Christian Nation in Indiana.

It's another token of our "changing" language. I put the word in quotes because it's so strange to see things like the weaponizing of words described in such benign terms, but "religious freedom" simply hasn't meant the right to perform rituals, say prayers or build places of religious exercise without restraint except to a few for a long while. 

In Indiana, or to the Indiana chapter of the Christian Caliphate in America it means the right to do any damned thing you want as long as "Christians" like the Robertsons: Phil and Pat or Reverend Phelps or a majority of the Indiana General Assembly approve. No one really, no one at all is in any doubt that, as it has in other religions, the militant wing of American Christianity is rising in power and rising in the lust for control and domination and the ability to punish people of other beliefs or thoughts or perspectives. No one fails to see how such assaults on liberty tend to thrive in places of ignorance and religious passion (you may find some correlation if you like:) places like Indiana.

No one has any doubt that if the shoe were on the other foot, and there were significant numbers of people who would refuse to service cars with those chrome fish, or religious bumper stickers or serve them at drive-through restaurants,  the Christian Nation  folks would hesitate to stand up for that kind of religious freedom and certainly they would be raising hell if "Muslims only" signs were to appear in Indiana.  No Yarmulkes inside, no cross, no service, no Irish need apply, only church goers in this neighborhood. We do not serve people with tattoos. We've been there before. We've had those tradinal values before.  Perhaps those who keep telling me we've made little progress aren't entirely wrong.  Certainly the spirit of hate and exclusivity thrives, along with talk of beheadings and rape and castration, damnation and brimstone by bearded zealots, to the cheering of the mob.

So yes, freedom of religion now means something close to its opposite and to be evil, nasty and mean --  contemptuous of  truth and justice is to have Christian values, to have "faith."   None of the claims made about life liberty, the pursuit of happiness, about freedom and justice for all are in any way compatible with the goals of the Christian Nation in America people any more than they are with the Islamic State people and yet the damnation is so faint and public discourse so filled with pop culture, celebrity surgery, the latest product from Apple, transportation calamities and the angelic innocence of Michael Brown.  Not only the language has been prostituted, but so have our thoughts and concerns, at least that's the goal. Denialism, lack of definable terms, amorphous logic, conspiracy theories and fear are the means, tyranny is the end.

Big Brother and the Targets of Public Outrage

Idiotic and often disgusting stunts by college students and at college fraternities and sororities seem as regular and inevitable as stupid statements by politicians and questionable actions by police officers and if we were so inclined, we might spend our days ranting and raging about it.  Sometimes we do that, but what we choose to obsess about seems chosen for us rather than a spontaneous reaction to circumstances. The American public is an orchestra, a chorus, a marching band and those things have their conductors, their choir leaders and drum majors to produce and direct passion on demand, outrage on cue.

So the University of Houston suspends Sigma Chi for hazing practices so dangerous as to be criminal whether or not the pledges voluntarily submit. The District Attorney may press criminal charges.  You didn't hear about it through the week long din of  gnashing and wailing and rending of clothes over rude comments made on a bus at another university. Boys will be boys and at least they're not racists. We're only accepting racism outrage this month and next month will be reserved for Hillary's e-mail.

So two cops walk into a house in Dallas.  There's a man standing there with a screwdriver.  His mother tells the cops he's mentally ill and wants help getting him to the hospital. "we don't have time for this" says one of them.  They shoot him repeatedly until he's dead.  That's right, CNN is not covering this round the clock, there are no nationwide demonstrations reminding us that bipolar lives matter. Call me a racist, and some have, but the struggle for justice and equality for all isn't well served by ignoring anyone's liberty and civil rights. Human life matters.

So a guy gets a phone call from a neighbor.  His house is surrounded by 40 police cars, SWAT team with rifles and battering rams. There's a remote control bomb disposal robot, there are armored assault vehicles.  Returning home, the parents of the teenager inside are told not to enter "the kill zone."  Later they're told the kid "is deceased."  They could only get details from the TV news the following day.  It was claimed the kid had a long police record.  He didn't.  A neighbor saw the plainclothes officers approaching the young man and thought they were robbers. It's likely the victim did too.  They jumped the fence, tackled him and when he defended himself, they killed him.  Happens in Phoenix all the time: the mentally ill, the poor, the Hispanic, the innocent, the harmless. We tend not to demonstrate round the clock, not to burn cars, rob liquor stores, loot businesses. We tend not to notice. The conductor's baton is pointing elsewhere. This is what it means, all that it means and nothing else is pertinent, anything else is out of line and racist.

