The right-wing has been really stung by the massacre in Arizona and the criticism they’ve taken for contributing to an environment where such violence actually makes sense. They keep pumping out columns that seek to vindicate themselves and lay blame on the left for jumping to conclusions about the motivations of the shooter. The president asked us to stop pointing fingers and trying to assign blame. We all know that is not going to happen, but we could try honoring his wishes in this case out of respect for the victims and deference to the president’s wisdom and leadership. We could try, but first one thing needs to be made clear.
If it had turned out that the shooter had begun planning this atrocity the moment he received an email from Sarah Palin’s PAC that included crosshairs on his congresswomen, we wouldn’t have anything to debate, would we? If he said that he voted for Giffords’s opponent but after they lost he felt the need to take Sharron Angle’s advice and resort to a 2nd Amendment remedy, we wouldn’t be talking about whether the left’s criticism was off mark.
This isn’t a case of me saying that if we were right, we wouldn’t be wrong. What I’m saying is that the left has been complaining about the rhetoric from the right for a very long time because that rhetoric hints at violence, rationalizes violence, and sometimes openly advocates violence. How does it hint at violence? If the president isn’t a U.S. citizen, if he used ACORN to steal the election, then what is a patriot to do? Do we just let an illegitimate president continue serving or do we take some kind of action to correct this insult? Likewise, how should a patriot react to a president who is trying to turn this country in a Soviet Socialist Republic? Didn’t Thomas Jefferson say the following?
“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure”
If half of what the Republicans say about the president and the Democrats were true, we should rise up and kill them all as a minimum down payment on proving our love of country. So, I don’t give a crap whether the guy in Arizona was motivated listening to Sarah Palin or Sharron Angle. The problem is so much bigger than one incident, even if that incident had a lot of casualties. Glenn Beck alone has inspired three thwarted assassination attempts, including the planned attack on the ACLU and Tides Foundation offices in San Francisco. That’s just one shock-jock with a television program.
So, what’s my point? Stop saying things that make murder seem like a logical step, or a patriotic step, or a morally justifiable step. Stop doing things that endanger public officials and even innocent bystanders. After all, the fact that the shooter may not have been influenced by Sarah Palin’s crosshairs is not exculpatory in the least. The fact that the right thinks that they can avoid responsibility for their actions by appealing to the motivations of the shooter just shows how little they understand about the criticism being leveled at them. Based on the rhetoric of the right, we have to wonder why they didn’t applaud the Arizona massacre. That’s the logic they’ve created and the message they’ve been sending. As Jefferson said:
And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two?
Either we’re supposed to be on the barricades or we’re not.
With that, I leave you with the words of our president.
“If this tragedy prompts reflection and debate, as it should, let’s make sure it’s worthy of those we have lost.
Let’s make sure it’s not on the usual plane of politics and point scoring and pettiness that drifts away with the next news cycle.”
I’m pretty sure all talk of “reloading” and “taking Harry Reid out” and whatnot is not worthy of those we have lost. But the same can be said for some of my rhetoric. So…
uh, booman: they did and they DO applaud the massacre. they’re upset because they are being called out for it.
already I’m getting highly defensive emails from my conservative “friends” blaming the victims, calling the memorial a pep rally, etc.
this is how they are, and they are delighted someone got hurt. they just don’t want to be blamed for it. but make no mistake: they approve 100%.
Serious question: how do you answer emails like that?
I don’t. I delete them. And on facebook, I get into long disputes that generally end with the teabagger losing his temper and unfriending me. Just happened the other day, the guy flipped out and proved my point by threatening me, then saying he was going to make me cry by saying the words “nigger” and “faggot”, because apparently I’m politically correct.
yeah, I laughed too. then I made his comment my status update for the day. Should put his name on it for spite.
The thing (well, ONE of the things) the wingnuts don’t seem to get about this is that Palin’s name came up because the woman who was the primary target of the murderer had publicly called Palin out for her rhetoric and gun-sight imagery.
