CO-04 (Special Election)
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(R) Greg Lopez
(R) Trisha Calvarese
90%
10%
President (To Win Colorado)
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(D) Joe Biden*
(R) Donald Trump
80%
20%↓
CO-01 (Denver)
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(D) Diana DeGette*
90%
CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
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(D) Joe Neguse*
90%
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(D) Adam Frisch
(R) Jeff Hurd
(R) Ron Hanks
40%
30%
20%
CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado)
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(R) Lauren Boebert
(R) Deborah Flora
(R) J. Sonnenberg
30%↑
15%↑
10%↓
CO-05 (Colorado Springs)
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(R) Dave Williams
(R) Jeff Crank
50%↓
50%↑
CO-06 (Aurora)
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(D) Jason Crow*
90%
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(D) Brittany Pettersen
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(D) Yadira Caraveo
(R) Gabe Evans
(R) Janak Joshi
60%↑
35%↓
30%↑
State Senate Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
80%
20%
State House Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
January 08, 2011 10:02 PM UTC
356 Comments
I pray this was not political. One of the strengths of our country has been we settle political decisions at the ballot box.
It’s probably political, but it could also be random
“Second Amendment Remedy”
Oddly, I have my fingers crossed for the evil dog.
Can we indict Sharron Angle for murder…please?
that the congresswoman approves of the attempted assassination?
I support the Second Amendment, I own guns.
I do not support insane people suggesting that it is OK for citizens to resort to Second Amendment “Remedies”. If you are suggesting additionally that I didn’t understand Sharron Angle, then you, sir, will have insulted my intelligence.
I was pointing out from a public policy perspective the Congresswoman supports 2nd Amendment rights.
… compared to who saw the cross-hairs in the SarahPac Ads.
The crazy had already started when 10 Reps were harassed, specifically Rep. Giffords’ office door was vandalized.
But, even if Rep. Giffords’ death wasn’t political, I predict that it will be.
If this isn’t political, I’m a monkey’s uncle. The hard right uses warlike dialogue all the time, and I will blame them for this if the shooter was one of their own.
No, LB, you won’t be able to use the “lone nut” defense.
Palin has pulled her target page.
she can scrub but she can’t hide.
And issued a statement:
Justice indeed, Sarah.
That’s as nice as I can be.
just ask the freepers.
Obviously this was the work of a jihadist, kos-loving communazi. Or a Mexican. Yeah…a Mexican…
His name is Jared Lee Loughner, age 22.
as this, a lone nut description may not be far off.
He describes himself as a “conscience dreaming” sleepwalker. He talks about receiving a “mini bible” before his tests at the Phoenix Military Entrance Processing Station (MEPS). He talks about not paying in currency not backed by gold and silver. He talks about the government brainwashing people by controlling grammar.
I found that youtube channel and if this guy was sincere (and no reason to believe he wasn’t) then my extremely unqualified diagnosis is paranoia.
are just that, lone nuts?
But Muslim lone nuts, such as the lone nut who killed 12 at Fort Hood, are terrorists?
The shooter today was every bit as much of a terrorist, in my opinion, as anyone who ever shot dozens of his co-workers or put a bomb in his underwear.
Seriously. If you want to call him a lone nut, fine. Justify any difference you see between this lone nut and the Fort Hood shooter.
is labeled a terrorist by those who wish us to fear and hate any Muslim. Neither he nor the kook in AZ are terrorists. They are simply fools encouraged by others to carry out very violent acts
fools encouraged by others to carry out very violent acts
My 15 year old son said, “Imagine if the shooter was Muslim and the victims were at a Republican event”. What kind of war would we declare then?
It was at one time here: http://www.pimagop.org/
Post from June 12, 2010, discussing it:
http://www.blogforarizona.com/…
Palin’s aspirations for higher–much higher–political office are over. Kaput.
She might as well seek out that retirement home near Bristol in Arizona. Because that’s what she effectively is, at this point, in terms of the national political arena: retired.
The shooter has unofficially been identified as one Jared Lee Loughner. A quick Google search on the name quickly finds the politcal-based rantings of a clearly disturbed man.
You’re behaving naively if you think this is not political.
Just when no one wants to raise taxes, with 39 police officers being laid off here in Mesa County soon (according to inside sources), political emotions and insanity on the rise….ALL representativesof the people need additional security.
This was preventable.
No more so than for the family and loved ones left behind this horrific act.
Also from NPR
Unfortunately since she was hosting an event related to her office it does appear to be a politically motivated assassination and not some random murder. More obviously will be revealed.
I’ve been expecting something like this since their fall break in 2009. Many radicals showed up armed all over the country to congressional town hall meetings.
But this brings up a point made by Gun Promoters, who say that everyone should carry a gun…
That wouldn’t have stopped this. Not as the assailant was described as four feet away.
I’m looking around four feet from myself, and the idea that guns somehow prevent violence is just insane.
This was a tragic event, and I’m very sorry for the loss of Rep. Giffords’ family and friends. This event should never have happened, but it will happen again all too frequently unless gun laws are changed.
It would have turned into a modern-day gun fight if more bystanders had guns.
The reports of someone returning fire at the gunman raises the possibility that some may have been wounded in that action. Although the report of a semi-automatic pistol with an extended round magazine is consistent with the number of shots heard.
MSNBC has retracted the statement that Giffords has died, based on information from the Tucson sheriff and a SWAT-team surgeon at the hospital.
http://www.cnn.com/video/flash…
I hope they get enough from the statements of the shooter to go after the groups that have made the political environment so toxic. Both criminally as an accessory and in a civil action to bankrupt them.
… that extremists have not been held accountable, and this environment is poison for democracy if not civilization!
From the Representative’s website:
http://giffords.house.gov/2011…
four dead at the scene. From the hospital spokesperson.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21…
There is no good reason on earth for such an unspeakable act.
Listening to CNN on XM radio just got done listening to a hospital spokesperson saying the was shot in the head and is in surgery and that “a number” of others were admitted in “serious to critical” condition.
Earlier. shortly after the shooting there was consternation on freerepublic about the shooter possibly being associated with it. freerepublic has not been responding during the last several minutes. Perhaps crashed?
and they’re already condemning “the Left” for daring to suggest one of their guys might have possibly had a hand in this.
has been wonky for the last few days. Naturally a bunch of them think they are under a liberal attack…
I missed anything about one of their own being involved. There was a link up about a Kossack being a suspect because…uh…they say so…
http://www.cnn.com/video/flash…
.
they just said it will be another 15 minutes
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America does not need this. If this is politically motivated, the SOB needs to fry. There is no need for anyone to act with violence on the political landscape. If this maniac acted to promote a political cause, he has just worked hard to destroy it.
And it takes a lot for this agnostic to say that word.
Palin painted a target on her back.
Local GOP seconded the notion.
The fact that one lone lunatic took the bait is almost beside the point. It doesn’t absolve the leaders of your political party.
And take your hate-filled ideas with you.
I was there on the lawn of the Capitol when the “Tea Party Caucus” was spewing their hate in condemning the political process.
Michelle Bachmanns’ hands are soaked with blood tonight, for not only the fundamentalist frogwash she spewed that day, but for the fact her and her ilk have never condemned the hate that is awash in their political movement.
And the GOP is as guilty as her – they have embraced this creature that was created to fight a proxy battle over health care, and now it’s out of control maiming innocent Americans.
If Coffman and the rest of the Colorado GOP caucus do not get out in front the cameras tomorrow and condemn it, they are just as guilty…
but not only Michelle B.
Thanks Dan
who approves of this mentally imbalanced idiots actions, tell me. Otherwise you are coming across as being desperate enough to use any tragedy as an opportunity to attack your political opponents.
There is evidence by way of someone who says they knew him in high school that he had left leanings in those days. And he apparently had previous contact with the Congresswoman.
Right now there is no evidence of any of the accusations you have made are in any way true. Maybe if you would stop to think, rather than let your biases rule you, you could see that. But I’m probably wasting my time hoping for that.
using this tragedy as an opportunity to attack political opponents will compound the tragedy.
You’d also be right to admit that a lot of the rhetoric of the far right over the past year abets, at least subliminally, those looking for justifications for violent actions.
You don’t get to pull the same tap-dancing PR effort that Repubs and Teabaggers are trying to pull right now.
“Oh, no REAL Conservative would ever say or incite violence against anyone.” They’re busy redefining who or what a Conservative is, finessing whatever terms they can to distance themselves from this frogwash.
“SECOND AMENDMENT SOLUTION” was spewed by Sharon Angle while she was a real,gosh-darn honest candidate for political office. Did “Real” Conservatives grab the mike and condemn it? No, they left it alone, and allowed it to inflame across the country, be it on talk radio, the interwebz, or everyday conversation.
FUCKING GUN SIGHTS on Sarah Palin’s website. Open carry at Democratic political events, matched with passive-aggressive rhetoric to match the sidearms. Bachmann’s call to “Storm the Capitol.”
ALL Of this was an organized effort by the RIght, and at the time, they REVELED in the hyperbole. It made the angry right feel tough, and noise machine that supported it whipped it up – it NEVER tried to tone it down.
And now that the constant, gundamantalist hate has victims, those same people who fanned that flame are trying to act innocent. “Who could have imagined that 2 years of campaigning with angry words and weapon-infused images could have caused someone to view this as unacceptable behavior? We’re SHOCKED!”
Bullshit on you, Cologeek. If the senior leadership of the GOP is truly innocent of all this, then they have no reason to cut the Teabaggers loose and condemn it in the strongest, absolute terms. And even if they believe that they’re not, they STILL can go that extra mile and do what Obermann did and say “we might have gone to far, and we will never do it again.”
But they won’t. They’re too busy covering their collective asses, while trying to find a way to kiss Teabagger ass while trying to quietly work their away apart from them.
My military training didn’t use the gun anologoy as much as Sarah et al has over the last two years.
Their only disappointment now is that is wasn’t Obama. Yeah, I said it!
You are making a totally pathetic attempt to link a horrific event to politics. I doubt you even realize how you sound. Stop getting your talking points from Democratic Underground and pay attention to what the facts are. If you can’t do that, if all you have is the hate fueled bullshit you are spewing, then you have nothing to say that a rational person would want to pay attention to.
