Ted Cruz Ping! If you want on/off this ping list, please let me know.
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CRUZ or LOSE!
Posted on 05/22/2015 5:32:46 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Rolling Thunder, Biker Gangs and Human Nature.
On Sunday in Washington, D.C.,—Memorial Day weekend— the annual “Rolling Thunder” gathering will draw hundreds of motorcyclists to ride together in a steady roar to honor living and dead war veterans, POWs and MIAs.
Except for the bikes, it probably won’t resemble the motorcycle club event of last Sunday in Waco, Texas, that left nine people dead and 170 arrested after a high-noon brawl that included guns, knives, chains and brass knuckles.
Nor will it be like the chase up the West Side Highway in Manhattan in September of 2013 that left an SUV driver bloody and bruised after being battered and stomped in front of his wife and two-year-old daughter by a motorcycle mob that included a New York City police officer.
The cop left State Supreme Court this week with a towel covering his face. He’s on trial for first-degree assault and could face prison.
“There’s like 100 motorcycles,” the victim’s wife said on a 911 recording. “They’re attacking us right in our car.”
Despite their sporadic mayhem and constant threat of violence, motorcycle outlaws don’t inspire the fear and public condemnation heaped upon, oh, say, for instance, black men on foot who loot and burn a CVS on live TV.
Instead, bikers are mythologized as cowboy-outlaw archetypes, desperadoes riding with big chips on their shoulders and big machines between their legs instead of big animals.
In his 1966 masterpiece Hell’s Angels, the author Hunter S. Thompson wrote: “The outlaw motorcyclist views the future with the baleful eye of a man with no upward mobility at all.” (Geez, might there be any people like that around nowadays?)
And outlaw bikers show reticent voyeurs the beast that beats in the breast of the rest of us. Through them, we viscerally understand something about our tribal nature: Humans are pack animals, especially men. From rowdy frat boys to the Ku Klux Klan, from rogue police forces to soccer hooligans, guys will do things in groups that they would never do as individuals.
This human undercurrent was portrayed most poetically in the 2002 film Gangs of New York, in which director Martin Scorsese showed Lower Manhattan of the 19th Century as a civic cesspool run by barbarians who eventually evolved into political parties.
But government and civilization make a thin veneer for what lurks beneath. Novels like The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006) imagine what it might be like – cannibalism, anyone? — if disaster came and civil order ceased to exist and human society degenerated into predatory packs.
Prefer reality over fiction? Observe the films left by the Nazis and the videos uploaded by ISIS – gangs of vicious cutthroats who claim ideological legitimacy for murderous behavior. And with so many cameras recording so many things now, it’s harder for violent people – including violent police officers – to lie about what they’ve done.
Images – even fictional images – stir reaction. A century ago, "The Birth of a Nation” (1915) sparked race riots, specifically white mob attacks on blacks. Video from the Texas biker battle has been shown by the Twin Peaks restaurant people to the police and to the Associated Press.
Perhaps careful study will show how many bikers were shot by other bikers and how many were shot by cops. Bikers, it seems, dislike cops as much as the “roving bands of black youths” who riot to protest deaths of young black men in police custody.
Wonder what emotions will be stirred up if those images ever get released in public? And it’s classic Texas stuff, too, from a state that sometimes threatens secession. Whacko Waco gave us the massacre of the Branch Davidians in 1993 when 76 people died, many at the hands of the feds.
Even dull-witted Texans like former President George W. Bush (who didn’t know Sunni from Shia) can comprehend a good throw down between the Bandidos and the Cossacks. And consider another powerful Texan, the Republican Senator Ted Cruz, a skilled demagogue and master of wedge issues and rabble-rousing.
One more major terrorist attack – another 9-11 or worse – could be televised and exploited into a mob stampede toward the 2016 Presidential election if frightened voters seek a “strong man.”
With Fox News and hate radio beating the propaganda drums and fear stirred up as it was in 2001, America might wake up one morning to President Cruz and a government taken over by politicians with the manners, ethics and instincts of biker gangs.
I’d rather live in the sewers of “Demolition Man”
One of my classmates was a medal of honor winner who was killed in VietNam saving his buddies. He was buried in a cemetery near his parents but when they died, and the family had left that area, his brothers decided to rebury him in Arlington.
Not only was there a “call out” to all of us who attended school with him to accompany the convoy, but there is a group of motorcyclists who went along to escort his body. Alas, I can't remember their name.
Most of the news about these gangs are confused, but a guy discussing it on coast to coast essentially said it was a turf war between Latino and white biker gangs who had been feuding for awhile.
Some bike gangs are into the meth business and very very dangerous.
Others are recreational bikers who just like to ride around and tour. When the bikers come through town on these rides we docs treat more problems from hitting dear or crashing and also things like sunburn than we do drug overdoses.
My favorite biker story (or maybe an urban legend) is Jimmy Carter's sister, who found Jesus and went nuts after a death in her family. One day, she was praising the Lord and said, Lord, I'll do anything you want me to, and she heard a voice saying: Go riding with your husband. He was a recreational biker and was very lonely because she spent so much time in church...So she became a biker.
the annual “Rolling Thunder” gathering will draw hundreds of motorcyclists to ride together in a steady roar to honor living and dead war veterans, POWs and MIAs
This guy is a journalist? “will draw hundreds of motorcyclists”????? Dude you gotta get out more.
This event draws anywhere between 300 THOUSAND and 500 THOUSAND bikers every year..............
Uh Joe, the barbarians of Lower Manhattan eventually evolved into....DEMOCRATS!!!! How many decades have they been running the city nonstop? (that RINO Rockefeller was basically a Democrat). What a dope!
geeeeeeeeeeeeeeeez where do these slimeballs come from?
Ted Cruz a deny’er of climate change ? Yeah I’d vote for him, A deny’er of gay marriage ? Yeah I’d vote for him.
A believer in Christ ? Yeah I’d vote for him, a believer in the American way that we once loved, yeah I’d vote for him.
Ted Cruz Ping! Joe LAMEpointe sounds like a master of conflation. I’m surprised no one in the LSM tried to make any gratuitous comparisons between Sen Cruz and the Duggar sex abuse scandal, YET.
Nice job working Bush, Cruz, Texas, and outlaws into a single op-ed. Too bad it’s incoherent!!
I am thinking that if you were to ever call one of those numbers scribbled on the stall walls in a public mens room, Joe Lapointe would answer.
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