Signs of hate, right here in Denver

9 thoughts on “Signs of hate, right here in Denver”

1. rather than writing everything as an attack piece.  Sacrificing accuracy to (attempt to) score a political hit makes me tune you out 3/4 of the time, and I am quite far left.

   The “tea party” movement and the “birthers” are becoming more and more outrageous. They’re in the thrall of demagogues like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Peter Boyles, Sarah Palin, and right-wing elected officials in Colorado like Senator Dave Schultheis–who sent out a statement last week comparing President Obama to the 9/11 terrorists who flew United Flight 93 into the ground.

   I think that the passengers flew the plane into the ground…just saying….to avoid the target the terrorists presumably selected.  Sure, DS’ analogy was off in that regard, but PN’s hyperbole gets a bit tiresome IMO.  

   We’ll defend anyone’s First Amendment right to speak his or her mind. However, the “marketplace of ideas” that the First Amendment protects only works when everyone speaks out. If hate like that spread by Dave Schultheis and the owners of Wolf Automotive are allowed to go without a response, then we allow the perception that these ideas have merit.

   I know you want to make it about GOP elected officials, but to lump that idiot DS with this racist crap is unfair.  Dave is just clueless and stupid…not overtly racist.  Again, your intent here seems just to attack the GOP by whatever means you can, and the actual strength of the connection be damned.  Personally, I think that harms, not helps, our cause.  

   It is, IMO, another breech of our cherished 1st amendment responsibilities.

    

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   1. I appreciate the feedback, but I don’t agree with your criticism. For one thing, I have never read anywhere that the passengers aboard Flight 93 were at the controls of the plane when it crashed in Pennsylvania. I don’t believe that is correct according to the 9/11 Commission report.

      In the case of Dave Schultheis, one (of many examples) of his “overt” racism came a couple of years ago in Greeley, where he demanded to know if the victims of a car crash were “illegal invaders” because their last name was Bustillos. You can read a little about it in a blog I wrote at the time, “All the children involved in this accident are American citizens.”

      In light of episodes like the one above, and given the related subject matter of this billboard and Schultheis’ Tweets, I do not find this comparison–or the allegation that Schultheis is personally a racist–to be at all inappropriate.

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      1. ClubTwitty, the passengers definitely did NOT crash Flight 93, the terrorists did, and Schultheis is IMO a racist. He’s proven that over and over.

         I don’t see anything factually wrong here, and I think you jumped Alan’s shit for no good reason – or reasons not related to this blog post.

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         1. I still don’t see the link between the the idiot and his billboard and the idiot who is Dave Schultheis.  DS has said a number of things that sound vaguely racist, or at least anti-immigrant and xenophobic.  I still don’t think it is as overt as this sign, which was my point, as poorly made as it was.

            I understand wanting to use the billboard to attack the GOP, that is what PN does, but personally–as a died-in-the-wool lefty liberal–it grates on me.  It is possible to engage in hyperbole while remaining factually correct, I just am unsure it helps our cause.    

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      2. We tend to focus on short-term political strategies, at a cost to advancing the “most enlightened” long-term goals. To the extent that we can critique (and utterly obliterate) dysfunctional and odious ideologies and orientations, that is, in the long run, far preferable to getting dragged down into the mud-pit of attacking the individuals who are the carriers-of-the-day. The latter is so tempting, and so much in demand, that it’s hard to resist, and sometimes shouldn’t be resisted. But, ultimately, we are fighting over ideas, and I believe that focusing attention on that fact advances our ability to prosecute that fight most effectively.

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      3. .
         
         The 9/11 Commission was instituted by Bush to exonerate Bush.  I don’t trust anything they said.  

         It doesn’t take much error while driving a jetliner to cause it to crash.  They do not recover very well.
         
         There was a fight in the cockpit (“let’s roll,”) and the nose got pointed downward in the scuffle.  They were at about 30,000 feet AGL, and it would take more than 40,000 feet to pull out of a downward spiral.
         
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2. Because this is already diaried, front paged, and phone numbers have been provided.  

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   1. I had to make a choice between posting a really long comment or cross-posting this as I did on several other blogs–didn’t mean to clutter things up.

      To explain, this is the email we sent out to about 125,000 of our local friends today, so I’m hopeful that it also generated some phone calls. Thanks to Pols, Westword and AM 760’s David Sirota for getting the word out.

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      1. Well done. 🙂

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