Had one of your favorite knee-jerk bogey men–say ACORN or Bill Ayers–issued a ‘electoral hit list’ that showed gun sights over prominent Republicans, reinforced with ‘metaphors’ about violent revolution…and then some unhinged person, with confused but somewhat sympathetic ramblings, took the rhetoric seriously. Imagine. Mr. Issa would be firing up the subpoenas and the not-to-subtle whisper campaigns would begin about the Manchurian president…
That would look a lot like this.
This thread disgusts me. The kid was a lunatic, anti-semitic sick fuck. Not a Tea Partier or Republican activist.
a bullseye is NOT cross hairs
But the DLC also targeted the whole State. Does that mean every murder committed in CO can somehow trace itself back to their campaign picture?
putting a target on a state is in no way the same as putting the crosshairs of a gun on a PERSON.
Like this?
I’m growing weary of this “the left does it too” bullshit.
You either condemn what happened yesterday or you don’t. You either want the political rhetoric in this country toned down or you don’t.
I don’t care if the shooter was a nutcase. Once you poison the well with “second amendment remedies” and similar messages, you don’t get to control who drinks the water.
Show me someone who hasn’t condemned it.
That should be assumed, if you didn’t read my earlier posts. It’s a horrific tragedy.
Condemn the shooting, condemn violent rhetoric. The rest is bullshit.
Except the shooting and violent rhetoric are completely unconnected, as far as anyone knows. To say otherwise would be lying.
That there has been a serious and unacceptable correlation between what is acceptable to say and what is acceptable to do in this country, there’s no point in having this conversation.
The bullseye and Giffords’ photo and the arrows pointing out bits in the article were not on the original dKos post – they were Photoshopped in by some right-wing hack.
and I think Dan has it exactly right.
And you cannot wipe away your culpability in participating and abetting the inflammatory rhetoric that precipitated this event. You would do well to shut your ineffectual yap and go back the the corner you crawled out of.
The more you try to spin away the truth of this ugly incident, the more you become the living proof of the insanity that drives your political party.
Show me one shred of evidence that this kid was influenced by Palin, the Tea Party, the Republicans, etc.
Is the heat too much. There is not a leg the Right has to stand on. They have done way too much in terms of hate and calling for the “Second Amendment Solution”.
I guess the 2nd Amendment Solution worked.
Why are you directing this at me? What have i said that was hateful?
Unhinged? Sarah Palin, Rush and Beck are unhinged.
cologeek, you are correct that many on the right have never intended anything like this. But at the same time, the rhetoric from the right, because much (not a little, much) of it is so extreme both in what it says people are doing (Obama worse than Hitler) and the imagery to wrest control from the majority (second amendment alternative) does hold some (not all) responsibility for this.
At a minimum everyone (and it’s 98% the right doing so) needs to stop using metaphors for violence in political speech.
If you want to complain about rhetoric fine. But if your not willing to accept that hate speech is as prominent on the extreme left as well as right, such as this:
It’s not hard to find more in this vein, (Bush as Hitler anyone?) coming from the left, or Republicans as “hostage takers”
But to tie it in to this horrific event is beyond low. To use the deaths of these people to attack your political opponents when there is no evidence that politics played a part of it is on a level with bjwilson.
That comment came from here. It is not from any known Democratic political figure, talking head, etc. It’s not from any organization or group.
So yes there’s a reprehensible thing said by a random liberal – that’s the 2%. But on the right it’s your political leaders, your talking heads, Fox News. It seems to be official policy on the right.
on the local left talk radio, from Ed Schultz, Thom Hartmann and Mario Solis-Marich when I can pick it up on the radio. I pay attention to this crap, so I know that the left’s side is not all reason and light. Kos made his reputation dancing on the graves of Americans in Iraq. Democratic Underground is full of the vitriol that seems to be spilling out to here.
Very few. And that rhetoric is part of why. With that said, yes they should be called out too.
ps – I don’t think Kos danced on the graves of American soldiers. He just was one of the few voices opposing the war early on and many called any opposition anti-soldier.
He wrote a comment on the deaths of 4 private contractors killed in Iraq , 2 of them burned and dismembered and hanging from a bridge, on a blog diary in April 2004 “Corpses on the Cover”.
He clarified his comments the next day and frankly, they weren’t much better.
Maybe the real lesson after what happened yesterday is for all of us to think before we open our mouths and hit Preview before we hit Post.
How so? In what context?
The mailer had the quote really big and who said it really small, with Jay’s name really big. Made it look like Jay said it.
I hadn’t read or head that before.
.
I never saw that mailer.
.
Sorry i was just confused, but i am clear now.
Good luck to you and your party.
Sarah Palin, former Republican candidate for Vice President of the US. Major Republican Party operative and fund raiser. Considered by many to be a viable candidate for POTUS.
vs
Anonymous poster on DKos.
But wait! You can find more anonymous web postings…
If that’s how low you’ve got to stoop, you got nothin’.
As soon as you show me any evidence that said assassin was influenced in any way by the Tea Pary, Palin, Republicans, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, then you will have a good point.
Until then, please stop shamelessly laying the blame at peoples’ feet just because you have your own irrational hatred of them.
I’ll remember this.
🙂
Mine is a rational distaste for them.
Have a kid in DPS?
Not so funny at that point.
Do you have any? I don’t blame teachers for the districts problems though.
But Ardy’s noting my belief that the teacher’s unions have destroyed public education.
Another topic for another thread.
I am in a race against time to make enough money to keep my kids out of DPS when they are old enough.
I didn’t bring up unions of any kind here – that was ajb.
I was just pointing out that you offered some good advice (which I was following even before you posted this – namely I haven’t made any claims about what motivated the killer since I do not know) and I suggested that you might want to follow your own advice about laying blame even though you have very incomplete information to work with.
My question, below, about whether you have read what you wrote is a paraphrase from the Tao of Pooh. Maybe I’ll include the actual quote later, if I can find it …
Every time crap like this comes up, the right (including you) starts yammering about how the left “hate” this or that person. This comes after weeks, months, years of seething, violent vitriol from the right. But apparently, that doesn’t count, because we never hear a peep of condemnation from the “responsible” right.
While my posts were castigating the leadership of your party, your response is to insult me and dismiss anything I say as “irrational”. Way to stay classy.
Mine is irrational hatred.
Yours is rational distaste.
You might want to think about that.
Al Gore Al Gore Al Gore
Boo!
That his quote or the one from the lying Anglia scientist are just their own words – not mine.
Maybe you can take the time to read what you write?
The rhetoric is pretty universal.
Gee – why on earth would Kos scrub this?
Kos didn’t scrub it. The author says he deleted it himself.
Regardless, this crap comes from both sides…and acting like repubs have a monopoly on hate is bull…
isn’t the same as a threat. It’s a relatively common idiom. But you know that.
And I’m sure that with enough time, you could find a case where Joe Biden posted a graphic that used crosshairs and the names of elected reps. And I’m sure that most Democratic Senate candidates condone armed insurrection and glorify that in their speeches.
While idiocy has friends across the political spectrum, the level of violent rhetoric that has been used by Republican leaders appalls me. But everytime it comes up, your only response is that Dems do it too. Not a condemnation, just an excuse.
Or, like CG, you find some idiotic post on DKos, and equate it with something uttered by a prominent Republican. To me, they’re not the same. Not even close.
You would never find anything of the sort.
The fact that Sarah Palin saw fit to remove her “crosshairs” graphic on Giffords AFTER Giffords was shot, shows that Palin herself realized the graphic was abhorrent. That’s apparently more than LB is willing to recognize.
Palin versus DailyKos blogger. Apparently that’s the “they’re doing it too” logic we’re asked to accept by LB.
Tea Party and Repub leadship has been yelling hate. Who in the Dem leadership has been hateful.
The average guy posting, whether Dem or Repub, doesn’t matter. None of us reach millions of people.
according to a city official, according to MSNBC. Keith Olbermann tweeted that she’s alive and out of surgery. Amazing news if true.
and a federal judge either dead or wounded. I’ve only read of Gifford’s staff and the judge being shot.
While we don’t yet know the motivation of the attacker, assassinations are imminent given the tenor of the right. Yes, I do realize that there were times that lefty rads also carried out these kinds of acts. But, they were never called for or sanctioned by those in authority and power who we usually expect to behave more responsibly.
A small child died as well. This is such a terrible tragedy. Nobody deserves to be killed for their political beliefs, no matter what those beliefs might be.
…especially during this tragic time, but…
If the perpetrator is not MUSLIM and not LATINO, does Sean Hannity and other Conservative pundits still refer to this as an ‘Act of Terror’???
And my prayers to the lost lives – terribly sad
But if it’s not a minority, I bet he’ll get the same treatment as the software engineer who flew a plane into a building in Texas over a tax dispute.
“Oh, he was just under so much pressure. He had been abused by the government and just snapped.”
I don’t object to compassion being one portion of the resulting discourse when acts of terror happen, but I do object to it only being extended to criminals who fit a particular image.
Preaching to the choir, I know.
.
To me, “Terrorism” means an act intended to scare folks into a particular course of action, by making them think that they could be next, if they don’t do what the terrorist wants.
For example, don’t go to the market where our suicide bomber killed folks, or we could set off another bomb, and that next time it might be you that is killed.
This sort of attack is intended to undermine support for the government by showing that they cannot protect the population.
It is more than just political; it is advancing the cause of a political group that persists after the attack.
So, I don’t think this was a “terrorist” attack, since it didn’t involve trying to change people’s actions, or didn’t support the aims of an identifiable political cause that was bigger than just the perp.
This looks to me like it was just about him and his personal frustrations.
.
no question this was an act of terrorism. Elected officials have to be terrorized by this, to one degree or another. How do they appear in public or move about in public, without fear of assassination? It will have to change their actions, as they take steps – or additional steps – to protect themselves.
It also terrorizes the general public – it was at a grocery store! Most everyone shops at a grocery store. Some people, particularly those in the area of the crime, will be terrorized by this.
I have to agree with BX here; a single nut doesn’t make it a terrorist act, but with his two buddies and/or organization it is.
And I do agree with both you and dwyer (specifically – I had the Perlmutter thought as well) that attitudes will shift and people will worry. Behaviors could be changed, and maybe should until everything is sorted out.
I think it would be a shame if Perlmutter and Polis had to stop being so accessible.
A terrorist act doesn’t have to be perpetrated by a group. If the message is “This is what happens to those who dare to (fill-in-the-blank)” it’s terrorism, using terror as a tactic to achieve a goal or send a message.
