They really are going overboard to silence any discussion of the role rhetoric plays in mass violence. This is at Daily Caller —
ABC News host George Stephanopoulos refuses to admit fault or issue a correction for implying politics had something to do with accused Tucson tragedy shooter Jared Lee Loughner’s motives.
On ABC’s “This Week,†Stephanopoulos, a former Democratic White House press secretary, asked Rep. Chris Van Hollen, Maryland Democrat: “The rhetoric definitely got ratcheted up all thousand the course of the campaign. Going forward, what do you think you, other members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans and the like can do to help bring the temperature down?â€
When The Daily Caller asked Stephanopoulos if he would air a correction for the error, he asked, “What’s false in that question?â€
“I explicitly said at the top of that broadcast that we didn’t know the killer’s motivation, whether this was more akin to Columbine or Oklahoma City,†Stephanopoulos said in an e-mail to TheDC. “A point endorsed and reinforced by George Will later in the program. Asking the chair of the Democratic Campaign what responsibility he’s going to take to ratchet down the political rhetoric in no way repeats or endorses a ‘baseless accusation.’â€
The DC also asked the Washington Post, the New York Times and CNN if they were going to run corrections for the mistakes their reporters, anchors and columnists made.
Wow, talk about trying to silence your opposition! I say again, if today’s Right ever gets unfettered control of the government, they’ll turn America into a totalitarian state the likes of which Orwell could not have imagined. They complain about “political correctness,” but no one dares not be “conservatively correct” in America.
Just wait — if it hasn’t happened already — somewhere, some wingnut mouthpiece will declare open season on anyone who thinks hate speech played a part in the shooting in Tuscon. Countdown to the progroms …
If you missed this links I put up this morning, here they are again — these are must reads —
“Will We Remember Tucson? Was It Enough? Is Anything?”
“The Voices in Jared Loughner’s Head Shall Not Be Respected.”
How many more are going to die?
Update:
Ex-Weatherman Mark Rudd writes,
My willingness to endorse and engage in violence had something to do with an exaggerated sense of my own importance. I wanted to prove myself as a man – a motive exploited by all armies and terrorist groups. I wanted to be a true revolutionary like my guerrilla hero, Ernesto “Che” Guevara. I wanted the chant we used at demonstrations defending the Black Panthers to be more than just words: “The revolution has come/Time to pick up the gun!”
As the Weather Underground believed in the absolute necessity of bombs to address actual moral grievances such as the Vietnam War and racism, Loughner might have believed in the absolute necessity of a Glock to answer his imagined moral grievances. Violent actors in this country – whether James Earl Ray, Timothy McVeigh or Scott Roeder, who in 2009 killed a Kansas abortion provider – are always armed not just with weapons, but with the conviction that their grievances demand satisfaction and their violence is righteous.
He could have put Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 terrorists on that list also. Most of the mass atrocities of recent history have been carried out by people who believed they were justified in what they were doing; that their violence was righteous.
Another reason the conflation of right-wing politics and conservative religion is so dangerous.
“How many more are going to die?”
One is too many. But I think the next few deaths are merely going to be the appetizers in the right’s meal plan. Soup, (word) salad, entre and dessert to follow. And that may just be for breakfast. Kool Aid will be the beverage of choice, of course.
The MSM better start waking up and stop playing this “Well, both sides do it!” routine. Of course, calling the right out on it would only serve to ratchet-up the crazy. Liberal media, and all that, don’t you know…
So, as usual, it’s “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t…” with these people. And all that matters to them is that we’re the ones that are damned. They are, after all, God’s chosen people, because there’s no one Jesus would rather have at his right hand than a fat, white, hateful, xenophobic, gun-toting, science-denying, anti-gay, sexist, ignoramous who know nothing of his work or his words. Or so their preacher told them. And who are we Liberals to tell them otherwise?
If you are really interested in the conection between violence and ideas – and you do sound as if you are – I suggest you look at the FBI’s “Most Wanted” domestic terrorist list. http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/dt
What conclusions do you draw from that list and the ideologies it represents?
Obviously, that right-wing terrorists get a pass. That’s been true for years. The Justice Department since Reagan has looked the other way at threats against abortion clinics until someone actually dies, for example.
A Glock in every waistband, and a Humvee in every garage!
They are, after all, God’s chosen people, because there’s no one Jesus would rather have at his right hand than a fat, white, hateful, xenophobic, gun-toting, science-denying, anti-gay, sexist, ignoramous who know nothing of his work or his words.
Gulag.. that’s one hell of a sentence.. You should submit that to Bartlett’s Quotations.
..if today’s Right ever gets unfettered control of the government, they’ll turn America into a totalitarian state the likes of which Orwell could not have imagined.
It already is. I happened to stumble across Democracy Now! on a fringe public service channel on my cable box. The contrast between Amy Goodman’s reporting versus any corporate media newscast, including PBS, was striking. I felt like someone who’s been in the Soviet Union for ten years, finally seeing and hearing a real news broadcast, instead of Katie Couric fluff stories. No wonder the public is totally asleep.