 Last year the police story about the homeless New Mexico man who pulled a small knife when ordered to move along and had to be killed, was contradicted by video that shows he was complying, not resisting. His life mattered and his "white privilege" availed him not.

The U.S. Justice Department issued a report last year documenting that the Albuquerque Police Department  has for years engaged in a pattern of excessive force that violates the U.S. Constitution and federal law. The mentally ill, ethnic minorities, the homeless, the poor, the helpless: 

     officers too frequently use deadly force against people who pose a minimal threat, said the report.

     Albuquerque officers use “less lethal” force, including Tasers, on people who are non-threatening   or unable to comply with orders. 

     Encounters between APD officers and persons with mental illness and in crisis too frequently result in a use of force or a higher level of force than necessary. 

Police brutality, excessive force -- it seems to correlate more with helplessness than with anything else, but that observation departs from the official line, deflects anger from the target we're given. It flirts with racist thoughts. It admits shades and colors into our prescribed, black and white arguments.  In fact we have a problem with the way the police sometimes treat people in general. and for those without such effective advocates and agitators, their plight is worse. Black, Brown, Indigenous and indigent people all suffer from  official brutality as well as from official lack of concern and it's time to step out of line and take a stand against the incompetence, the bias, the anger and increasing militarism of our police. But for the love of justice, let's stop forcing our force-fed examples to monopolize the news while ignoring the real problem.  All lives matter!

Rush to Judgement

Zeus has led us on to know, the Helmsman lays it down as law that we must suffer, suffer into truth. We cannot sleep, and drop by drop at the heart the pain of pain remembered comes again, and we resist, but ripeness comes as well. From the gods enthroned on the awesome rowing-bench there comes a violent love.

-Aeschylus: Agamemnon- 

We hear on the TV that most arrests in Ferguson Missouri are of  African Americans but we don't ask if the percentage given relates to the percentage of African Americans living there.  I don't know the answer, but I'll bet few people bothered to ask themselves because it complicates things and we're looking for "proof" of something we know a priori. Most of us would be very disappointed at anything in the way of opinion or conjecture or documented proof that things aren't the way we thought and perhaps not the way we hoped.  We want that cop to be guilty and his whole department complicit. It's plausible after all and that's enough for most of us.  Thank god for the law and the courts or we'd become what we think we oppose.

It's well documented by many scientific studies that people will believe a simple, plausible story with few selected supporting facts, or even fallacies for that matter, before they will take the trouble to sort through all the verifiable facts and analyze how they relate to our chosen opinion. Occam's razor cuts both ways and after all, our brains have evolved as machines for jumping to conclusions, not as calculators or statistical tabulators.  Hell, I suspect most people simply latch on to the opinions of the mobs they belong to, or aspire to belong to.  Far more witches have been burned than have been burned by witches.

I think there's great wisdom that comes with self doubt -- the ability to ask oneself  "what if everything I believe is wrong or absurd, or not worth consideration." What if the case is far more complex and the certainties for less clear? If we're lucky we have one of those epiphanic moments when it becomes obvious that we were wrong and we learn from it. We find out someone we were sure was guilty is innocent or vice versa. We find out we're not who we thought we were, that something we believed without question is demonstrably false, that someone or something we had confidence in didn't merit it. We find we've misjudged someone and we're forced, to go out and rage in the storm like Lear.  We suffer into truth and the truth is that if justice is to be served, we wait for the evidence and we look at all of it without prejudice. It's not easy.

The simple plausible truth behind the acquittal of O.J. Simpson was that he was the victim of racism. He's black, the LAPD has a history of  brutality against minorities,  one of the investigators was once heard using the N word and so when his defense attorney told the jury they had to send a message to "the Man"  all the endlessly damning evidence was forgotten.

When Trayvon Martin was killed, so many of us, so well aware of  racism in small town police departments instantly assumed that a "child" was murdered by some racist intent upon hunting innocent black children and were appalled by the jury's decision, because after all it was impossible that the innocent child jumped out of hiding in the dark at a "creepy guy" 4 inches shorter than him. Teenaged boys never do impulsive things, do they?  Impossible because we don't want to consider anything but black and white both in a real and metaphorical sense. We wanted to tie it to our mistrust of guns and laws that had no part in the trial and so we did rightly or wrongly, guilty or innocent -- case closed, minds closed.