I also agree with all who point out what the reaction on the right would doubtless be if the victim was a Republican pol and the perpetrator a minority, Muslim or someone connected with leftist views. If anyone like that was responsible for such carnage including the murder of a nine year old child, righties would not be quibbling about using the term terrorist, and they would be excusing anyone who retaliated against members of the group connected with the perpetrator.
(one above A&E — #HoarderAddict) and they were covering the whole incident very well. They didn’t get into a attacking her politics, or really any of her stances. Just that she is an incredible Congresswoman obsessed with representing her entire district (as much as possible) and staying in touch with constituents. They had R colleagues saying the same. No jumping to conclusions either. It was almost artful. I cried for half an hour, at least.
This seemed as good a place as any to post it. Who knows what people will say tomorrow. Credit for being sensitive today though.
They carry responsibility for repeating the rhetoric. They’re in full CYA mode.
You tell us. Hannity’s YOUR buddy.
Based on the conduct of your ‘goons’ at the State Convention last May, I don’t think you’re in a position to be spreading sarcasm, considering the topic above son…
Just because someone thinks your’re a flake doesn’t mean they’re an arrogant MF or a goon.
Keep it in check.
Your reputation as an arrogant goon was created here…by your posts.
Then again Hiking… if I was guilty of your political history, I would pretend it never happened either
Hell, I’d rather have my wisdom teeth removed again than attend a Republican state convention, and even I know you’re full of it. Drop the act. Honest villains get more respect than jerks batting their eyelashes and playing innocent.
It’s inappropriate to jump to conclusions about Nidal Hassan (which was apparently an actual act of terrorism carried out in the name of Islam, however perverted his view was – that was his intention, and he was coached by a radical Imam into doing it) but in this case, it’s wholly appropriate to automatically assume that the ‘rhetoric of the right’ or Sarah Palin are directly responsible for an act carried out by a man whose mental illness is becoming clearer every minute.
Weak.
But why defend the Tea Party, by showing the Dems are bad? A child is dead, national rhetoric is at least part of the problem, at least according to everyone this morning. Why not just say that “Yes, bring in everyone who has uttered a possible threat this last two years.”
If a dem had made remarks, bring them in the with Rush, Beck and Palin and maybe a civil suit from the 9 year old girls Mom may be enough to make all them think.
But LB, i double dare you to defend Palin on the merits of her actions alone. Not justify her by saying the left is just as bad.
Are then saying that Palin is bad?
She’s just kind of lame in general. She’ll never be President.
Come on, WLJ – you’ve been in politics a long time. Have you ever used the word “target” as a metaphor when referring to candidates or districts or fund raising numbers?
Palin hasn’t ever been threatening, and the hunting thing is a schtick that’s worked well for her. Kos also “targeted” giffords in 2008. Is he responsible too?
If you just looked at the tape, in normal speed, you could clearly tell he wasn’t lunging at the cop he was trying to get away from the Taser. Not clear when you dissected the film frame by frame.
Same issue here. We can discuss what each statement meant and who said it when, but to the stupid people it is all just one big message.
Sure, i have used the word targeted, as in “targeted race” or “targeted seat”. But never with the string of words, “Second Amendment Solution, Take Aim and Fire, Show up armed and ready”, etc. This is not about one legislator or one negative word spoken; this is about a whole campaign based on this outcome. The only sad part is the 9 year wasn’t “targeted”, she was just collateral damage, how sick is that.
Just saying….
I think you’re right that she didn’t really mean for anyone to get hurt. I think the fact that she felt the need to put out a statement and get rid of the targeting sights and send a flak out to explain that gun sights are actually surveying symbols illustrate the fact that she spooked herself.
I don’t think right-wingers purposely tried to get Giffords murdered. I just think we’re dealing with people who can’t really get excited or motivated unless they think it’s the end of the world, which is why the rhetoric has to get so heated to get anything done (health care reform is worse than 9/11, Obama is worse than Hitler, and some of the Bush-lied-troops-died stuff on the other side as well).
I don’t think cologeek is necessarily wrong when the piece he plagiarizes says lefties use violent language. Some of them do. Certainly not prominent people, unlike Sarah Palin or Rush Limbaugh, but it happens, and it happened a lot more when Bush was President.
Still, there’s one crucial difference: lots of people have died at the hands of people who, to varying degrees, were espousing right-wing ideologies when they snapped. Somebody has to take responsibility for that. It’s not an isolated incident. And it’s not just smashing a window anymore either.
The rhetoric is superheated because Republicans want to win elections, and when you have a guy who’s already teetering on the deep end, that’s the kind of stuff that pushes him over.
It may be unavoidable; lots of horrible things are going to happen no matter what anyone does to try to prevent them. But it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to prevent them.
Thanks
Gold-backed currency, a rant against takings of private property. But all in all, this guy is hard to characterize as left or right. Just “out there.”
Out there far enough that he’s near the point where left meets right, IMHO.
And he can’t be a REAL terrorist because he’s white. How do you know this kid wasn’t coached by someone himself? Who’s this “person of interest” they’re looking for?
And who’s jumping to conclusions?
You don’t know any more than we do, LB.
From:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/201…
And Sarah Palin is their cheerleader in chief, shooting 20 shots into a crowd sounds more like the work of a lunatic than an assassin.
I could be wrong of course, but let’s hold our breath as the facts come in.
Of course if it was a bagger, Palin should be sued for her cross hairs ad by the families of any wounded or killed. The precedent was set when the “Nuremberg Files” website was found not to be protected speech when it targeted abortion providers for assassination.
Sorry if it turns out I jumped the gun. This story just happened to hit home. I’m going to watch some football.
which assassin has NOT been a lunatic?
It is the lunatic and the stupidly-mislead that are America’s terrorist.
The Tuscon Citizen has reported that one other man is in custody and a third is being sought. The website is mostly down so I did not put a link here.
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please ignore my comment above about it not being a “terrorist” attack.
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There is a lot going on all at once. I have not seen or heard the national media with this info. I also would not be surprised to see it pulled once the website is running again.
One of the police spokesperson did mention in a presser there were many questions about how the killer arrived at the location. It maybe there was a clear view of the guy being dropped off and the car recognized as one of his buddies in crime.
I just checked the website and the information about others has been purged. Also, there is a big push by talking heads to make the guy a loner.
Also, freerepublic is still down. There is more information out and about that the killer was posting on it. Redstate still sucks.
On DKOS someone wrote that people similar to freepers are salting that it was a lefty who did the killing. Nasty, nasty.
Political? I am really taken back. I have been ranting about this for two years, but deep in my heart, I always believed it would not happen.
It is sad as a people we have just lost 48 years of evolution. Even a child died. I am in tears.
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The bullet evidently went through her brain, but only on one side.
Even if badly damaged, she can learn to do most things in rehab.
but if shot in the side of the head, it would be more likely to damage the center of her brain, instant death.
At least that’s what I got from a Slate article reposted today.
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Crazy as that may be. The second for the Congresswoman. I am glad she is still surviving. Heart and prayers to those who were killed and their families and to our country.
Not first but soon. She was doing exactly what Ed does on a regular basis.
I imagine this weighs especially heavily on him and on his family.
The problem is the litany of lunatic declarations that every goddamn Democratic policy is the gravest threat the republic has ever faced. We’ve heard: Tancredo say Dem policies are a worse threat than terrorism; Daniels say current deficits are a worse threat than the USSR was; and LB and his soulmate Glenn Beck declare that our milquetoast health law will cause “the collapse of our economy” (LB’s own verbiage).
Once you’re declaring that current Dem officeholders are causing the collapse of the nation, then it’s actually not a great logical leap to armed violence. After all, “the collapse of our economy” will lead to all the widespread death and devastation that a non-collapsed civil society guards against, so it’s not a great logical leap from “X policy will destroy America” to violent insurrection.
So there’s a real cost to grotesquely exaggerating disagreement with center-left policies into a declaration of nationwide “collapse”: you’re providing the logical basis for the Jared Lee Loughners of the world.
Seriously, you moronic piece of worthless shit. Lumping LB in to carry your vendetta on for another day just makes you an “ignore on sight” commenter for me, from here on out.
… yes, it’s a HUGE leap from that rhetoric to this.
It’s the violent rhetoric that’s to blame. LB has never engaged in it, and has condemned it when he encountered it. And there was no shortage of that; redstate always used militaristic and combative jargon on their site, for example; blame them. But individuals should be judged as individuals, and LB’s hands are clean.
Do NOT make him your scapegoat, buddy boy.
that framed a debate in terms that could possibly be seen as condoning or promoting violence.
First of all, fuck you.
Second, go find a single comment of mine in which I ever praise Glenn Beck.
Third, you really ought to be ashamed of yourself for so quickly jumping into ‘how can I take a tragedy and try to use it for my political benefit?’ mode. The bodies of these poor people aren’t even in the ground. Congratulations.
Statement just out from Sen. Mark Udall:
I can’t get the thought of the dead 9 year old little girl outta my head. I was stunned to hear the news and was in shock until I heard the news about the death of the little girl. Then I just balled for awhile.
I absolutely believe that small child’s death can be laid at Palin, Angle, and Beck’s feet. Between Palin’s “Don’t Retreat, Reload” and cross-hairs visuals, Angle’s “Second Amendment Remedies”, and everything Beck has ever said they steered the shooter towards this event. They may not be legally culpable but they each share in the responsibility.
Serving the public, whether as a Congressperson or a Federal Judge, shouldn’t be a life or death job. These aren’t careers that may one day require you to take a bullet. Politics in the United States shouldn’t equate with politics in Somalia. We’re supposed to be the nation that shows others that democracies can work. Our way of self-governing is supposed to be the better alternative to bloody dictatorships.
Tell that to the (at last report) 6 dead and 16 wounded in today’s tragedy.
that this post from Daily Kos Thursday (now “revised” out of existence on the site) or maybe this post putting the districts of the “Blue Dogs” who “sold out the Constitution” on a bullseye set this guy off as any of the sources you note.
Using this horrific event to attack people you don’t agree with without an ounce of evidence comes across as more than a little opportunistic, to be polite.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40…
No additional comment.
as I am.
But, AZ passed some crazy EZ concealed carry law last year. The very first day some BJ discharged a gun in a Walmart. Restrictions on legal purchases are being attacked all the time. No mental health treatment is offered. Crazy folks talk about “2nd amendment remedies” and how “dangerous” Dems are. These folks that perform these acts are first armed with weapons and then armed with an ignorant ideology.
He’s calling out the garbage spewed out on the extreme media.
