Yes, we can be a mean country

I happen to catch a little of one of Fox's stalwart shows last night -- Hannity & Colmes. If you have seen it, you know the drill. Hannity, the right winger, brings on people like Oliver North, who not only broke the law but flaunted it on ideological grounds, and they play a game of "You're right about that." Then he brings on some type of lefty, most of which cower under his bully questioning.

Colmes, the lefty, spends most of his time looking and talking like Mr. Peepers. (Ask somebody from the 1950s about him. Wally Cox played him on TV.)

The discussion du jour was about a comment made yesterday by Michelle Obama about "meanness" in America. Hannity, naturally, got on his high horse and talked about what a giving country this is, etc. The left wing guest, a professor from some California college, said that was off the point. She politely noted out that, in a recent primary in West Virginia, some people actually said they would never vote for Barack Obama because he was black. The professor suggested that showed meannness.

When one of the right wing guests pointed out these are Democrats talking, she quickly acknowledged that was true and said it didn't matter. Wrong is wrong.

There are a lot of very nice people who do a lot of good things in this country. But there are a lot of mean-spirited, nasty, bigoted people who are only interested in themselves and are happy to trample on somebody else's rights to do it. Included in that group are people like Hannity, who firmly believe that his point of view is the only one that should be allowed in this country. People like him have a mean streak, too. They try to hide it behind ideology but it's meanness.

What's worse is they inspire people to try to one-up them in that department. So, we get eggs (and worse) thrown at people who disagree politically. The instigators then throw their hands up and say this wasn't what they had in mind. Too late. They started

Rodney King said it best a few years ago when he asked, "Can't we all get along?" The answer is we could but a lot of people don't want to.