Charles Bronson for President

I've been watching the Death Wish movies all week on AMC. Quake loves them dearly for the wet explosions and hand cannons. I am amazed that these films ever saw the light of day.

The story goes as follows: Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) is forced into violence by so many thugs and cretins, who run roughshod over New York city like a band of vikings. Kersey never really wants to spill blood, it's just that the aforementioned thugs will not stop killing and raping his loved ones. The cops are no help either. They are either woefully incompetent or believe Kersey to be just as bad as those he hunts. Paul Kersey has to be the unluckiest man in the history of film.

These are laughably bad films and in no way do they represent reality. But something about them struck me as being fairly accurate, and that something was the sheer panic that some people exhibit right now. These people seem to feel that gangs of colored folks and sexual deviants are perched right outside their door waiting to strike. Ladies and gentlemen, I introduce you to the official film series of the tea party movement.

I'm not even kidding. This shit is right up their alley. When Glenn Beck ominously tells his audience that 'someone' is taking their country away and that the government is inherently evil, he is intoning the same paranoid rhetoric afforded in each and every one of these films. Even the way tea party politicians portray themselves is similar to the every man Kersey: honest, hard working folk who only want to live in peace and not be bombarded by so much multicultural nonsense.

An irrational reaction to an ordinary circumstance is usually a pretty good indicator of mental illness in an individual. When a group of people exhibit this characteristic, it is typically not taken as such (see also, religion), though it should be, though every person with a modicum of intelligence can see it that way. The tea party movement is like the mainstreaming of those tin foil hat people, or white separatists who stockpile canned goods and automatic weapons for the impending apocalypse.

Because when the shit hits the fan, the only thing left to do is to whip out your anti-personnel grenade launcher and take to the fire escape. There is literally no other way. And while the tea party faction has yet to pull out the heavy artillery, they figuratively live up to the part by employing the most dire speech when dealing with non-threatening situations, like Beck telling his audience that their country is being taken away, or Sarah Palin's slippery slop logic when dealing with anything not approved by the republican party, or the crazy opposition to the (not at) ground zero (non) mosque, where the piping hot rhetoric flows like brandy in the mutterhals' household (that is, daily and usually resulting in a drunken brawl).