When we heard some "child" was shot in Missouri. We saw the inevitable graduation picture wearing a mortarboard hat.  It was just so obviously a racially motivated murder to consider otherwise and of course if we want to pause and wait for more than confused and conflicting eye-witness reports we display endless anecdotes about racism in Ferguson.  So just as we as good liberals shouted "rush to judgement" at the lengthy Simpson trial, we turned about and rushed to judgement even before any investigation in those other two affairs.  Who wants to suffer? Who wants to be seen as a racist?

For those of course, of a different political persuasion, quite the opposite is true and Timothy McVeigh is a hero but Dr. King is not.  But enough about Fox News.  Enough too about questioning the need for the National Guard to stem the violence -- it's necessary because we think the situation is obvious and we are sure that nothing will be done if we don't demonstrate and exhibit our credentials as racism fighters before we really know what happened.  We don't.  We've just assumed and just decided what's obvious.  We get angry because we assume a cop assumed and because we assumed that cops always assume and we make sure that everyone knows every thing that might be construed as evidence  of racism so that we don't pause to reflect that sometimes we're wrong when lives hinge on our being right.

Nos it's absolutely certain that someone reading this will call me a racist or apologist for racism because I'm attempting to temper your crowd-sourced certainty.  If you do, you're not a liberal nor a defender of human rights or of justice but a prejudiced partisan a long way from wisdom.

A life for a life

summa awilum in mar awilim uhtappid insu uhappadu

-Code of Hammurabi-

If a man has destroyed the sight of another man's son, they shall poke out his eye.

It's no secret that I think the execution of criminals is not a power that should be given a government. Reenacting a murder, repeating the act of violence whether quietly with a needle or loudly with a squad of rifles serves no purpose other than to dignify anger, hatred and blood lust.

The State of Missouri killed serial killer and white supremacist Joseph Paul Franklin yesterday, in a little room and in front of witnesses. It took the mechanism of institutional homicide over 30 years to exhaust all appeals and procedures and last minute delays before strapping him to a table and running phenobarbital into his veins. 

Franklin has been convicted of 8 racially motivated murders and has confessed to a dozen more. He is thought to have committed over 20 in Tennessee, Utah, Wisconsin and Ohio. He has confessed to shooting publisher Larry Flynt, paralyzing him permanently and to wounding civil rights leader Vernon Jordan.  Using a 'deer rifle' he killed two young cousins Dante Brown and Darrell Lane in Cincinnati because they were African American and fully 18 years later was given a life sentence for it, but of course that was moot since he had already been given a death sentence for the similar sniper shooting of Gerald Gordon outside a suburban St. Louis synagogue in 1977. He fired 5 shots into a group of Jewish worshipers, killing Gordon and wounding two others.  God gave him this mission, he said.

So I'm not in mourning for Franklin.  Given the chance to stop his 'divine' calling to kill Blacks and Jews, I would not have hesitated to use lethal force, nor chastised anyone else for doing so,  but of course his mission was long over when they killed him.  Larry Flynt will never walk again nor will those  killed be restored to life. The lives diminished by grief  will not likely be restored to happiness. 

"I hate him for destroying my life, for taking away something precious to me, a life that I brought into this world,"

 said  Abbie Evans Clark, Dante Brown's mother. I hate him too and it wasn't my son he killed. She will likely always hate him.

 "It's devastating. It's a void. You never get over it."

 I'm sure she's right. She feels no forgiveness, she says, and although she knows it won't bring the two boys back,

 "It lets you know that justice will be done for the senseless murders of two innocent boys."

Justice.  One has to ask: what is justice if it's not the undoing of wrong? What is justice if it changes nothing, restores nothing?  

If a man dieth -- doth he revive?

-Job 14:14- 

What is justice if it's inspired by hate and why then is it called justice if hate itself is not justice?  Children are not fungible, not property that can be replaced, like money that can be repaid, like debits and credits on a balance sheet. The death of a murderer does not repay a mother for the loss of her son nor can his life be restored to him. Even El could not restore Job's murdered family to him but only a substitute. Those he once loved are gone forever.