And play them over and over. He is making excellent statements about what has become of our public culture.
“This may be free speech but there are consequences.” (Probably not precisely accurate.)
Beautifully said. Eloquent, frankly and without sinking to the same level he is rightfully criticizing.
It’s open season on Democrats.
The truth has a tremendous resiliency and power.
if this had happened in Maricopa County. . .
clearly offering his personal opinion but I believe he’s saying some very important things that too many are afraid to say.
Alan Grayson
the bold is mine
He said the Congresswoman “could” survive. Clearly it’s touch & go right now.
of the overheated, exaggerated, dishonest, and generally hateful rhetoric routinely deployed by too many Republicans and their ideological allies, and amplified on the airwaves by the propagandists at Fox News and radio talkers like Limbaugh.
When Democrats are castigated as “traitors” and “communists” for advocating on behalf of health care reform, or tolerance for immigrants, or environmental laws, or all the other bugaboos of the right, it is to be expected that there will be those who take the step to violence.
Especially when Sarah Palin as much as suggests it.
We need the Fairness Doctrine back. Now. We need an end to the rapid, unreasoning partisanship in Congress and reforms on Capitol Hill that will encourage members of both parties to socialize, get to know each other and their families as people, and learn to trust each other. Political differences never justify violence and they never justify the sort of sophomoric insults that have come to define American political discourse.
Let us hope that Gabrielle Giffords survives and returns to her work for the people of Arizona. Let us hang our collective heads in shame that Judge John Roll and other innocent people, including a 9-year old girl, have been murdered in a spasm of political extremism.
Let us call our state legislators, our congressmen, and our U.S. senators and demand – insist – that the level of partisanship, the level of meanness in our politics, the degree of hate that marks so much of what is said and done in the statehouse and on Capitol Hill end and end now.
Thank you.
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it could be a watershed moment,
or a potential watershed moment that slips by with nothing changing.
I think it’s up to the T-party leaders right now. I hope they can step up.
I hope Tom Tancredo comes out blasting the tenor, even if he is in some way responsible for it. As one of his supporters, I wanna hear him apologize.
Apologizing doesn’t have to make a person look weak; recognizing error and making appropriate corrections can make ya look smart.
I hope the Constitution Party folks make an unequivocal repudiation of what’s going on.
I hope.
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Of it’s others that are to blame. And those others should stop doing it.
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T-partiers, these are muh peeps. I’m aghast. I think they are, too.
Most T-party social conservative are going to get a stern talking to from their Imams tomorrow morning.
Let’s see what happenz.
Most days, folks can easily segregate their theoretical Christianity from their visceral politics. Not right now, though. The two are crashing each other.
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being on board with tea partiers. It’s clear their primary and almost only motivation is hate, especially for a black president. Otherwise how do you explain the facts that they never came out while the economy was crashing and jobs were being lost under Bush, never came out in force while the debt and deficit were exploding under Bush and a Republican congress, never showed support for the 9/11 responders when Republicans were blocking legislation to help them, aren’t carrying any signs demanding legislation to penalize companies that send jobs abroad, are actually opposed to much of what is in the constitution…I could go on and on.
It isn’t a coincidence that the Tea Party came to the fore only with the advent of a black president. Their entire agenda is composed of what they hate and fear and their rhetoric revolves around the imagery of the gun and the target. Your peeps are appalling, Barron.
that the current president is African-American and a Democrat to boot.
For alot of people on the right, that is hard to accept.
Racism and demogoguery is not new in American politics and there are many in politics, including some in public office in Colorado right now, who actually believe some of the most hateful things that Tea Party types and militia types and Birchers and the like profess.
Regrettably, alot of those who speak those sorts of words also claim to be “Christian.” Worse, they argue that those who have a different political point of view can’t be “Christian.”
As Sheriff Dupnik said today, this isn’t the America many of us know from our childhoods. There was a time when most – indeed, the overwhelming majority – rejected ignorant, mean, and divisive political language. But that was before we lost the Fairness Doctrine, lost the idea that we should not give corporations the power to buy elections, lost the idea that giving any one religion the ability to control government was a bad thing, and lost the shared experience of having fought for the very freedoms we all take for granted against three authoritarian regimes in a long war that didn’t have a certain outcome.
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first, I think hatred is about zero on their meters, whether hate for a black president or hate for Democrats. I don’t see it or hear it.
Rather, the prime motivation is fear of loss. Fear of losing their retirement funds; fear of losing their health care; fear of losing influence over events.
Though they would deny it, fear of getting old and being irrelevant.
T-partiers aren’t as concerned about sheltering the “rich” from fair burdensharing as you might think.
Why didn’t they come out of the woodwork to hold Bush accountable ?
If you have to ask that, I guess I have a lot of ‘splainin’ to do, Lucy.
GW is one of them, jes’ a good ol’ boy who is just as unaware of the machinations of corporate control of government as the rest of us.
Heck, he’s just as much a victim of the hyper-intellectual atheist (or is it “godless ?”) Eurotrash bankster-derivative trading, Harvard-educated … – see where I’m goin’ ?
Bush was percieved as Clinton to the nth power, in terms of being just plain folks. Nevermind his being born into a family of multimillionaires and Bilderbergers.
They liked the guy and figured he was too dumb to have intentionally engineered their dimming prospects, regardless of any facts to the contrary.
Here’s the main draw, though: Bush trumpeted American exceptionalism as the rationale why we were not accountable, as a nation, to anyone. Without saying it out loud, he even made it OK to defy the teachings of the Son of God, and still call ourselves His humble servants. Pretty slick.
Chat Bleu,
you have been tripped up by mistaking timing with causality. I think.
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And you’ve offered a perspective that gives me something to think about. Fear is often a much more powerful motivator than hate.
Just an analogy, so please don’t call 6odwin’s — did the average German citizen hate the Jews a priori, or did their fears get used by the hateful Nazi propogandists?
Did the reconstrction southerners hate the slaves that had worked in their households, or did their fears get used by the hateful klanlike?
Are Americans today being told to fear or hate Muslims, . . . ? Mexicans . . . ? Is the right-wing telling their listeners to fear or hate losing their country?
In the end does it matter? Fear leads to, and is manifest as, undeniable hatred. Hate is spread first and fastest among the fearful. If there were no fear, there would be no hatred.
And, calling it fear or ignorance as though it were something more excusable than hatred, doesn’t make it more excusable. Sorry Barron.
Tell me what you fear, and I will tell you who and what you hate.
And I agree with it, as far as it goes.
But…I KNOW that a significant, I think a majority, of people who have that fear of loss, have it rooted in terrors borne of racist roots. I am talking about my family members and many of my friends from around the country.
In most of those cases, I am their favorite liberal… because I listen to them. I don’t lecture or argue, I just listen. And what I have learned, is that this is about trust. It is extremely difficult for most of them to trust a black man with that much power.
The most astonishing part, to me, is the high level of buy in to the many aspects of the “he has no right to be president” Birther movement, how many of them STILL believe he is a Muslim…in short, how many of them listen to…and BELIEVE the shit they hear on Fox news.
A case in point:
I am sitting at lunch and am shocked to hear an associate, who is otherwise pretty smart, tell me he is not sure Obama was born in Hawaii and has a doubt that he is a citizen.
Says I, “Well, the state of Hawaii says he was born there”.
Says he, “Well, if that’s true, why didn’t they prove it right away…why did they wait so long?”
“They didn’t”, I replied, “It has been out there since early on…but how can you convince someone who demands proof, who, upon receiving it says, “I don’t believe your proof”?”
That pretty much ended the debate, but I point it out to explain that this is why I believe “Tea Party-ism” is, fundamentally, an emotional state of mind.
I posit: If you will not see and believe evidence of a thing, it is because you either are functionally blind, or you don’t WANT to see it. If you don’t want to see it, there is an emotional reason, not a logical reason for that.
Racism lies very deep within southern culture, particularly in the churches. That culture has deep, long abiding prejudices galore. That culture, I submit, is pervasive in the Tea Parties of America.
Remember the anthemic words of the VanZandt brothers…”I hope Neil Young will remember, a Southern man don’t need him around, anyhow”.
Of course, Barron, there are exceptions galore of whites and blacks getting along together famously, but for every tale of love…there is a tale of hate.
Palin and her bunch of tea partiers and Fox News have created fear. Maddox did a piece on it months ago. Fear the Black people are taking over, fear the Mexicans are taking over America, fear the gays are ruining marriage, and fear the liberals are taking away our guns and estate tax. It is all fear, it always has been. Since the 60s, fear is the major motivator in every crazy persons rise to power. Hate to bring it up, but Hitler used Jews to make people fearful.
Please do not let Palin et al off the hook. This is their fault 100%.
A dead 9-year-old girl is the real result of their fear!
I fear these people, i have been writing this for over two years now!
Fear and hate go hand in hand with one another as well as with with irrationality, which accounts for why the Tea Partiers’ stands lack any coherence in terms of whom they hold accountable for what and are instead steeped in racism, bigotry and xenophobia. As for what Barron has to say about Jesus, I fail to see what that has to do with anything. There is zero evidence that non-Christian Americans are any less morally grounded, have less commitment to their marriages and families, or are more inclined to criminal behavior than Christian Americans. Zero.
One more very important fact must be noted – the fearmongering that has been growing during the past 2 to 3 years has two distinct targets:
1) Make conservatives more fearful of Democrats, liberals, etc, which in turn increases – for at least some – their hate for Democrats, liberals, etc;
and
2) Make Democrats, liberals, etc fearful of the fearmongerers so that the left rarely calls out the right on their fearmongering tactics which too often includes the language of violence.
I’m not saying this never happens in reverse, but there is no question where the predominance has been in recent years.
but the very important thing that’s been left out, is the importance of huge financial support and organizing efforts the TPers received from the Corporatists. It was corporate money funneled through Dick Armey’s group that got the Tea Party off the ground, with the major complicity of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox, and the other cable “news” networks. Without that immense megaphone and the money from Big Insurance, Big Pharma, Big Oil, the rhetoric would have been much more muted.
So while the psychological/sociological aspects you’ve been talking about, re the individuals who are TPers, are pretty right on, the Bigger Picture requires assigning responsibility for the power of their words to the Corporatists. Esp. the words of Beck, Hannity, Palin, and many Republican legislators–both state and national.
