Talking Points Memo: Classic

[meegbear]

The Washington Post today has a profile of Mike Vanderboegh, the 57-year-old former militiaman from Alabama who last week posted a call for people to throw bricks through the windows at Democratic offices around the country to protest their votes for Health Care Reform. Whether the people who actually did this over the last week did so in reaction to his call to arms is not clear. But he's happy to take credit and others are crediting him too.

But Vanderboegh really is a classic exemplar of scream-at-your-TV tea-partyish extremism. A radical libertarian, champion of getting big government off the people's backs, his day job? Vanderboegh lives on government disability checks down outside of Birmingham, Alabama.

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2010/03/classic_1.php?ref=fpblg

[SpiralHawk]

1. Typical republicon hypocrite

With his hand out for government goodies -- talk about Welfare Queens (R) --
then he wants to whine about the same government that is giving him a free ride, and encourage people to throw bricks at it.

He is a consumate republicon.

[Enthusiast]

11. "He is a consumate republicon."

And there is a million just like him.

[rurallib]

2. Like my senator Chuck 'hate big gummint' Grassley

He and his family get some pretty hefty farm subsidies from the gummint every year.

[KittyWampus]

3. Oh Meegbear, I wish you'd give just a hint of subject matter in your header.

Flaming hypocrites, these Teabaggers.

[meegbear]

6. That's the headline from TPM ...

When I post, I use the original heading (exception being Rude Pundit titles with the "c-word" in it; that I will edit.)

[SolidGold]

4. No more big government - just keep my checks coming!

Figures ROFL!

[havocmom]

9. Not unlike last summer's Teabaggers at Town Halls: all love their Medicare!

None wanted 'socialized medicine'

Cant connect dot A to dot B, can they?

[City Lights]

5. Vanderboegh is too stupid to ever get it!

Hats off to TPM for digging up that gem.

[pampango]

7. From the WaPo link in the TPM story: The Southern Poverty Law Center has been following Vanderboegh

since the 1990's."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/25/AR2010032501722_pf.html

""He has been on our radar forever," she said. "He hasn't been involved in any kind of violence that we know of ourselves, but these causes that he's involved in led to a lot of violence. The ideas that Vanderboegh's militia groups were pushing were the same extreme anti-government ideas that inspired McVeigh in the Oklahoma City bombing."

Vanderboegh said he once worked as a warehouse manager but now lives on government disability checks. He said he receives $1,300 a month because of his congestive heart failure, diabetes and hypertension. He has private health insurance through his wife, who works for a company that sells forklift products.

Born in Michigan and raised in Ohio, Vanderboegh said he was not always a libertarian. He once was active in the Young Socialist Alliance and the Progressive Labor Party. "In my youth, I was a communist," he said. But in the mid-1970s, Vanderboegh read Friedrich von Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom," among other books, and had an epiphany. "From that point on, I could never take Marxism-Leninism seriously again," Vanderboegh said."

Sounds like one strange dude.

[trotsky]

8. Are any of us really surprised? n/t

[activa8tr]

10. He lives on disability checks and he wife's health insurance from her WORK!!

You can't make stuff up like this, really!

He's such a caricature for all that's wrong with the Republican way of thinking.