompetence, abuse of human rights, centralised control and an attempt at totally disempowering the ordinary citizen. George W Bush himself is trying to get on with his life, probably quietly happy that he can just be George the ‘good ‘ole boy’ again. Dick Cheney, however, is coming out guns blazing at attacks against his policies towards detainees at Guantanamo Bay. It is this strident chest beating that has inspired the right wing to ‘rise up’ and defend Cheney and all that he stood for. Leading this charge is right wing broadcaster Glenn Beck.

Mr. Beck likes to state that he just wants politicians to be ’straight’ with the people, whatever side of the political fence they sit on. He tries to make out that he favours neither Republican or Democrat, but he does have a show on the FOX News network, which is unashamedly right wing, and he believes Sarah Palin is more real than most politicians. But more dangerous is his encouragement of the American people to have what he calls ‘the ‘civilest’ of wars’.

Did Mr. Beck ask people to rise up when George Bush was in power? Did he ask people to ‘rise up’ when Cheney and Rumsfeld made torture an acceptable form of interrogation? Did he ask people to ‘rise up’ when we found out that the war on Iraq was started on a myth? I have searched high and low for comments from him that criticise the Republican party and for the life of me I can’t find one. But now, with President Obama in the White House, we find Mr. Beck on the warpath against a President who is trying to bring back credibilty to the United States for the first time in eight very long years.

Are the Democrats perfect? Of course they aren’t. No politician is. But to incite civil unrest simply because the new leader does not have the same ideological thinking as you do should be a punishable offence. President Obama has barely been in office five months. He has ideas in his head of where things should go, and has put in place some of those ideas, but if he dropped dead right now, his Presidency would be forgotten in history. It is way, way to early to tell how these policies will pan out in the long run, and the long run is what creates Presidential legacies. Bush’s legacy is not pretty, and barely has a flicker of credibility in it.

The point here is the United States government, under the ‘care’ of Bush/Cheney, have emphasised the importance of ‘national security’, and were at pains many times to warn us all of threats to that ’national security’. It became such a buzz phrase that now everyone around the world uses it. Robin Williams even made a joke of it once:

They couldn’t call it the Department of Fatherland Security, because they would have old German men saying “Zat’s very goot.”

If we are serious about protecting our citizens and our countries, then it is vitally important we put a stop to this ‘civilest of wars’ nonsense, because that threatens national security. If something, God forbid, happens to President Obama or his family, will the right wing stand back and say, “It wasn’t anything to do with us?” It sure as hell will have a lot to do with them. With people like Glenn Beck putting seeds of paranoia into the minds of his faithful, it is only a matter of time before the bomb goes off in someone’s head and the safety and well being of the President will become an issue.

Let me leave you with Glenn Beck on ‘The View’. What is absolutely priceless about this is how Barbara Walters pins down Beck and exposes him as a man who does not check his facts, and makes stuff up in order to get a reaction. If he does this when relaying a minor incident such as the one you will now hear about, what ‘facts’ is he presenting to the narrow right wing audience that watch his show?

Whoopi and Barbara? You go girls!

Enjoy your day