I would like to hold them accountable along with the groups and individuals that are responsible for the hatred.
http://mediamattersaction.org/…
And you can start with Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/…
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo…
There are links in the second piece to many citations. Now read this: http://www.freedomworks.org/pu…
It includes this statement. If this isn’t a “tell,” I don’t know what is.
Americans for Prosperity is another funneler of right-wing big money to promote the TP:
And this from April, ’09:
Follow the money.
I don’t know how much of this rhetoric comes from the left. It probably does happen.
However, here is a pretty good summary of the comments made by lots of people on the right in the last two years:
http://www.csgv.org/issues-and…
No one should be using this kind of language in politics.
That would seem to be a pretty good size ‘fringe’!
Elected officials need to be accountable for what they say. For example this quote from Rep. Franks (R-AZ):
His office tried to walk it back somewhat but I think that David Gregory should have confronted him on Meet the Press today with what he has said. If the press wouldn’t let them off the hook, they would be more careful what they say.
that would happen.
Unfortunately, I doubt it will.
Too many people in politics, especially on the right, see advantage in war-like rhetoric. They have been castigating Democrats as “liberals” and implying (and sometimes overtly saying) they are “un-American” or “communist” or “treasonous” or “unpatriotic” or “queer” or . . . . for decades.
The language of division is not new. Republicans deployed it during JFK’s time in office and during the Civil Rights Revolution and in opposition to those wanting an end to the Vietnam War. They were encouraged to use it in Joe McCarthy’s time. They attacked FDR and the New Dealers with it.
But the price of those words, even when they bring short-term political success, is almost always paid by someone with their blood. The victim isn’t always a member of Congress, or a president. But maybe it’s a big city mayor, or maybe it’s a police officer caught in the cross-fire, or – sadly, sadly – a 9-year old child.
When will we break free of this curse? When will American politics move to a more rational plane?
When will people entrusted with public office, given the power to affect millions of lives, stop making the most scurrilous and dangerous accusations against those with whom they disagree?
Whether you say President Obama isn’t really an American, or whether you are one of those who say that those of us who take seriously our country’s commitment to welcoming immigrants are duplicitous enablers of law-breaking, or whether you call those who want to do something about global climate change “socialists,” or whether you castigate those who think abortion should be legal as “evil” or “accessories to murder,” your words are part of the problem.
We all need to learn again to give people a break and, in public life, our elected officials need to move away from the extremes and try to remember that the person who puts a different party label on their campaign literature is not an enemy, not a traitor, and not evil.
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WaPo also hinting that there’s a hunt for co-conspirators. not good.
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the Army says he tried to join but was rejected (they cannot publicly specify why). The alleged shooter mentions the Phoenix MEPS on one of his YouTube ramblings, as if he was there at one point. Makes you wonder if MEPS was the point at which he was rejected – you’d think it would have been earlier in his attempt to enlist.
So far the military is not saying why they did not accept him.
http://www.kitv.com/news/26413…
I wish to hell I knew how to link to it. Will try. Basically, the hate talk has to stop and has to stop with each of us. Well done.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30…
I posted the video. No need for a link.
Thank you for posting the video. I hope others here can see it. This is my IT problem… My computer is almost as old as I am (and I remember VE Day) and all I got was a black blank screen.
The important thing is that it is posted.
@ MTR, thank you for the link. That I can do.
Thank god ColPols doesn’t do CSAPs for pollsters to stay active….I’d be back with the crayons….again.
You all know that I am not religious at all, but for those hate mongering Americans, it would appear that your hate has come home in the worst possible scenario. The very monster you set free on the earth has turned it head on the most innocent of victim.
This is the one part of the story I cannot get out of my head. That poor child…
from Sheriff Dupnik
I told my wife about these statements and her first comment was that President Obama needs to say this.
If the President said it, it would be dismissed by the right as just more rhetoric. That it comes from the sheriff who is in charge of this catastrophy carries far more weight, I think.
I stumbled across some rightie blogs that are doing just that; attacking the Sheriff and dismissing everything he says as unprofessional, unfair lefty garbage. I’ve seen Obama’s first response, which was given long before much of the information concerning the exact nature of the event was confirmed, and have no problem with it. Pretty sure he will have more to add. He was not on the scene and is not a jump to conclusions kind of personality. Jumping to conclusions, after all, at first produced false accounts of the congresswoman’s death. His response was extremely sober, dignified and deeply sympathetic so I don’t feel at all inclined to join in the picking.
There’s nothing the hysterical fear and hatred Tea Party right dislikes more than common sense. It interferes with the rhetoric. Like the difference between just yelling about kicking all the illegals out and seriously looking at the mechanics of doing it, screaming about supporting the troops and the 9/11 first responders and keeping mosques off the sacred site while not saying a word about R pols you elected voting against funding for programs for vets or responders or yelling about government take over of health care when you’re on medicare with no intention of giving it up. Sane people need our own Frank Luntz and our own deep pocket billionaires to build our own message juggernaut before things get any scarier on account of the Barron’s lizard brain “peeps”.
But it takes the President to get something like this to create a change. The right will fight this change no matter who presents it (right now they’re hoping they can ignore it and it will go away). What’s key is to sell it to the middle so that using it becomes a losing proposition.
So much of the vitriol is aimed either directly or indirectly at the President already and if he makes an issue of it the righties would just say that he is whining and otherwise ignore what he had to say.
The majority of the repudiation needs to come from Republican elected officials. They need to clean up their own rhetoric and then call on their followers to clean up their rhetoric. They also need to, in no uncertain terms, let their followers know that the President is not an enemy!
These are the moments when true leaders come to the fore. Yes, these particular phrases are probably not what he should say, but Clinton forcefully decried the violent rhetoric of his day, and Obama needs to do the same today.
However, Sarah Palin claimed they were.
Not speaking as an expert, but yeah, those are crosshairs.
Any other military want to back me up on what a crosshair looks like? If they weren’t crosshairs or they did nothing wrong, why did they take down the post?
I can not believe the spin coming from her camp. If she were Muslim and had this on her site, would she be under arrest right now? Shouldn’t she be charged with inciting a murder? There is case law for this.
Not to be insensitive, but the ads in 2012 will feature the parents of the 9 yr old girl that was just elected to student council, every time a Tea Party or Republican even decides to run for office. The party of Family Values. Let’s see them defend this when looking at this child’s mother.
I can not imagine the pride that her mom or dad had that brought her down to Safeway to meet the Congresswoman. I can not imagine the horror they are living this morning.
Right here, on her Facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/notes/…
These words are right above the map with the crosshairs.
You AIM the guns, and you fire the SALVO. Period. That’s what those words mean first and foremost. So go ahead, Sarah, wiggle and weasel all you want. Guns is what you meant, and guns is what you said.
The culture of political violence has become so commonplace in this country, we almost don’t notice it anymore, until yet another lunatic with a weapon makes it impossible to ignore. Via Digby, this astonishing timetable of violent rhetoric and political violence over the past two years is a must-read.
http://www.csgv.org/issues-and…
Money Quotes:
Can anyone, and I mean ANYONE, now still say that there’s been a hateful campaign of poisonous rhetoric out there towards Dems? Can you even acknowledge, with a straight face, the Mainstream of the GOP has been waste-deep in this slime?
http://www.csgv.org/issues-and…
I think it’s tempting not to negotiate with hostage takers, unless the hostage gets harmed. In this case the hostage is the American people and I was not willing to see them get harmed,” Barack Obama on keeping taxes from increasing, December 6, 2010
“A Republican majority in Congress would mean ‘hand-to-hand combat’ on Capitol Hill for the next two years, threatening policies Democrats have enacted to stabilize the economy,” Obama, October 6, 2010
“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” Obama in July 2008
“Here’s the problem: It’s almost like they’ve got — they’ve got a bomb strapped to them and they’ve got their hand on the trigger. You don’t want them to blow up. But you’ve got to kind of talk them, ease that finger off the trigger.” Obama on banks, March 2009
“I want you to argue with them and get in their face!” Barack Obama, September 2008
“We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.” Obama to Latinos, October 2010
“I don’t want to quell anger. I think people are right to be angry! I’m angry!” Obama on ACORN Mobs, March 2010
“We talk to these folks… so I know whose ass to kick.” Obama on the private sector, June 2010
Nothing provocotive there, right?
But the vast majority of the violent rhetoric comes from the right. Like this gem
that you have to pretend these quotes are remotely similar, because you find this guy so embarrassing.
“I think people are right to be angry” vs. “Bullets or ballots.”
The more bizarrely defensive you get, the guiltier you make all teabaggers look.
“A spoiled child (Bush) is telling us our Social Security isn’t safe anymore, so he is going to fix it for us. Well, here’s your answer, you ungrateful whelp: [audio sound of 4 gunshots being fired.] Just try it, you little b*stard. [audio of gun being cocked].” – A “humor bit” from the Randi Rhodes Show
“..And then there’s Rumsfeld who said of Iraq ‘We have our good days and our bad days.’ We should put this S.O.B. up against a wall and say ‘This is one of our bad days’ and pull the trigger.” – From a fundraising ad put out by the St. Petersburg Democratic Club
“…but the kind of people who would buy a car that increases the risk to other motorists in an accident can’t be reasoned with. They’re selfish and stupid. It’s unfortunate that drivers must worry that their SUVs are being targeted by insulting stickers and Molotov cocktails, but one thing’s for sure: It couldn’t be happening to a more deserving group of people.” – Ted Rall winks at ecoterrorism
“F*** God D*mned Joe the God D*mned Motherf*cking plumber! I want Motherf*cking Joe the plumber dead.” -Liberal talk show host Charles Karel Bouley on the air.
“Republicans don’t believe in the imagination, partly because so few of them have one, but mostly because it gets in the way of their chosen work, which is to destroy the human race and the planet. Human beings, who have imaginations, can see a recipe for disaster in the making; Republicans, whose goal in life is to profit from disaster and who don’t give a hoot about human beings, either can’t or won’t. Which is why I personally think they should be exterminated before they cause any more harm.” – The Village Voice’s Michael Feingold, in a theater review of all places
“I know how the ‘tea party’ people feel, the anger, venom and bile that many of them showed during the recent House vote on health-care reform. I know because I want to spit on them, take one of their ‘Obama Plan White Slavery’ signs and knock every racist and homophobic tooth out of their Cro-Magnon heads.” – The Washington Post’s Courtland Milloy
My Congressman Eric Cantor, and you and your cupcake evil wife…” “Remember Eric…our judgment time, the final Yom Kippur has been given. You are a liar, you’re a Lucifer, you’re a pig, a greedy f***ing pig, you’re an abomination, you receive my bullets in…your office, remember they will be placed in your heads. You and your children are Lucifer’s abominations.” – Obama campaign contributor Norman Laboom
There is plenty out there to find, if you just bother to look outside the small confines of your own echo chambers.