It’s entirely possible the killer was unaffected by Palin or the gun-toting teabagger loons who worship her. But it’s legitimate and wholly natural to ask the question since the congresswoman raised it herself before she was shot. Duh.
Also, too.
The ultimate end of republican ideology is the destruction of America’s social wealth and collective institutions, and with it the dissolution of it’s civil society. As a side bonus the self-servingly ignorant energy policy, to say nothing of the systematic environmental destruction it’s favored industries are undertaking, will catastrophically alter the planet’s climate. Meanwhile their shadow allies and bankrollers, the financial Octopi currently pulling the levers of our economy, are quite happy to permanently impoverish entire sections of the population, and pompously scold public expenditures while they’re doing it. Let’s not get started on the global security state. Of course there is a significant constituency for all of these things in the democratic party as well.
I see no problem with honestly talking about where we are going. I think it’s healthy. The tendency of republican rhetoric seems purposely designed to prevent any honesty in the discussion, as with their hugely successful public campaign about climate change.
I don’t think any leaders on the right (or wherever) are consciously willing terrible things for our country-well except for like Frank Gaffney and Dick Cheney’s boys. They’re not thinking of the future at all, which is clear from the exploded emptiness of their positive agenda. They’re only thinking about what is advantageous to them right this second. They can hardly put anything forward except for tax cuts, deregulation and xenophobia at this point.
Do I think our situation calls for violent action? I don’t think so. They have all the guns (as they so cheerfully remind us). Plus that path isn’t going to solve our problems. I don’t know what the solution is, unless it’s getting twice as many people to the polls, or getting people to go on strike.
“They’re not thinking of the future at all, which is clear from the exploded emptiness of their positive agenda. They’re only thinking about what is advantageous to them right this second.”
The lack of foresight is a characteristic of conservatives and republicans: it’s clinical. And then when the disasters happen, the scratch their heads and say “who coulda predicted?”
I think they’re all mentally ill.
I don’t think that a movement that is undergirded by billionaires who have carried out a 75 year vendetta against the new deal, passing the torch from father to son to grandson can be said to lack foresight.
The rank-and-file folks who have been riled up by this campaign only seem to lack foresight because they are so economically and culturally distracted and haven’t figured out what is happening to them.
And it’s not exactly accurate to call the current state of the “conservative” movement conservative. They are reactionary; they are so far removed from the pre-New Deal days that they are unsure of what they want to conserve. Thus the forays into 14th amendment and 17th amendment. Why the 16th amendment has not gotten their attention is amazing. And maybe they want to do in the 20th amendment as well, or end sessions of Congress on the election day for the next session.
The sum total of their ideology and actions, applied over the long term, will immiserate our country. Yeah, some of the big shots may have a clear idea of how they want things to go long term, but even in those cases the whole truth is no doubt obscured by all too human illusions and rationalizations.
I’m beginning to think of the fear peddlers, gun toting 20 percenters, Teabaggers as something akin to the Ebola virus. It’s hot, instills fear based on violent death which comes quickly…but because it is ‘hot’ it burns out fast.
I would not be surprised if we’re seeing this population begin to burn out; that middle America is weary of their nasty bellows.
And likewise, the Koch brothers and their pals are finding it harder and harder to stoke the fires of hatred and so they keep upping the ante. I see Tom Delay encouraging folks during his Matt Lauer interview to bring guns to Congress and says he welcomes gun toters at rallies because they keep the crazies away. Don’t really miss him.
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The Billionaires Bankrolling the Tea Party
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."I’ve mentioned Susan Faludi’s analysis of American culture in respect to this phenomenon several times. Here is a quote from the The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America that captures succinctly the general direction of Faludi’s argument:
In Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Male, Faludi argues that the Post-World War II male normative paradigm had four tenets:
A frontier to be claimed. (Always there is some new frontier or another out there; the space race was framed in this way)
A clear and evil enemy to be crushed
An institution of brotherhood in which anonymous members could share a greater institutional glory
A family to provide for and protect
Now, evaluate all of these in terms of the violent rhetoric of elements of the Tea Party and the commissioning that the GOP “momma grizzlies” do of their male followers.