Introspection

The violent anti-Obama sentiment coming out of central Arizona managed to get still more toxic over the weekend. Chris Broughton, the man who brought an AR-15 rifle and a handgun to an Arizona Obama rally earlier this month, says he "concurs" with his fundamentalist pastor's prayer for President Obama "to die and go to hell."

And in an interview with a local TV station, pastor Steven Anderson himself elaborated on his statement to TPMmuckraker that he would prefer Obama to die of natural causes so "he's not some martyr." "I don't want him to be a martyr, we don't need another holiday. I'd like to see him die, like Ted Kennedy, of brain cancer," Anderson now says.

In an interview with ABC 15 outside the storefront Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Broughton said of Anderson's controversial August 16 "Why I Hate Barack Obama" sermon: "I concur, I think we'd be better off if God would send [Obama] where he's going now instead of later. [Obama] is destroying our country." And when a reporter followed up with, "you're not advocating violence against the president?" Broughton, who has previously said his weapons are for defense, says "I'm not going to answer that question directly." "I don't care how God does it, I'm not going into further detail than that," Broughton says. "It would be better now than later."

---- When I first heard this story I thought, crazy zealots wanting their 15 minutes. My second thought was the left/progressive and democrats will love the fuel for their anti-religious folks, and their anti-racist groups - but damn, Broughton is black so that completely waters down the race card.

The comments, as always on these stories, are so predictable. There's the "give real Christians a bad name" sect. The gun experts describing the workings of an AR-15. The shut down this church commentors. The right to bear arms commentors and their opponents' diatribes on gun control. And of course, the all love one another sermons from those commentors who always want to appear bigger and better-hearted than anyone else. On and on.

But not one comment mentioned something I thought a few short years ago.

There was a time when I could not see Bush's mug or hear his voice without feeling intense loathing and the fleeting wish that the s.o.b. would just die, drop dead, choke to death on a pretzel. That's right, die - I didn't care how.

So, what many on the "right" feel today about Obama, is no worse than my own darkest thoughts about George W. Bush. Maybe the only difference between my "violent" thoughts and the pastor's - is I know when to bite my tongue and not preach about it.