An Ol' Broad's Ramblings
Where Have All The Grownups Gone?
When political vandals hit, parties have united message – knock it off
Greg Larkins stood in the driveway of his Antelope-area home Monday wearing an Obama-Biden pin on his white dress shirt.
Craig MacGlashan, head of the Sacramento County Republican Party, stood next to him in a gray pinstripe suit and sporting a McCain-Palin ball cap.
Both men were responding to the latest rash of political vandalism in the region and had the same message: Enough is enough.
For Larkins, the head of Sacramento County’s Democratic Party, the problem hit home over the weekend, when he returned to find his Obama sign missing from his front yard and a message scrawled in black spray paint on his garage. “Obama’s ship of fools,” it read.
The act of vandalism sparked a $1,000 reward, a news conference that drew Sacramento Mayor Heather Fargo (even though Larkins lives in the county) and a stern denunciation from the county GOP chief.
It’s bad enough when these….children….steal and destroy political signs. Vandalizing someone’s home? I say NO! I don’t care which side of the political spectrum you are on, wrong is wrong. Stealing and destroying is WRONG!
Across town in Carmichael, Jaye Munger found that out Thursday night when a young blond woman in a van pulled up to her yard and pulled up her two McCain-Palin signs as passers-by stuck in rush-hour traffic watched in amazement.
“I was right there,” said Brent Scott, a 42-year-old financial adviser who was stuck in traffic on Fair Oaks Boulevard near Arden Way.
As she yanked the signs out of the yard, Scott started yelling.
“I said, ‘That’s stealing, put those back. I’m going to memorize your license plate.’ I just hate people stealing stuff, it doesn’t matter if they’re stealing Obama signs or McCain signs.”
Munger didn’t know what had happened until people like Scott started leaving their business cards with a description of the woman and her license plate number.
She responded by erecting two large signs of her own, one that read “Who took our McCain-Palin signs?” and another that announced, “You took our McCain-Palin signs – Not our votes.”
The juvenile antics seems to know no boundaries. Left, right, Democrat, Republican…..they are all losers! And we lose as well. Trespassing on someone’s private property in order to stiffle their First Amendment rights shows a lack of regard for not just those they are stealing from, but for all of us.
I’m not involved in the process like I was in 2004, or 2006. The reason being the lack of party leadership has found it’s way to the county level, and I just don’t much care to deal with fools and the spineless. I have one sign in our yard, up on a hill, very hard to get to, unless you come down our drive, and we’d KNOW.
In 2004, we had 3 sets of signs stolen from in front of our house. We found a few of them ripped to pieces a few houses down the street. Working in the HQ in FdL, WI, the heads of both parties traded candidate signs almost on a daily basis. People would find a pile of their signs, bring them in, we’d return them to the Dem HQ, and visa versa. This type of behavior isn’t condoned on either side. So, why does it continue? Why has it progressed into property damage? I recall the Bush supporter whose yard had a swastika burned into his grass. Broken head lights on cars sporting Bush bumper stickers. I had a rock thrown at mine, and have a dent and missing paint still. The police told us they found hundreds of Bush/Cheney signs in the river, thrown there by the oh so staunch environmentalists, I suppose.
If someone disagrees with you, it’s ok to steal and destroy? I have to say, anyone who finds this amusing, or encourages such theft and vandalism, no matter which side you are on, is just as guilty as the person who commits the crime.
Is this what we’re teaching our children?
