Virginia Teabagger group advocating armed revolution if Obama wins in November.

[JHB]

47. A lot of people rebreathing each others' hot air...

...to the point of becoming detached from reality, until they knew -- absolutely knew -- what horrors a new administration would visit upon them, so they took action before any of that had a chance to be shown if it was true or not?

Title: The Republican Party going to the right House

Year: 1860

Creator: Currier & Ives

Description: Abraham Lincoln's supporters are portrayed as radicals and eccentrics of various stripes. The satire is loosely based on an anti-Fremont cartoon from the previous presidential race, "The Great Republican Reform Party" (no. 1856-22), also issued by Nathaniel Currier. Here Lincoln, sitting astride a wooden rail borne by Horace Greeley, leads his followers toward a lunatic asylum. Greeley instructs him, "Hold on to me Abe, and we'll go in here by the unanimous consent of the people." Lincoln exhorts his followers, "Now my friends I'm almost in, and the millennium is going to begin, so ask what you will and it shall be granted." At the head of the group is a bearded man, arm-in-arm with a woman and a Mormon. He claims to "represent the free love element, and expect to have free license to carry out its principles." The woman looks at Lincoln, saying "Oh! what a beautiful man he is, I feel a passionate attraction' every time I see his lovely face." The Mormon adds, "I want religion abolished and the book of Mormon made the standard of morality." They are followed by a dandified free black, who announces, "De white man hab no rights dat cullud pussons am bound to spect' I want dat understood." Behind him an aging suffragette says, "I want womans rights enforced, and man reduced in subjection to her authority." Next a ragged socialist or Fourierist, holding a liquor bottle, asserts, "I want everybody to have a share of everybody elses property." At the end of the group are three hooligans, one demanding "a hotel established by government, where people that aint inclined to work, can board free of expense, and be found in rum and tobacco." The second, a thief, wants "the right to examine every other citizen's pockets without interruption by Policemen." The last, an Irish street tough, says, "I want all the stations houses burned up, and the M.P.s killed, so that the bohoys can run with the machine and have a muss when they please."

URL: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3a05729

Historical note: in 1860, the Republican Party was the "radical left" party. And tell me if those caricatures couldn't be straight off of Fox: replace "free love element" with gays, the mormon with "secularists", Miss "what a beautiful man" with "obsessed with celebrity/charisma", and the whole rest of the cast: uppity minorities, sour feminists, crooks, moochers, etc.