Lex Talionis is what we often call reciprocal punishment. In it's favor, we can say that it determines the limits of punishment -- only one eye for one eye. We talk about repayment, but some crimes cannot be payed back  nor is the victim's sight restored when someone else's is taken away.  Indeed can we talk about justice at all when we admit we want someone dead or worse that God wants someone dead and we need to fulfill his divine will?

I'm glad Joseph Paul Franklin is dead.  I hate him down to the bottom of my soul, but I do not love my hatred. I do not ennoble it. I do not justify it or try to reconcile it with my reverence for life. I feel no better and am no better now that he's dead. I don't think we are safer. I don't think we are any closer to fulfilling that longing for harmony in all things we've likely had since our beginning. I don't think we reach it in our various faiths -- neither in the laws of Missouri or the law codes of Ur-Nammu or Hammurabi or edicts of Telepinu or the Hebrew Halacha.

Some things cannot be made right nor losses recovered and when we act out of hate, when we justify hatred,  perhaps only hate itself is served or preserved.

Justified

This isn't the first time I've said that Justice in America isn't about the law, it's about the lawyers.  It won't be the last time.  The web footed honkers and quackers at CNN were still telling each other as I switched it all off and went to bed that we have a pattern of letting killers go free, but if you have a memory longer than a goose and if you still make an effort to look past the selected stories the angertainment industry allows us you'd be aware that if there is a pattern, it's a pattern of  framing the innocent.

I was appalled last Friday night when Cornell West told us on Bill Maher's show that Florida's Stand Your Ground law allowed everyone to carry a gun, but not surprised.  The level of ignorance about gun laws is shockingly high, stubbornly held and sadly near universal amongst those most vociferously opposed to public ownership of weapons. Tragically sad because the  law is written to exclude the right to chase down, confront and threaten or even to escalate a dispute if one wants to claim self-defense, but as I said, it's not about the law, it's about glib and sarcastic trial lawyers, dull witted jurors and ignorance.

I dread to read the news this morning. I don't want to lose my breakfast over yet more railing against guns, I don't want to hear that the decision to acquit Zimmerman was all about race or any of the other stale arguments imposed on this case before Trayvon Martin was interred. As far as I'm concerned, it's just another flim-flam defense based on making the law seem to say what it doesn't, and it doesn't say that you can shoot someone -- an unarmed someone who knocks you down or gives you a bloody nose particularly when you instigated the fight and violated someones civil rights in the process.  In fact, the law was designed to allow someone like Martin to use deadly force to defend himself against someone, some "crazy cracker" posing a credible threat to his life to force him out of any place he had a right to be.  He brought his fists and some skittles to a gun fight.

Innocent people wind up on death row. People are incarcerated for decades and their lives ruined for smoking Marijuana or receiving naked pictures of a girlfriend on a cellphone. People are locked up with false accusations and to me, that's worse than that a guilty man should go free, but although the NRA will doubtless try to make him a folk-hero like Bernhard Goetz, there is little similarity. Martin wasn't carrying a sharpened screwdriver and demanding money and Goetz didn't corner the muggers in a dark alley. Goetz wasn't a vigilante, Zimmerman I think, was, defending a community against burglars by carrying weapons and confronting and chasing suspicious people, something the gun laws do not permit.

But again, it's about the lawyers and while it's a respectable and necessary profession in any civilization, people like Mark O'Mara disgust me, convincing a jury that his "muscle tone" and perhaps his dangerous, hoodie wearing image was responsible not only for Zimmerman having chased him down but justified shooting him.

No doubt many axes of all sorts will be ground on this case.  Perhaps as with OJ and Bernhard Goetz there will be a wrongful death suit and I think there's a good case for it. Although I don't think either victim or vigilante was without fault or are in any way heroes, I do think the preponderance of responsibility is on Zimmerman.  There is a responsibility on us as well -- not to traduce the law, misrepresent it or to make more of this case than it is for the purpose of furthering our politics, but of course, this being America it's a false hope to expect us  not to -- as false as we are.

Justified?

A lot of people are very angry about the shooting of Treyvon Martin last month in the old North Florida town of Sanford. I'm one of them.

Florida, as you may know has been a model of old South attitudes toward black people, but was the incident racially motivated as is being loudly asserted or is there racism involved in interpreting what happened?

