It's the end of the end: wing-nut conservatism in it's death-throes: baggers, birthers, christian extremists, and aryans. A cauldron of fail that knows just how profoundly it's failed and is trying to save itself through destruction.
BILL MOYERS: What do you mean revanchism?
SAM TANENHAUS: I mean a politics that's based on the idea that America has been taken away from its true owners, and they have to restore and reclaim it. They have to conquer the territory that's been taken from them. Revanchism really comes from the French word for 'revenge.' It's a politics of vengeance.
http://www.alternet.org/media/142754/bill_moyers%3A_conservative_radicals_and_the_politics_of_vengeance/ (http://www.alternet.org/media/142754/bill_moyers%3A_conservative_radicals_and_the_politics_of_vengeance/)
When do we get to the part where we get to experience the same rights my Father fought for, for ALL Americans from Tunisia to Berlin? My Father lived through Kasserine Pass so we can...
People like that are why a Census worker was found hanged in Kentucky with the word Fed scrawled on his chest. They should be taken in as accessories and booked and tried by a jury of their peers. We can put a stop to this kind of behavior once and for all.
And if that census worker was killed because he stumbled over a pot farm, for instance? in that part of that state there's a lot of things the feds aren't supposed to see.
As far as "taking back the country" - true or false: that was basically the marching banner of the left while GWB was president?
It continues to amaze me that a given word or action is legitimate protest when our side does it and "dangerous" when the other side does it?
I weep for my country because I don't see this divide ever being bridged. It's such a waste, on both sides.
I am not going to let the vile act of murder against a temporary government worker be pushed under by switching the debate to partisan politics. There is so much hate being stirred up by individuals out there that it will fester and blow up and more people will be dead. Those who enable hate or use fear for political purposes no matter which side they are on should be required to face the criminal responsibility for their part in stirring it up.
Post Merge: September 23, 2009, 10:27:35 PM
Oh and a pot farmer is not going to scrawl the word fed on the guys chest and leave him hanging, most likely they will simply shoot you and leave you in a ditch.
Well, I tend to think that nothing like this is going to get "swept under the rug" (not with the media outlets available to stay after it)
I, for one, would argue the mature thing to do is to let the process play out and let's see who turns out to be guilty.
If it's a right winger then so be it.
But it hardly speaks well of us if we pre-judge that before an arrest is even made, does it?
In any case, there was a pro-lifer shot recently - would you blame that on inflammatory left-wing rhetoric? or just one misguided violent person?
I happen to have a real distaste for inflamed rhetoric on both sides of the debate, it only serves to divide us. But the society we live in is flooded with it on both sides and any call for ONE side to tone it down while the other is free to carry on is dangerous.
Someday the levers of power might be in other hands and it will be you and I who are silenced instead.
Best we don't silence anyone and we hold the guilty responsible for their own actions.
IMO.
In any case, I refuse to make an assumption that we need to put Beck or Limbaugh or Hannity in jail until we at least have an arrest.
To make those accusations in the absence of fact is EXACTLY the sort of inflammatory speech we're professing to be against.
How any sane and rational person can support anything that supports those types of policies is beyond me.
The right wing IS stirring up anti-government sentiment.
The right wing IS stirring up racism.
The right wing IS stirring up right wing christian fanaticism.
The right wing IS stirring up anti-glbt sentiment
The right wing IS stirring up anti-immigrant sentiment
The right wing IS stirring up Anti-islamic sentiment
The right wing IS stirring up anyone they can in hopes that they can then motivate that person to go vote for them.
With the TEABAG Parties and other anti-government actions they have undertaken, encouraging their supporters to display weapons openly at political events, to blatantly disrupt political meetings to gain their fringe movement free press, the death threats (http://www.tothecenter.com/news.php?readmore=9446) against the elected president of this nation. When those people that they enabled goes out and commits horrible acts, everyone who has supported these extreme actions bear a part of their guilt.
But that's just it we were targeted for 8 years. They could find nothing to smear us with, because the left is peaceful. They are encouraging violence and armed rebellion against this country. When their followers go out and do what they told them to do, then yes they should be prosecuted.
QuoteWe all recall when Rep. Michele Bachmann said she wanted people to be 'armed and dangerous'. Then a conspiracy theorist in Pittsburgh murdered 3 police officers and people started bringing guns to Presidential town halls.
