Patriot or Just Another Stupid Thug?

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

Charles Alan Wilson is cooling his heels in jail tonight. Should his jailers lose the key, the outside world would necessarily become a kinder and gentler place.

Wilson, a resident of Yakima, Washington, admitted to an undercover FBI agent that he has repeatedly made telephone calls to the offices of Washington's two U.S. Senators, Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, regarding the health care legislation. (He was against it.) He has been charged with making calls to Senator Murray in which he threatened to kill her.

Charles Alan Wilson probably fancies himself a patriot. He owns a .38 caliber revolver and has a permit to carry a concealed weapon. He probably also fancies himself to be a fairly bright guy. True, he seems to have difficulty stringing together a coherent sentence that does not contain expletives, but he does know how to block caller i.d. when he makes threatening phone calls. What he didn't count on was that the Feds would take these threats seriously, and that they had the ability not only to find out who he was, but to also finesse an admission from him.

The Republican Party and Fox News have fired up the nuts, and now they can't get them back under control. All of the craziness is "news" to Fox, so they really have little incentive to try to dampen down the loonies. But the Republicans have put themselves in a box by catering to the teabagger crowd, and they seem to be incapable of extricating themselves. If they hang with the nuts, the moderates within their party will eventually find a more sensible home, and if they try to return to positions of sanity, they will bring the noisy wrath of the know-nothings down squarely on their heads.

The good news for Charles Alan Wilson is that if he goes to prison, he will almost certainly have free government health care. And if the Feds continue their aggressive pursuit of chickenshit loudmouths who make anonymous threatening phone calls to public officials, the next big teabagger conference might be held in his prison dayroom!