As you might suspect from his name, Martin was black. He was only 17 years old and when he was accosted one night, dressed as many 17 year old males are, in a hoodie and sneakers and baggy pants; the kind of costume that produces unease and possibly is designed to produce unease, after dark, when worn by someone strolling through your neighborhood.

Young Martin was shot by a "neighborhood watch" volunteer - one of those people who lurk about neighborhoods at night looking for people who don't 'belong' there, but although such groups are often encouraged by local police and like any citizen who qualifies, is allowed to bear arms for the sole purpose of protecting themselves, these volunteers are not and are not allowed to be policemen. Indeed the concealed weapons license course stresses that fact repeatedly.

If you've ever lived in a community that has rules, you've probably chuckled about "Condo Commandos" who delight in the feeling of power they get from reporting you for having your garage door open for more than 5 minutes or failing to take in your garbage can by the required time. I would imagine that such folks would delight even more in taking on the role of protector while walking a beat at night. Does that describe George Zimmerman? Not having all the facts and being unlikely ever to have all of them, I can only speculate.

Mr. Zimmerman, 28 years of age, is being accused by the family of Treyvon Martin of a hate crime and a racially motivated killing. Of course I can't know what was on Zimmerman's mind, but I do read that he is of Hispanic origin and comes from a racially diverse family. There may be many reasons having nothing to do with race for Zimmerman to have accosted the young man and shot him. And of course it's inevitable that Florida gun laws will be blamed for this sad event by those who haven't read them and I despair when thinking about any lesson we should be learning here.

The laws governing concealed weapons here in Florida are rather clear about the right to defend your life when a person has reasonable fear of a lethal attack and it's rather clear about one's right to defend against someone trying to forceably remove you from a place you have a right to be, such as your house or your car. I'm no lawyer, yet I can speculate that a public sidewalk is one of those places one has a right to be. The law is equally clear about your right to use a weapon being severely undermined in a situation where the attack was provoked or 'escalated' by you. In other words, should I draw a weapon and shoot someone I picked an avoidable fight with, or made it worse by remaining when I should have walked away, I won't get away so easily with a self-defense plea as Zimmerman inexplicably seems to have done. The law is also clear about using a weapon to gain advantage in a dispute or as a threat. Simply showing it or even mentioning that you have one is a serious offense in many cases. "Get off my block kid, I've got a gun" is one of those cases.

The rights of a neighborhood watch volunteer extend as far as observing and using a telephone to call the police. They do not include provoking a fight, attempting to chase someone out of a neighborhood, shoving, pushing or physically engaging anyone. From the testimony of Martin's girlfriend who had been talking with him on the phone when Zimmerman 'went after' him and allegedly pushed him to the ground, that may be just what happened and if so, Zimmerman had long since transgressed and his right to use lethal force against an unarmed person had long since departed, at least in my non-lawyer opinion -- yet Zimmerman has not been charged.

Somehow, in the city of Sanford, this possibly unjustifiable use of force seems to have been ignored. I suspect that if there's racism lurking in this case, we'll find it in uniform or carrying a briefcase. Attempts to get around the apparent lapse by law enforcement people by framing the incident as a civil rights violation or a hate crime are not likely to be successful and any chance for justice drowned in the storm of predictable and formulaic accusations.

J'Accuse!

Fox lies and America pays the price. Sean Hannity's latest witch hunt against anything good and decent has found yet another victim in Kevin Jennings. The Obama administration employee whom Czar Hannity, mad with power, calls a "safe schools Czar," has been accused of ignoring or not reporting the sexual abuse of a minor. Of course not only is Jennings not the absolute monarch of anyplace, he's only Assistant Deputy Secretary at the Department of Education for the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools (OSDFS) and more importantly, the story isn't true.

Hannity lies and one more piece of justice dies. Of course Fox sometimes quietly retracts a story after the damage has been done -- as they have with the story insisting that Jennings one ignored a report of sexual relations between a minor student and an older man, but such lies have momentum and the mad dogs of the GOP are issuing demands that he be fired for promoting a "radical gay agenda" they would like you to believe includes the exploitation of children by gay teachers.

