It’s not just those lighthearted Molotov cocktails!  Hope and change also comes in the form of grand larceny:
Steve and Rachel Larman say a strange credit card charge appeared on their statement this month — a $2300 donation to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.
…
The Larman’s don’t want their politics to enter into what is essentially just a fraudulent charge. But they say that the charge involves the Obama campaign adds insult to injury for the registered Republicans.“They (Chase) kept on asking me ‘are you sure you wouldnt have gone to a site in support of Obama’,” said Rachel Larman. “And I repeatedly said ‘Im voting for McCain – I would not be going to an Obama site’.”
But hey, at least they aren’t as bad as those McCain supporters who excerised their free speech rights to say something unpleasant about Obama at a rally.
UPDATE: Vote fraud we can believe in!
Shelby at Palestra tells me that some 12 activists associated with Vote From Home may have fraudulently registered and that some have voted already. If they were this breathtakingly careless or brazenly reckless with their own registrations, imagine what damage they might have done in their voter registration drive — and what damage they may yet do in following through on absentee ballots with those voters.
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How about those reasonable folks who hung Obama in effigy from a tree at George Fox University? I don’t want to paste a link and get this comment kicked out, but search on "Obama George Fox University" and it should come right up.
I’m not defending crimes by Democrats in any way (although since the perpetrator in the crime you describe is unknown, it’s hard to say if it was an Obama operative or someone who knew the victims personally, knew they were Republicans, and wanted to hurt them but didn’t want it to be traceable), just pointing out that there are scumbags on both sides.
If hanging (or burning or beheading or whatever) someone in effigy is good enough for Democrats, then it’s good enough for Republicans.
I don’t condone the behavior on either side, but Liberals have made a career of doing things to people in effigy. Besides, larceny is a crime and hanging someone in effigy is, apparently, free speech.
TexasAgo3,
It’s just not exactly the civil, reasoned discourse that some have claimed Republicans engage in as opposed to awful Democrats.
As far as I’m concerned, and this is generally how I approach life, not just political campaigns, you can either keep the moral high ground, OR you can use tit-for-tat reasoning and do the same thing as the other guy, but not both.
Some lighthearted burning of Obama signs:
http://www.wptv.com/news/local/story.aspx?content_id=17ab9e8d-63fd-48f8-bce7-c78bece13807
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27122474/
Also, search on "Obama sign burned". I’m sorry, this kind of reprehensible behavior is simply not limited to one party or the other. People just suck, period.
Elizabeth,
I agree and I hate seeing this kind of thing from either side. However, compared to some of the things that are done these days, effigies are pretty low on my "shocked" scale. That’s really a sad testament to the state of affairs.
I actually had a nice discussion the other day with a very good friend who is a Democrat. He’s not necessarily an Obama "guy", but just doesn’t like McCain. The good part is that we talked for about an hour without yelling or calling each other or the candidates names. We discussed policies and issues and how we honestly felt.
It was a nice change and it shows people can talk civilly.
TexasAg03,
Hey, me too! I had lunch today with a close friend who is a Fundamentalist Christian with whom I have many political differences. We usually manage to stay civil, and today was no exception, but we both felt pleased that even right before a hotly contested election and in the middle of a financial crisis neither of us was pushed out of that zone.Â
My close friend the firebrand super-Lefty has been out of the country for a few weeks so we haven’t been able to argue. I actually tend to get more vehement with him, because our opinions are somewhat closer although not identical and so his excesses bother me more, if that makes any sense.Â
How about those reasonable folks who hung Obama in effigy from a tree at George Fox University?Â
George W Bush gets burned and hung in effigy pretty often.
Also, it’s not illegal (that pesky free speech thing again). At least, not yet…
Burning someone else’s sign, or on someone else’s property is wrong and criminal.
Burning your own sign or effigy on your own property is at least legal. It’s not something I really approve of, but there are lots of things I don’t approve of.
Using someone else’s credit card to make a campaign contribution without their knowledge is wrong and criminal.
To say that these things are somehow analagous strikes me as somewhat delusional.
If you search, you will see cases of Obama signs having been burned without the consent of their owners. In that case, I was indeed comparing apples to apples. It’s not possible to know for sure that they were burned by McCain supporters unless the perpetrators are caught, but the same applies to the original news item; it doesn’t give the perpetrator or the motive for the crime, so we can’t be sure it was an Obama supporter (yet). I may well turn out to have been, and I condemn it in any case as theft is always wrong, but we don’t know yet.
I agree that the hanging in effigy is not illegal, so maybe it’s a better example for the other thread about niceness rather than for this one which is about illegal acts.
I’ll start getting agitated when these teens start throwing Molotov Cocktails at police and people.
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