Then Bachmann went after the census workers, saying she was worried that the information they collected might be used to put Americans in concentration camps. Then on 9/12/09 a census worker is found hanged near a cemetery in Kentucky, his corpse desecrated with what appears to be anti-government language carved into his chest
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZS9UW0okY4# (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZS9UW0okY4#)
(https://www.susans.org/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fsynd.imgsrv.uclick.com%2Fcomics%2Fpo%2F2009%2Fpo090922.gif&hash=3d60bccdd517c5fb63636162a034d33b45273fda)
Fear and paranoia are the tools of the right wing (and the far left too, as it happens). All the anti-whatever propaganda is founded on some form of fear mongering. It's depressing that this sort of stupidity can find such a receptive audience :(
Freedom of speech doesn't grant us freedom from responsibility.
Quote fine wine
Freedom of speech doesn't grant us freedom from responsibility.
Wasn't it Voltaire. " I disagree with everything you say, but will fight to the death to allow you to say it"
At what point is this statement indefensible? When the language is so poisoned? When the argument is insane?
For example: I'm vexed as why denial of the Holocaust is a crime. Aborrent and stupid yes. But a crime? If it used to inflame yes it's wrong. If it's for debate it isn't, or to my mind shouldn't be.
There are people who deny man ever landed on the moon, there are conspracy stories about everything. Most are just stupid. But should we repress the ability to express stupidity, or are we better off defending what is moral? I suppose I still have that faint glimmer of hope that logical argument can settle disputes before we get to killing people. But maybe I am away with the fairies.
Cindy
Well this is an interesting point, Cindy. I think it's a blurred line, rather than an absolute (very, very few absolute positions are a good thing).
I think there is a general distinction that can be drawn between disagreeing points of view and irresponsible, deliberately inflammatory speech. Imagine causing a stampede by shouting "Fire!" in a crowded room when there is no conflagration at all. Do you have freedom of speech to shout "fire"? Yup, sure you do...but you don't have the right to cause a stampede and any subsequent harm. My position is that such a freedom does not obviate one from the responsibility that goes with it.
So in this context, any punitive ramifications are not an infringement of ones right to free speech but rather a consequence of acting irresponsibly.
After all, the oft argued "right to bear arms" doesn't give one the right to go on a gun-toting killing spree :) Ditto for the right to free speech, in my opinion.
That's just it, I am not saying they don't have the right to say what they want. I am saying that they also have the responsibility to repay society when based solely on their speech others commit acts of violence.
I know where this conversation will go if I give into temptation. i don't want to be (more of) a pariah, so I resign the discussion.
Sometimes the wall doesn't give and it just makes your head hurt.
In any case, there was a pro-lifer shot recently - would you blame that on inflammatory left-wing rhetoric? or just one misguided violent person?
See, that whole 'got shot' thing, that's where I start blaming guns a little bit too. "One misguided (interesting choice of words) violent person" - aren't there a whole lot more than one? Isn't the Texas/Texas A&M football game in College Station pretty much a stadium full of misguided violent people? And, as long as there are violent, if misguided, people lurking about out there, wouldn't it be prudent to at least stop arming them.
But that's not equal either is it?
There are sure differences between the rhetoric on both sides. And, time after time, we find that one side has laid in a righteous stock of weapons and ammo to back themselves up with if the black helicopters ever show up. The level has changed since the election. So has the local. The intentional disruption of town hall meetings is not the equivalent to some peace march in San Francisco. One is an actual disruption of a democratic process, the other a rather routine minor annoyance.
That has turned out to be true in practice as well as theory. The reality of both right and left wing political terrorism in the United States is that the right is a hella lot better at it. The two 'biggest' left wing terrorist deals in the recent past were the Weather Underground (Weatherman, later - of course - Weatherpeople) and The Unabommer. In the most violent act of their years the Weather Underground managed to blow themselves up. Granted had them been able to pull off what they wanted to do the outcome may well have been horrific, though competence was never their strong suit, that, and since they hated the military, they never went in and learned all them great skills, like how to handle explosives.*
Theodore John Kaczynski, AKA The Unabomber, was better than the WU, at least he could hit a target, but face it, long-winded, disjointed cultural rants are great if you're into crazy (and he was, big time, and he wrote a lot of it down, I highly recommend it if your into crazy of a politcal/social/cultural milue.) but most people tend to wisely avoid it. And old Ted, he had specific targets who received one of a kind, totally handmade bomb made just for them. It was very targeted.**
I'm not even sure where the Branch Davidians would fall. That's Millennialism, and that's not really political either.