Fifty-three House Republicans have written President Barack Obama calling on him to fire Jennings. Jennings isn't a Czar of any kind and the gay "child" in question was above the age of consent, but Jennings is also gay and Jennings has spent a lot of time trying to make schools safer for all students, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity. Such things infuriate bigots and witch hunting religious idiots and Retro-Republican trolls and Fox is happy to fan the flames regardless of who burns as long as those ratings stay high.

The disgusting, shit-eating cockroaches calling themselves the Family Research Council (FRC) launched the “Stop Kevin Jennings” campaign this week, warning that he is a

“radical homosexual activist” who has “worked tirelessly to bring the homosexual agenda into our nation’s classrooms.”

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/16/kevin-jennings-should-res_n_323547.html

None of these people care that the story was a lie or that the accusation is a lie. Even if Fox were to give serious time recanting it ( and ten thousand other lies) it wouldn't matter. The excuse to persecute heretics, to stomp all over freedom and justice is too valuable to let go. More foetid slime to fling at Democrats is far more valuable than truth or justice.

If a lie is as good as the truth, if preventing the abuse and promoting the safety of gay students is radical activism and if truth and justice for all is to be despised as the "Gay Agenda" then maybe it is time to stand up and say "Long live the Radical Gay Agenda!" Maybe it is time for those decent citizens to say we've had enough of the hate-stinking madmen with hate-foam on their lips and the lying enemies of freedom who whip them into a religious frenzy.

Is it any wonder the Republicans oppose hate crime legislation so vehemently? The persecution of Kevin Jennings is a hate crime and the lies of Fox are hate crimes and the Republican Party is the party of hate mongering, small mindedness, injustice and persecution of liberty. It's long past time to tell those values voters their values are evil and their deeds are evil and certainly at odds with anything this country claims it stands for. We get tens of thousands of armed idiots in the streets protesting a tax increase that's actually a decrease, but why is it that we sit by and let a good man be ruined and say nothing? Why is it that we keep watching Fox and giggling and never speak up? Is it because we're no better?

Tightening the belt

When A Texas jury set out to decide what to do with convicted murderer Khristian Oliver, the decision was made easier by a supply of Bibles in the jury room with specific passages highlighted. Whoever highlighted them chose words carefully because the jury decided to kill him -- based on their reading of the Bible.

Although the US Supreme Court decided in 1967 (Loving V. Virginia) that the government has no right to tell people they can't marry someone of another "race" the news may not have made it to parts of Louisiana. Keith Bardwell, (who claims he's not a racist) justice of the peace for Tangipahoa Parish's 8th Ward refused to marry Beth Humphrey and her boyfriend, Terence McKay because Terence is "black" and she's not. Actually Terence is no darker than this sun tanned white Floridian, but it's not about that, it's about the "traditional value of not "mixing the races" one finds in the Bible belt and it's about the result of preaching that this is a Christian nation whose law emanates, like the musty smell of unwashed laundry and pious injustice, from the Bible.

Wild Wild West

If you see someone standing on your front lawn taking pictures of your house and you stick your head out the door to ask what the hell he's doing, maybe you'd better find out if he's a Republican first.

Robert Lutes, a resident of Boise, Idaho suburb, Meridian, probably wishes he had done that. Asking the man on the lawn to tell him what it was about, his question was answered with a .357 magnum revolver pointed at him by the Republican Party chairman of Boise County, Charles McAffee, a "tea-party" activist. No, it wasn't high noon, it was just before dinner time.

There is a controversy of course about whether Lutes was engaged in heated discussion or argument about his delinquent mortgage payments before McCaffee drew on him, but McCaffee, working for collection agency used by Wells Fargo, says he pulled the gun on the unarmed homeowner to "de-escalate" the conflict. No, really.

I am unable to establish Idaho's policy on such use of a concealed weapon, but I know that in Florida, it is illegal to display or "brandish" even a legally carried gun to gain advantage in or "de-escalate" a dispute or argument. Since McAffee was arrested for aggravated assault, I would assume a similarity in the laws. Again, I don't know if Idaho is a "castle doctrine" state, but I suspect it is and under that philosophy, Lutes would have been justified in shooting a Republican Party County Chairman and tax protester like any other armed home invader.

The more civilized part of my nature is glad he didn't, but the little demon on my shoulder sort of wishes the idiot Mr. Teabags had been dealt a little bit of old fashioned Republican justice.