I’ve spent the better part of the afternoon flipping the television channels to hear more report about this 88 year old monster who killed a guard in his attempt to kill even more people at the Holocaust Museum in D.C.
This was a guy that the authorities KNEW ABOUT. He ran a web site which attacked Jews, Blacks and Catholics. He self-published a book that he gave the first six chapters of away for free on line (then advertising the last six chapters for money).
He had served 6 and a half years of an 11 year sentence in the 1980s for kidnapping Federal workers while armed. And yet he had guns. He brought a rifle to the Holocaust Museum and started shooting in the lobby.
Republicans who always insist on the right to bear arms and a Republican dominated Supreme Court that has recently declared it legal to bring firearms to National Parks and Monuments will be babbling away tomorrow on how this is above and beyond the legal protection of guns.
Fox News spent a lot of time with the local Washington D.C. Fox reporters talking live from outside the Museum. Wolf Blitzer scored a Coup at CNN by having former Secretary Bill Cohen and hs wife (who is directing a theatre piece at the Museum) talk about his experience 30 feet away from the shooter when it happened (Mrs. Cohen was on the way in by car and wasn’t allowed inside at the scene.) MSNBC put it as the first item on all their afternoon shows.
I watched all of them and searched around the web picking up more. This was a devastating event. Add it to the Murder of Dr. Tiller the other day and you wonder if the far right loonies are going to continue to pop out of the bushes to make themselves known the only way they feel good about.
As I write this, I am over at Full Circle Theater in Shepherdstown, WV, where we are getting ready for a touring production of POUND, a play about Ezra Pound, the particularly anti-Semitic poet who was held at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for 19 years after WWII, which he had spent in Italy supporting Mussolini and Hitler. In the play a young, Jewish doctor eventually gets him to realize a great deal of guilt for the radio broadcasts that caused the Italian police to kill her parents.
But I don’t think people really know how evil this guy who attacked the Holocaust Museum is.
Nor do I think they realize how easily this could happen again.