But the right. Lets review shall we? James Earl Ray. Tim McVae. Eric Robert Rudolph (he was really good, the most competent of all the American political terrorists - he hit abortion clinics and gay bars1 and AND the Opening Ceremonies for the Olympics. I'm impressed to the point of being shocked that he evaded a huge manhunt for five years), Your Freeman's Movement, the Christian Identity Movement, Aryan Nation, the various Militias, the Ku Klux Klan, Macheteros, Neo-Nazis, The Order, Posse Comitatus, and of course, the Skinheads.
The left is not, nor never has been that organized.
And I've never called for Beck to be put in jail, though an insane asylum might be an act of kindness. But, that stuff is entertainment. Michale Bachman is a sworn and elected official of the United States, and she ought act like it on occasion.
Well, I tend to think that nothing like this is going to get "swept under the rug" (not with the media outlets available to stay after it)
Well I don't think it 'goes away' either, because the murder of a federal worker, even a temp one, while working a federal job is a big time federal crime, and the federal police are going to make sure it doesn't go away. Ask Eric Rudolph how relentless that pursuit is, you don't screw with it.
And I'd like to add a personal note. This is not new. It's been part of the American Experience since the beginning. It crops up on the right, and on the left. But there is a book, a book so singular in its scope and execution that gets dangerously close to the truth.
It was worked up to book length, awesome it is, but here is the original article, so you can get it in a few pages. The book is of the same title, The Paranoid Style in American Politics by Richard Hofstadter
http://karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/conspiracy_theory/the_paranoid_mentality/the_paranoid_style.html (http://karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/conspiracy_theory/the_paranoid_mentality/the_paranoid_style.html)
Oh yeah, remember this was done in '64, not this year.
I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.
*The WU was planning the bombing of a Non-Commissioned Officers' (NCO) dance at the Fort Dix U.S. Army base and Butler Library at Columbia University in New York.
** And I'm only tossing old Ted in the left wing because really where does a neo-Luddite social critic who lived as an anarcho-primitivist fall in the political spectrum. Bonus Points for ID 'crazy' as the answer to that. The Luddites were kind of left, in a way - but weren't they really 'conservatives' trying to stop the kind of 'progress' that would - and did - destroy their lives. And the actual theory and practice of the anarcho-primitivist is defined (Just like us, now they can, and do, fight over who is the most anarcho-primitvist of them all) as slightly left, but is anarchy really of the left? Seems the modern conservatives think a lot less of government then their opposition does, and in that they are lot closer to the whole anarcho thing, but I don't see anything particularly 'right' or 'left' about political views, when you begin by hating all politics and government.
1. And I'd almost offer cash money to the person who can explain both gay bars (lesbian bar at that) and abortion clinics, other than a particular take on a particular religion. I mean, are those not pretty much EXACTLY the women who would almost never go to an abortion clinic? Exactly, how many 'unwanted pregencies that need to be terminated are caused by gay people? Really? I'm I the only one who looks at that stuff and just thinks 'crazy'?
QuoteOh yeah, remember this was done in '64, not this year.
A very good article all the same - thanks! Just swap commies for the "gay agenda", "ObamaCare" etc. and bam - back up to date :)
Yes, it seems so undated to read that first sentence: American politics has often been an arena for angry minds - and just sigh.
^^^
I've seen those pics, going both ways, a lot and the question that always leaps to my mind is this:
How do we know that wasn't staged?
Not making an accusation I can't prove but given what people have stooped too lately, it's certainly a possibility.
That said, there's also the "stuff happens" school of thought.
i recall a playoff game in '93 in which Joe Carter came out wearing a jersey for the Blue Jays in which the city name was spelled "Torotno"
:D
The right wing is coming unglued and they are very scary people. The scariest part is even the leaders are participating in all of these conspiracy theories.
Occam's razor would suggest that it's just another moron, Laura, not a left wing conspiracy theory. This one on the other hand... :laugh:
(https://www.susans.org/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ichloe.com%2Fimages%2Fnoidea.jpg&hash=c9bc0662cac670fe418ec0c7bc3e185393cf995b)
Now that's just plain funny, FairyGirl!
QuoteOccam's razor would suggest that it's just another moron, Laura, not a left wing conspiracy theory.
Sure. but for the record, I wasn't suggesting only the left wing would do it.
That sort of underhanded things goes both ways all the time.