So I was perusing the newest poll questions on Facebook (you can find me both there and on Myspace via my name, Mel Maguire, or my email address, animelmaguire@gmail.com), and came across one that nearly made me snort my protein shake all over the keyboard. It gave me a mixture of utter shock and hysterical laughter. Here was the question:
“Do you think Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck are traitors and should be tried and put in prison?”
If the question wasn’t loaded enough, here were the possible responses (I kid you not, this was word-for-word):
A. Hell Yes
B. Yes
C. No
D. Hell no, I am stupid and believe everything they say
Now, there was a little bit of talk about traitorism after 9/11 and what constitutes a traitor. Some Republicans even went as far as suggesting that those who wouldn’t support the troops were un-American. But how often did we ever suggest, with a straight face, that protesters who peacefully exercised their First Amendment rights be tried for treason and tossed in the clink?
I can’t think of one. Even Limbaugh, Hannity and Beck didn’t go that far. Hell, Hannity invites those guys onto his show on a nightly basis, and he’s NICE to them. What kills me is that the snot-nosed little brat who wrote this poll question for Facebook users isn’t the first person I’ve heard such a ludicrous idea from. I’ve heard people I thought to be fairly level-headed say these kind of things out loud.
I have to ask the liberals out there who agree with this nonsense: what, pray tell, makes these guys traitors? I’ve said things far worse than what Hannity has said, and I’ve agreed with Limbaugh and Beck in the past. Does that mean I need to go to prison, too? What the hell makes those of us who share these conservative ideals traitors?
(Wait, I forgot…I’m a lesbian and I’m conservative, I’m naturally a traitor!)
Meanwhile, back on the farm…
In a country where even outright threats that include detailed acts of severe violence can go entirely unnoticed, it floors me that anybody can even think that those who obey the law should be punished simply for what they think. How is it that a Muslim can openly call for Jews to be assaulted with drain cleaner, rocks on their windshields and murder and get away with it while the portion of our population that demands tolerance calls for the imprisonment of a group of people simply because they espouse views not in line with their version of “tolerance”?
You amaze me. But here’s what’s really absolutely hilarious about our idiotic poll question of the day…the first choice in the poll? It got 11%. The second? 3.4%. The third?
82.3%.
That was out of 34,141 votes. I guess the view some think is popular isn’t all it’s cracked up to be after all.
(Footnote: RTD protein shakes aren’t all that great when ingested the way nature intended. When you attempt, deliberately or not, to process them through your nasal cavity, they’re really bad.)