But keep in mind that that venom on the left reaches very few people. The vast majority on the left has no interest in listening to that garbage.
The number of people reached is of great significance. And on the right you have that vitriol being delivered to a significant chunk of the populace.
The other big problem on the right is you have their leaders spewing this venom from Palin to Limbaugh to Fox News. When the acknowledged leaders say it, it grants it legitimacy.
You cannot accept that the issue is not individual statements like these, most of which I certainly don’t agree with. The issue is the magnification and proliferation of violent speech from powerful voices on the right, with the immediate repetition of their statements on the Fox+ media megaphone.
I read and pay attention and never saw these statements before you posted them. Do any of these people have the reach and power of Palin/Beck/O’Reilly/Hannity et al? How many unbalanced people do you think your examples reached and influenced?
How about a list of R legislators’ offices being vandalized, R legislators being shot, statements from law enforcement about the increase in hate mail and violent/death threats to R legislators?
I am only aware of the one Cheney shot while hunting. Do tell?
He/she dredges up a list of obscure non-rightists making violent statements, but gee . . . somehow these don’t get magnified and repeated and we see no instances of left-progressive-liberal unbalanced gut-totin’ folks out shooting Republican legislators and dozens of people around them. Or vandalizing their offices, or relatives’ homes. Or sending thousands of threatening e-mails and letters. Such as the one received by former Rep. Betsy Markey.
My point: cologeek is indulging in extreme False Equivalency.
He/she dredges up a list of obscure non-rightists making violent statements, but gee . . . somehow these don’t get magnified and repeated and we see no instances of left-progressive-liberal unbalanced gut-totin’ folks out shooting Republican legislators and dozens of people around them. Or vandalizing their offices, or relatives’ homes. Or sending thousands of threatening e-mails and letters. Such as the one received by former Rep. Betsy Markey.
My point: cologeek is indulging in extreme False Equivalency.
since leftists and Democrats aren’t murdering their enemies.
P.S. As an example of the right-wing hive mind, here’s a fun Google search. I’m curious which of the many thousands of identical reposts you ripped this off from, and why you didn’t feel it was necessary to attribute it.
What’s really frustrating about this stuff is that it is now impossible for me to Google any of these phrases and try to find an original source. If I search for any of these quotes, I just get the same copy-and-pasted list with no attribution.
I don’t know if there’s some central server that tells all right-wing bloggers, “Oh shit, we pushed someone over the edge again, get out there and defend the leaders! Here’s a list you can use!” But the end effect is indistinguishable.
And we to the left of center don’t all defend everything and anything that’s said by anyone considered to be on our side either. Many of my lefty friends, for instance, share my low opinion of Randi Rhodes and her sloppiness with facts, not to mention her nails on chalkboard delivery, and don’t mind saying so, just for starters.
And, as others have pointed out, I would be interested in hearing which R pols have been shot by lefties? Which anti-choice activists have been targeted for murder on lefty pro-choice blogs and then murdered? Cologeek’s got nothing that begins to compare and is in no position to demand we defend jack.
I dislike rabid lefty talk radio as much as rabid righty talk radio. One schlock-jock is as bad as another.
Which finds Randi Rhoads at the bottom. I’ve never heard any other talk show host berate a caller who agreed with them because they reached the right conclusion for the “wrong” reason.
Ed Schulz is uber-populist, and not the brightest bulb, but mostly harmless.
David Sirota is a prissy bitch (but you knew that) who places more importance in being perceived as brilliant than moving progressive policies forward.
Mario Solis-Marich is not very bright, and is more interested in advancing a Latino agenda than the truth. If he wants to say “Coe-Low-Rrraa-Doe, he needs to stop saying “Eye-Rack.”
Thom Hartmann is a very bright guy who lobs the occasional partisan whopper, but he interviews conservatives and lets them make their own points, and you can always learn something from him.
Al Franken was the best. He would always explain why Cons felt the way they do, and then dissect their reasoning. He’s probably a bit of a dick in person, but I always found his show to be fair.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow is my favorite lefty talker, because she is always well reasoned, logical and well backed up with meticulously checked facts. She has flawless manners and is always courteous to guests with whom she disagrees, at least the few righties willing to appear on her show, and actually lets them finish sentences. Whether or not you agree with her take, her interpretation, it’s almost impossible to find a legitimate opportunity to call her on her facts, for which some form of documentation is so often provided right there on screen.
The good thing about Ed is that he speaks fluent good ol’ boy and has established a broad, folksy appeal with it, something that has been lacking among lefty talkers, and that’s a nice element to have in the progressive media.
as has been pointed out on other blogs, none of this is original to Geek. Extreme right wing has been distributing these around the blogosphere.
they’re in desperate spin mode.
as has been pointed out on other blogs, none of this is original to Geek. Extreme right wing has been distributing these around the blogosphere.
they’re in desperate spin mode.
http://www.splcenter.org/get-i…
http://definitions.uslegal.com…
Come on, WLJ. You’re so much better than this.
And if two maps were all that was out there, i would comletely agree with you. However, its not.
I’m just over the victimization theme. This act has nothing to do with the Republicans or the Tea Party. It looks like he was connected with an anti-semitic group, and was quite obviously very deranged.
I reject you tying anger from people like me over the actions of the President and the Dem Congress with an insane, sick little a-hole going on a shooting spree.
This act has zero to do with “rhetoric” and less to do with the fact that the President is black. That was completely out of bounds, and totally not what I expect from you.
I am surprised that you don’t believe people can be driven to act. And of course he is unstable, i have been saying this was going to happen for years.
It is the unstable people that have been targeted. Stable people dont take up arms and kill people.
But whatever,
We are so far a part on this, that even people who like each other can’t see the other side. Very, Very sad.
Palin, Rush, Beck have zero culpability in this. To say otherwise is shameful.
I like you too, very much, and I have tremendous respect for you, who you are, and what you’ve accomplished, but we are on opposite ends of the earth on this, and I really think you’re just wrong.
from Tim Egan, NYT:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytim…
In my home state Washington, federal officials recently put away a 64-year-old man who threatened, in the most vile language, to kill Senator Patty Murray because she voted for health care reform. Imagine: kill her because she wanted to give fellow Americans a chance to get well. Why would a public policy change prompt a murder threat?
Prosecutors here in Washington State told me that the man convicted of making the threats was using language that, in some cases, came word-for-word from Glenn Beck, the Fox demagogue.
And again, I don’t get the hatred for HCR – which was by and large a REPUBLICAN bill, based on Bob Dole’s 2000 proposal.
I did a presentation on health care reform in August 2009, and still have a lot of materials from my research including documents from the AHIP website (America’s Health Insurance Plans – member group for about 1,300 health insurance companies). AHIP specifically proposed the individual mandate in exchange for not denying people for pre-existing conditions. And now Repubs are trying to hang the “evil” individual mandate on the President.
And AHIP’s Board of Directors published a Dec 2008 document entitled “Now is the Time for Health Care Reform: A Proposal to Achieve Universal Coverage, Affordability, Quality Improvement and Market Reform.”
that HCR was “shoved up our ass” and that a “majority” of Americans don’t want it. (Never mind that a majority of Americans also didn’t want the status quo.)
If I followed this correctly, that justifies the violent rhetoric. I guess threats, for some reason, are just too far – why, I don’t know. Both are way over the line for me.
Does this change things?
Now, if it turns out that he’s been stalking her for years, are you going to back off the Palin thing?
isn’t just anti-Semitic. The founder, Jared Taylor, seems to focus his hatred on people of color, not Jews. A huge schism developed in 2006 at their annual conference over the group’s anti-Semitic leanings and threatened to split the AM apart.
And considering there is no firm evidence of Loughner’s ties to the group, since he lawyered up immediately upon arrest, it seems premature for any of us to assume why he did what he did, which was to murder a judge, murder four civilians, attempt to murder a US Congresswoman and wound 12 bystanders.
Until I know more about what motivated him, I’m not weighing in about this anymore.
Not you in particular, MoTR – I wish everyone had your compass on this one.
by Matt Bai today is drawing ire from the far left and the far right.
Maybe the single best editorial I’ve read regarding this whole nightmare.
But I also think it is very legit to say that our political discussion has become venomous. And that both hurts our democracy and creates a culture that encourages nut cases to actions like this.
And while both sides engage in it, I think the right does so a lot more, produces it constantly from many of their leaders & talking heads, and tends to take it much further.
I completely disagree.
It doesn’t surprise me that you and most here feel like that, because most of the folks here are from the farthest left 20% of the spectrum.
That doesn’t make it true.
The evidence is overwhelming and conclusive.
Sorry, LB. You just appear to me to be in denial.
Then please – give me a link that shows he was influenced by Sarah Palin or the Tea Party. If it’s so overwhelming and conclusive, this should be easy.
Sorry, SR, you appear to be pulling things out of your ass.
spreads the most violent rhetoric.
I don’t have enough facts to comment on what influenced Mr. Loner.
The Republican noise machine is the loudest, best financed, and peopled by more complete assholes than the Democratic Party.
Heck, Coulter alone casts a bigger shadow of ignorant comments than all the Democrats combined.
That’s just your opinion.
I agree with you about Coulter. So smart, but just so rotten.
At around $420 million in federal funds per year, the United States has one of the lowest-funded public media systems in the developed world.
You can find these facts here:
http://www.freepress.net/files…
Why are your Republican friends always trying to defund NPR?
.
didn’t seem right, saying that the US had one of the lowest-funded in the world.
so I followed the link. Lo and behold, that’s not what the source says.
It says lowest PER CAPITA. and since we have a larger population than almost all the others on that chart put together, even that becomes nearly meaningless.
sloppy, SR. not up to your usual high standards.
.
Admittedly, I didn’t thoroughly analyze the article in its entirety. But I stand by my point.
Thanks Barron for the compliment, BTW.
That’s not what David said. He said the right engages in the rhetoric more frequently. I don’t think you can make the argument that both sides are equally culpable.
AFAIK his influences are still undetermined.
I can and I will, and we’ll go back and forth in a pissing match about who the bigger assholes are. Again, just your opinion. Not a provable fact at all.
