When "Over My Dead Body!" isn't Just a Saying...

The angry Left is very well-known for trying to impose their chosen lifestyle on the rest of us, either insisting that we stop doing things that they personally don’t like or demanding that we all live as they want to live. They’re really good at putting their foot down and trying to block other people’s chosen way of living, but sometimes they tend to get carried away and go just that one step too far. And as examples, I bring you this list of loony lefties who overdid things just a tad, typically in ways that also qualified them for the Darwin Awards:

Diana Cushing Canning and Anthony Hernandez, both of California. On October 26, 2002, Canning and Hernandez basically knocked their own heads off as they were traveling through San Francisco in a converted school bus with their heads sticking up through a skylight. The skylight hit an overhanging concrete slab at the end of a tunnel, killing both of them. Canning and Hernandez were among two dozen passengers in the bus, en route to a demonstration against a possible war against Iraq. Another passenger in the bus said Hernandez and Canning had previously been asked to sit down while passing through the tunnel.

Rachel Corrie. In January of 2003, this over-indulged kid from Olympia Washington took a break from attending college courses and went to Israel. While there, she basically devoted herself full-time to protesting Israel and America and even burned American flags in front of cheering crowds of Hamas types. On March 16, she decided to stand in front of bulldozers that were removing structures that had been used by Palestinian terrorists and she wound up beneath one. “We were really surprised,” said one of her fellow useful idiot friends. “They’ve always stopped before.” Apparently they’d done this several times previously, but this time the operator of the machine didn’t see Rachel and she was inadvertently transformed into a human pancake.

Sebastien Briat, 21, from Meuse, France, In November of 2004, Sebastien chained himself to railroad tracks in that country to try to stop a train carrying nuclear materials. He rather stupidly chained himself to the tracks before the train actually stopped and placed himself just past a curve where the engineer was unable to see him until it was too late. Briat’s fellow morons said that Briat was “surprised by the train”, which ran him over, killing him. Surprise, asshole.

Tristan Anderson, 37, from California. Another trust-fund kid with no real purpose in life. He was struck in the head by a tear gas grenade on March 16, 2009 while throwing rocks at Israeli workers and soldiers who were building a security fence in Israel’s West bank. Like Rachel Corrie, Anderson was a member of the leftist “International Solidarity Movement”, a Palestinian front group that supports actions against Israel and the United States, mainly by recruiting spoiled rich American kids with low self-esteem and defective moral compasses.

Honorable mention: Weston Reidhead.
In the “hopefully he gets it right the next time” category, we have Weston.
On October 23, 1997, during an on-going campaign to stop a "salvage rider" timber sale in a wild, remote part of Northern California, Weston Reidhead was hit by a log truck on Sidewinder Road. Weston, born into a logging family in Southern Utah, was blockading one of the main haul roads for the controversial Outside timber sale in the Klamath National Forest, twenty miles south of Happy Camp. The log truck driver stopped his truck when he saw Weston in the road.

"The truck was stopped in the road and I was in front of it, yelling at the driver not to move, that I was under his tire. He called my bluff, but I wasn't bluffing," Weston stated after his feet were crushed by the truck's tires. Weston was transported by ambulance to
the emergency medical center in Yreka, and was treated for broken bones and lacerations on his ankle and feet. Weston only gets honorable mention since he didn't actually succeed in killing himself. As of the last report, he was still unable to walk and uses a wheelchair, or crawls on his knees.

Hey Weston, here’s a bit of advice: next time, put your head under the tires. That’ll show ‘em you mean business. Idiot.

Naturally, the left has lionized all of these fools. I don't condemn them for that, but I do wish that more leftists, to include Cindy Sheehan and the Code Pink harridans, would try a little harder to emulate them. Hey Code Pinkos--just a suggestion, but you could probably get a lot of attention if you all locked yourself together with a big, heavy pink chain and jumped off of the 14th Street Bridge into the Potomac...

My apology to Israel

Public apologies for things being in vogue these days--like the seemingly never-ending apologies for slavery that continue to be made by people who never owned a slave to people who have never been slaves--I would like to apologize to to sovereign nation-state of Israel for the hooliganism of another one of our spoiled trust-fund kids, Tristan Anderson.

Tristan, for those not paying attention to the current wailings of the left-wing liberal bloc, is (was?) a 38 year old "professional protester" who basically roamed around the world bothering people in the name of leftist causes, until his chickens came home to roost in the form of a 40mm tear gas grenade to the head, fired by Israeli soldiers in response to rocks being thrown by members of Tristan's "peace" group.
Tristan and his pals had apparently decided that the Israelis don't have any right to protect themselves from Palestinian suicide bombers so they were in Israel trying to interfere with the construction of a wall intended to keep those bombers out. Sorry, but I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for Tristan. He chose to be a "useful idiot" for an evil people and he paid a price that he could have avoided simply by staying out of it.

Even lessening my sympathy more is the disclosure that Tristan was one of those idiotic tree-sitters who obstructed construction of new buildings at the University of California, Berkeley last year (He reportedly spent 21 months--almost two years--just sitting in a tree!) in addition to writing for Indymedia, the notorious cop-hating, America-bashing, openly socialist website. This is a guy who apparently did everything in his life except work for a living and mind his own business, and while I can sympathize with his family for their loss, I have to say that I'm not going to miss a guy who didn't produce anything and devoted his life to obstructing the productivity of everyone else around him.

Karma can be a bitch sometimes, but it does eventually come around.

Now of course his parents are demanding "justice", probably in the form of a big bag of cash. They are mad at the Israeli government, even though Tristan put himself into that situation on purpose and despite his conduct and intent, it was the Israelis who picked him up and gave him state-of-the-art medical care. I have to point out that he's in an Israeli hospital now, not a Palestinian one. Wonder why that is?

Oh yeah. He's no longer useful to the Palestinians and they can't afford to waste money on him. They need that money to buy rockets that they can fire at the hospital in Israel that's trying to save Tristan's life despite his criminal acts. But then only one side of that conflict in the Holy Land is humanistic and respectful of life, and that would be the nation-state of Israel, the people that Tristan was trying to prevent from protecting themselves.

So to my Israeli friends, I apologize on behalf of America for Tristan. Our overly-permissive culture created him and his wealthy, overly-permissive parents funded him and enabled him to travel to your country to cause trouble and ultimately interfere with the flight path of that tear gas grenade that had to be fired because of Tristan's group's conduct. Please forgive us, and if you should happen to accidentally whack a couple more spoiled American kids like him, no problem. We'll get over it so don't worry about holding back on our account. Do what you have to do, because we've still got a lot more Tristans or Rachel Corries than we need.