You discount my statement with:
But many of the Democrats here think I’m a secret Republican. Look LB, the bottom line is there has been much more violent and hateful rhetoric from leaders on the Republican side. A lot more. And screaming “left wing nut” won’t change that fact.
The two cases may be exactly the same, when all is said and done. But MAJ Hasan was an Islamofascist Terrorist clearly under the control of Muslim terrorists…
Oh – right. I didn’t. In fact, I specifically said that Hasan’s view of Islam was perverted.
That’s kind of the opposite of what you’re inferring. Hmm.
Where, initially, you were convinced that militant Islam was behind the shootings.
It was. Next?
One Teabagger = No Teabaggers
Math is easy when you get to make it up as you go along.
Hasan openly admitted that he was perpetrating the act in the name of his skewed view of Islam.
Arizona douche has made no such claim, and has shown himself for years to be completely unstable.
I hope we can agree to that. And since there’s no evidence he had any real connections with radical Muslim groups, he’s a lone nut by definition. Nidal Hasan was unstable and looking for a reason to snap, and probably the language of radical Islam helped give him the reason he was looking for.
Sounds like the same story as the Arizona guy to me. Whoever the Arizona guy was listening to, they are as responsible for this as radical imams in Yemen are responsible for the Fort Hood shooting.
We may disagree as to exactly what level of responsibility that is, but I don’t think there’s any rational way of distancing Nidal Hasan from Jared Loughner.
Militant Imams around the world justified Hasan’s actions.
Has anyone come out in support of Arizona douche other than Fred Phelps?
Finally something we can all agree upon: Fred Phelps deserves the running balls kick.
They’re not Americans.
Because it didn’t. It’s true, so you’re going to have to live with it.
You’re comparing Americans (who, if anyone IS happy about this, won’t say a damn thing out of fear of reprisals) to non-Americans who are safely out of reach and safely ensconced in communities where everyone feels as they do.
Apples to oranges.
Hasan was a sick man who happened to be in contact with an evil man. Not terrorism.
Was the underwear bomber, in touch with the same Imam a terrorist?
Putting your head in the sand doesn’t change history.
with WAY more people then that imam. Who else was Hasan in contact with?
Now, getting back on track … Do you acknowledge what I said in my comment?
But I think you’re way off-base. I don’t mean that as an insult.
On one hand, you have a group of people with the freedom to say what they want without consequence; on the other, a group who do not.
You’re pretending ala WLJ that there’s this huge majority of conservatives that’s somehow applauding this horrific thing. It’s imaginary.
RE: Hasan, you actually have a huge group of caveman asshole freaks that are actually applauding what he did. So what if they aren’t in the U.S? They’d probably be safer to say it if they were.
Quit setting up straw men. You’re awfully damn defensive of these right wing nutjobs.
From WLJ yesterday:
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo…
Disgusted yet!?
The two things are completely unrelated.
And bravo to the Tea Party leader quoted in your link:
Gee, that’s sounding a little familiar.
bemoaning divisiveness and polarization, but it’s too depressing today.
There are many and I skimmed over a lot of the comments because many were repetitious and some irritated me. I wish we all would take a deep breath and think instead of knee-jerk all over this thread.
There are 6 people dead and many more injured. A family has lost its beloved daughter. An obviously crazy man was allowed to buy a gun and wreak this carnage.
Yes, let’s talk about the causes of violence generally in our society and specifically in this incident. I do believe that adequate mental health services and sensible gun control laws would have helped prevent this incident. I also believe that more civility in our political discourse … well, it couldn’t hurt.
I believe that the right-wing rhetoric about second-amendment remedies and watering the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots may appeal to some gun-toting crazy people. It doesn’t cause their craziness, but it does make guns more available to them and it does encourage people to bring guns to political events. As far as I know, no liberals have brought guns to political meetings; there have been several stories about teabaggers doing that.
I also believe that we’d be better off with a little less finger-pointing and a little more introspection. Instead, both liberals and conservatives have rushed to point fingers at the other side and say, “It’s your fault, admit it!” Liberals started it, no doubt because Giffords is a Democrat. If some nut had brought a gun to a Kyl meet-and-greet and shot up the place, I have no doubt that the righties would immediately start blaming the lefties for it. When it’s one of your own (even a blue dog one of your own), it’s natural to jump to the conclusion that “the other” was responsible.
As I’ve said before, I think the right wing has used more imagery of violence as a political remedy with its gunsight map and its “water the tree of liberty” and its second amendment remedy stuff. I have not seen that kind of talk from the left. However, I think the left is very quick to assume that the righties intend that violence result from their rhetoric. I don’t think that’s what they want; can anyone honestly say that Sarah Palin wanted somebody to gun down the reps on her map? No, she wanted them defeated in an election. But the gunsight image appealed to her and her target audience, and she apparently realized that she needed to ratchet it down when she took it off her website shortly after the shooting.
My dear husband is a yellow-dog Democrat, as is his sister who lives in Giffords’s district. Both of them assumed without a moment’s thought that it was some teabagger who did the shooting. They are rabid Dems, but the rightie rhetoric has solidified them in this opinion.
Yes, all of this kind of language and this finger-pointing is polarizing. There are people out there who are profiting greatly from this level of polarization. Some of those people are named Palin, Limbaugh, and Beck; they are making a fortune from it. Let’s see whether they will be willing to put their personal fortune behind the nation’s well-being and tone it down.
The entire Tea Party movement obviously has everything to do with the President being black. That is the only way to make any sense of their irrational, selective outrage, obsession with proving Obama isn’t American born, and complete lack of interest in proposing anything that isn’t a negative.
Example; they get all fired up about a mosque in a Muslim neighborhood anywhere near the site of the twin towers but have no interest in supporting funding to help 9/11 responders. They specialize exclusively in hating, opposing, repealing, promoting paranoid conspiracy theories, xenophobia, calling opponents un-American enemies and threatening second amendment solutions to the problem of the democratic election of a government they don’t like. If there is something positive they are promoting to, say, help vets or keep jobs here in the US, or defend our constitutionally guaranteed civil rights, or anything at all, I have yet to hear of it.
The Tea Party does more to restrict liberty, than promote it
Build a Mosque in New York? Nope.
Get citizenship, no matter what, under the 14th Amendment? Nope.
Allow gay marriage? Nope.
The Tea Party is by far more Totalitarian, than Constitutional or Capitalist
.
who is the Tea Party ?
who gets to decide that ?
folks who self-identify with its principles,
or
people who don’t really know what it stands for, but want to vilify an evil strawman as a target for their anger ?
.
You mean to tell me that questioning Obama’s citizenship isn’t common among self identified Tea Partiers? You mean to tell me you can’t find video of signs at Tea Party rallies espousing the views I mention? That’s funny because so many self identified Tea Partiers who appear on TV, in videos, quoted in the media and writing on blogs make no secret of these things.
You, Barron and LB, are the ones creating some fantasy Tea Party to fit what you would like it to be instead of looking at the reality. You are the ones who don’t want to know what it stands for.
And I notice neither one of you offered anything in the way of a positive policy they support, an instance of a Tea Party demonstration advocating legislation in support of anyone or anything rather than in opposition. And being for something vague like freedom or loving the constitution or taking back the country doesn’t count.
I mean something like advocating for the heroes of 9/11, for vets, for securing nuclear weapons and material, for keeping jobs in the US, for stabilizing the Middle East, for a solution to the problem of a having the least efficient, most expensive health care system in the modern industrialized world, solutions to preventing another Wall Street heist, any positive plan for accomplishing or supporting something or someone.
While there is no single source of official Tea Party stances, please show me your proof that your conception of stances most common among self identified Tea Partiers is more fact based than mine. Straw man? I don’t think so.
Are these “official tea party” stances?
You should be more specific in whom you’re painting with these ideas.
BTW, I don’t consider myself a member of any kind of Tea Party organization.
Your use of quotes is silly since those words appear nowhere in my post. Yes, we all know that the Tea party isn’t an official party. But it is a movement built around a collection of commonly held views of which self identified Tea Partiers make no secret. I doubt very much that you have anything concrete to back your contention that your perception of what constitutes the broad outlines of that self identified group is accurate and fair while mine constitutes a straw man. I assume that if you had anything concrete you would have alluded to it by now.
I was actually responding to MAH, and I think you might be responding to Barron.
My perception of the Tea Party is that it’s a pretty loose group of people from mostly the right side of the aisle and a lot of non-pragmatic libertarians with a collective main emphasis on government spending.
But I only went to one Tea Party event, and that was to work there.
my perception of views commonly held by self identifying Tea Partiers is way off base so it pretty much is in response to both of you, my sadly deluded friends.
Sure. This is obviously Palin’s fault.
Shameless. I feel so differently about this fucking place at the moment.
Show me what you mean, specifically.
Sir Robin.
Prove that LB is smarter than this. Do you have any evidence?
😉
It must be so lonely being the smartest guy in any room, Ardy.
It’s the only thing that get’s me up in the morning: knowing that I’m the smartest guy in my mother’s basement. Your point?
Sadly, for whatever reason, he is deeply in denial and couldn’t possibly be more wrong about the Tea Party dominated right.
I agree that LB is smart and well meaning (usually!).
I was just running with the meme de jour of “every claim requires two or more pieces of evidence or else you are a wanker.”
I’m sensing that emotions are raw and thus snark is not coming across well.
My apologies.
My belief that LB is smart and well meaning is entirely subjective and doesn’t make me any less aggravated with his defense of mean spirited, ignorant, bigoted, fear-mongering, hate spewing morons who don’t deserve it from anyone who is smart and well meaning. The ways of LB are mysterious to put it kindly. I don’t know why, but I can’t help feeling kindly toward LB no matter how much he ticks me off. I’m sure the Tea Party types he defends would never feel kindly towards me.
Because complete loons are immune to media influence.
I have yet to blame Palin, but every Hinckley need his Jody Foster.
I think we all can agree that Sarah Palin is not responsible for Jared Loughner’s actions.
I think we can also agree that Sarah Palin’s political rhetoric is despicable. Whenever ANY politician – from the left or the right – uses metaphors of warfare, shooting, targets, salvos, violence, or the like to advance their argument, they are crossing the line of decency and civility.
It makes no difference, in terms of whether that politician should be condemned, if their words actually cause someone to be violent. That’s not the point. The point is that a functioning democracy requires civility among political factions.
Right now, we don’t have that civility in America. Instead, we have politicians, and their supporters on the airwaves and online, attempting to convince Americans that the government is evil, that politicians of a particular party are treasonous, that our elected president is illegitimate, and that Congress’ motivation for enacting laws is dishonest and an attempt to subjugate people.
These are all demonstrably false claims. They do nothing to advance political debate, nothing to solve our country’s problems, nothing to encourage compromise – the very lifeblood of democracy – and nothing to inspire a sense of confidence in our leaders, our political process, and our government.
Language that invokes metaphors of gunfire, warfare, and violence is contemptible, destructive, and divisive. He (or she) that uses it should be willing to accept that many of us will make the appropriate decision about that person’s fitness for public office.
First, I do believe the right wing has been much more consistent and pervasive in analogizing our political disputes to warfare and encouraging people to use their second amendment remedies, water the tree of liberty, etc. LB, you’re way too defensive on this.
Second, and finally, based on all the information that is currently available, I do not believe that the Tucson shooter was influenced by incendiary rhetoric by any political group. It’s a random nut shooting, just like the Fort Hood shooting was a random nut shooting.
I was disgusted when the righties assumed that Maj. Hasan was acting as a Muslim terrorist. At this point, I’m disgusted by the lefties’ kneejerk reaction that Loughner must be a rightwing terrorist. He’s just another nut with gun.
Now, if you all want to talk about why on earth we let these nuts have such easy access to guns, I’m in. Otherwise, I’m done with this discussion.
isn’t that the political rhetoric on either side forced Loughner to do the deed.
He is certainly unhinged and we do not yet know why he did what he did.
However, it’s also true that the language of war, conflict, guns, targeting, and the like, deployed in the service of partisanship, very well could send the signal that violence against a politician opposed by those who use that language is acceptable.
A rational person probably would not consider it appropriate, but an irrational person might.
This is not a debate about what definitely will or will not happen when politicians, commentators, etc. go for the over-the-top words. It’s a debate about whether our country’s democracy, and our collective ability to reach needed compromises to advance social goals, can be advanced if we ratchet down that kind of rhetoric.
It’s also about whether we can finally, after decades of hearing and seeing it, and after not just these deaths but others in decades past, we are willing to admit that the language of hate is destructive, encourages people to form emotional reactions to those with whom they disagree, and contributes to a toxic atmosphere of duplicity, division, and denial of others’ humanity.
Beyond that, it is long past time to have a conversation about guns. The notion that people should be able to carry a gun anywhere, with no permit, and that virtually anyone should be able to acquire one, is one that has imposed great costs on our society and, as yesterday showed, continues to do so.
Except he was acting as a Muslim terrorist. Just ask him.
Soldier of Allah?
Loughner is not, apparently, a Muslim.
I suppose it’s possible that his behavior could be considered an act of terrorism, though, if you take a wide view of that term’s meaning.
Hasan did. Both previous to and during his killings.
Try to follow along. I was referring to Hasan, not Arizona Crazy Boy.
There’s no reason for sarcasm or rudeness in your response. It seemed to me that you were referring to Loughner. I apologize for my misunderstanding.
Loughner was a random nut, and we don’t know what he’s using as an excuse. If he were to say, “I was just using a second amendment remedy,” then would you say he’s a right-wing terrorist? Would you say that it’s the right wingsnuts’ fault? Or would you say he’s a random nut who just used wingnuttery as an excuse?
In my opinion, everybody should tone down the violent rhetoric. However, I don’t think that’s what caused this incident, and that’s not why we need to tone it down. We need to tone it down because it’s unproductive. You can’t have an honest discussion with someone if you’re also saying you need to water the tree of liberty with that person’s blood. Can you possibly disagree with that?
This is brilliant.
I try to do that all the time, anyway. Sometimes I fail, but most of the time I’m a very civil man. I don’t think the same can be said for some of the folks that come and post in here, and are now shrieking about rhetoric.
I agree with you 100%, actually, on that paragraph.
Setting aside all questions of the degree to which the 24 hour cycle of hateful rhetoric contributes to loonies committing violence, I am puzzled by your staunch defense of the snow white and unquestioned innocence of those who spew hate speech coupled with such deep hostility to those whose objections to it you characterize as “shrieking about rhetoric”. If anyone is “shrieking” it appears to me to be you in defense of a bunch of vulgar morons, not to put too fine a point on it.
And I disagree. I see the party out of power as generally shrieking the most.
BTW, I don’t think you’re shrieking.
I just found this link:
http://motherjones.com/politic…
It’s a Mother Jones story/interview with Loughner’s friend, and it was more illuminating than anything else I’ve seen to this point.
that this isn’t the act of a seriously wacked out individual.
h/t R. Maddow
The intimidation, threats of violence, and all the angry mobs, failed to prevent passage of the HCR bill.
That bill is a piece of shit. A majority of Americans didn’t want it, and they passed it anyway because they think they know better than us poor rubes.
And you’re surprised people are booing and hissing?
That has zero. Zero to do with this little shitbird in AZ. Nothing.
We can argue the merits of HCR on another thread. But the fact remains that the substance-free vitriol stirred up against it – and worse, the personal nature of that vitriol – was deliberately directed against members of Congress in a way that was ugly and unmerited. Rep. Giffords was one object, as were the members of Congress (most notably John Lewis) who were screamed at and spat upon by a mob as they tried to enter the Capitol and do their jobs. And this anger was bankrolled by those with a financial and political interest in the outcome.
Whether on HCR or anything else, that type of incitement has no place in public policy discourse.
And that type of incitement does contribute to the unhinged acting on their madness.
from the health insurance industry, not from the left wing of the Dems.
Everything they do is appalling, but the idea that they would picket the funeral of a 9 year old girl is beyond words.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…
Finally, something we can all agree on.
And talk about gun control.
There’s a significant parallel here with Virginia Tech, where the killer was known to be unhinged by school officials, but was still able to buy a gun.
Loughner was tossed from school in September after demonstrating signs of instability, and bought his weapon in November.
The difference is that Sung-Hui Cho had contact with the legal system and was ordered into therapy, which placed him on a list which ought to have prevented him from buying a gun. After the VaTech tragedy privacy laws were changed which loosened the restrictions on educational institutions re: alerting law enforcement about troubled students. Since Loughner never did anything illegal, the fact that lots of people knew he was nuts couldn’t stop him from getting a gun.
As a pilot, if you get a prescription for meds on the banned list, you’re almost immediately contacted. There should be a similar list for psychiatrists to put people on that puts a temporary hold on weapons purchases of any kind.
And bite my ass. This is leftie hate-talk, trying to pin this horrific incident on people that have no responsibility whatsoever for its taking place.
And cross-hairs on your opposition with talk of reloading is hate-filled Republican rhetoric.
Whether or not it had anything to do with this incident is at issue, and I haven’t pinned anything on anyone. You’re not denying it’s hate filled are you?
I am going to play the age card.
For those of who are (were) democrats and adults in the sixties, , we know the crippling loses which violence has cost us – Two Kennedys and a King. The Democratic party has not recovered from those acts of violence.
In the last sixty years, our leaders are almost 100% more likely to die from an assassination than Republicans are.
Those of us who were alive at the time of the assassinations know the hate filled environment which preceded the killings. We also know in the recent history, that the Wellstone airplane crash and the subsequent talk radio attack on the two remaining Wellstone family members helped republican norm coleman get elected, made the Senate republican and brought us the Iraq war.
I do believe the airplane crash was an accident.
Quite apart from the attack at our very governmental foundations, the killings impacted the whole party structure.
The nation has continued to turn to Democrats when there is a crisis….Carter after Watergate and Obama after the almost collapse of the world economy. Clinton won in a three way race and survived to run for a second term because the repubs ran Dole… Other than that, the dems have been out of power since 1968.
WE HAVE THE RIGHT TO DENOUNCE THE HATE TALK WHICH HAS PRECEDED ALL THE POLITICAL ASSASSINATIONS.
Reagan was shot and could have easily died.
…carry on…
The reason I ask is that the right wing fanatics must anxious to dump on the left are those talk show hosts who would loose their jobs, ultimately, if the country tuned out the hate. You seem frantic in trying to blame the left…
Tancredo, ever the decent gentleman, was on KOA today.
His contribution? Twofold”
1) To blather on ad-infinitum about all the times he had to deal with threats and he never got shot…
2) To give out the telephone number of sheriff and tell his audience to call him and tell him how awful they think he is…..that should be a big help with the investigation.
But wait a minute…..maybe I had tommy the fearless figured all wrong…..if his audience calls the sheriff, the FBI will get a record of all those kooks….which should help the investigation….tommy is really helping to catch the fanatics….
Finally, did anyone notice that Baynard did not shed ONE tear in his press conference over the Arizona nightmare?
I’m a very rich man for slumming with a bunch of fucking nutjobs.
🙂
Even if at times, we may appear not to be :))
PS Could you help some of us get that gig?
I don’t have the password, the secret handshake, the magic decorder ring. Evidently I am not even on the payroll.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new…
Because that’s new.
Same as the people making the threats on Obama because Sarah Palin sent out her secret mind-control waves to make them do it.
Who tried to kill a Republican based on this moron’s incitement?
It is the “Secret” Service, after all.
My point was to respond to SR’s assertion that no Presidential candidate had ever received death threats before the Antichrist (Palin) arrived on the scene in 2008.
Neither did the Secret Service. Nor did anyone call her the Antichrist. Nor does anyone even think any of those things.
Why can’t you respond to what’s actually said?
Death threats against the President are unfortunately very common, and not the fault of Sarah Palin. And I demonstrated that.
Next?
Did you get my reply to your email?
And while you seem to be fixated on the idea that we are all blaming Sara Palin for specific acts you are smart enough to know perfectly well that’s not at all what most of us are saying. Most here are saying that the clear intent of those like Palin to energize their base by whipping up fear and hate, an attitude that all opponents are enemies of the country, of freedom, and must be stopped at all costs in language replete with allusions to guns, cross hairs and second amendment solutions contributes to a dangerous and toxic atmosphere that is poisoning our public discourse.
There also are not at present any instances of executions of right wing pols or activists by those espousing progressive views that can be connected , even indirectly, to any hate speech from the left. That is a fact.
I don’t say that there is no corresponding toxicity coming from the left but that any objective analysis will show that much, much more of it is coming from the right. If you can’t argue with those assessments without first distorting them that doesn’t show much confidence in your own arguments.
They were talking about this on SATURDAY.
this is terrible.
http://www.truth-out.org/the-w…