I stopped complaining about my cable bill (I haven’t made the jump from cable to watching TV online).
I’m torn between not showing this link because it’s bordering on bad taste (and, in fact, despair – which is worse than bad taste), and… well…
http://www.theonion.com/articles/report-it-going-to-take-way-more-than-an-inconceiv,18816/
And it isn’t only the nut job unloading his gun on people, or blowing them up, to whom we should pay careful attention. Goebbels launched a very successful campaign, successful because the German people did nothing to stop him, against Germany’s ethnic and national minorities (Jews, Poles, French.) Six million plus dead people later did the German people ever wake up and ask how did this happen? When (or if?) will more of us wake up.
Yahoo!.. It’s about time. I guess I’ll dust off my M- 1911 with my webbed belt and US embossed leather holster and hit the streets defending liberty, American values and making the world safe for democracy.
http://www.tampabay.com/news/courts/criminal/looser-gun-laws-including-open-carry-in-floridas-legislative-hopper/1145778
LHW, The Onion is great satire, I’m a “South Park” fan, so bad taste, well you know. I’m 56, but just discovered Marilyn Manson, holy crap! That guy is really “out there”, but he’s a master at what he does. If you want to get some chills up your spine watch his videos for “Personal Jesus” and “Sweet Dreams” (are made of these), creepy, scary, nightmare stuff.
“Obviously, that right-wing terrorists get a pass. That’s been true for years. The Justice Department since Reagan has looked the other way at threats against abortion clinics until someone actually dies, for example.”
huh?
Wouldn’t it make more sense to say the opposite? (Unless you are complaining the Feds are not arresting people BEFORE they commit crimes.)
Do you know of someone who bombed an abortion clinic or killed an abortionist who is still on the loose? Hell, they unleashed the National Guard on that nutjob in North Carolina a few years back. It would make a lot more sense to say they are much more diligent going after those on the right as opposed to the left.
Still, now I know… you are not in fact interested in the connection between ideology and violence, only in bashing your “enemies”.
As I said, now I know.
You wanted to prove that only lefties are violent, dear. And I refuse to take the bait. Do take your hypocritical ass elsewhere.
Swami,
Thanks, I appreciate it, but you do it. If I did it, it would seem vain (not that I’m not guilty).
right now the the republicans are looking for someone to be their next president, someone who is senile and don’t know what he is doing, or someone like george bush or palin who are to stupid to know what they are doing. If they can find someone who just dosen’t give a shit, then we are in deep shit.
Rick Horton,
You probably won’t read this, but you might want to consider some salad’s. Your fat cheek’s are almost wider than your fedora. And you’ve got more “chin’s” than the Hong Kong phone directory.
Also, can you really trust one finger to hold that fat head up? I’d be afraid of a concussion if I were you. You might want to consider stuffing a coat rack up the back of your XXXXXXXXXL suit for support to make sure you don’t cleave a cocktail table in two if your thumb shatters and gives way.
Gulag, you Do realise fat people are hard to kidnap………..
I’m Not Hateful
I’m not a hateful person,
You Liberal MFer,
And if you keep sayin’ so,
I hope you die.
The Father tells me,
Lock.
I’m not a violent person,
You Liberal MFer,
And if you keep sayin’ so,
I’ll shoot you in the eye.
The Virgin Mary tells me,
Load.
I’m not a hateful person,
You Liberal MFer,
Just ’cause I wish you’d
die, die, die, die, die.
The Holy Ghost tells me,
Pray.
Jesus saves.
Democrat’s spend.
My Saviour loves me,
‘Cause I wish you a violent end.
And Jesus tells me,
Squeeze.
The Father,
He speaks for me.
The Virgin Mary,
She cries for me.
The Holy Ghost,
He shows me.
And Jesus,
He speaks to me.
They all tell me that you’re a worthless CSer.
And all four of them can’t be wrong,
Now can they,
You stupid Liberal MFer?
erinyes,
Hell yes. I’m fat, and sadly no one’s kidnapped me yet. Least of all the Ford Modeling School’s Female Cheerleading Squad. And here I’ve made myself soooooooo available, too.
It would make a lot more sense to say they are much more diligent going after those on the right as opposed to the left.
It would even make a lot more sense to say that the righties evasion skills are not as sharp as those on the left.
Not computing for me.
Maha, Rich Horton’s link to the FBI’s most wanted domestic terrorism list show a bunch of supposed lefties who remain at large while all the rightie domestic terrorists,Eric Randolph, Scott Roeder, and dozens of other abortion clinic bombers and doctor killers have been apprehended and therefore don’t qualify for the most wanted list. So one possible reason other than claiming “all” most wanted domestic terrorists are leftist or the Justice department is lax on pursuing left wing terrorism would be that the righties just aren’t as skilled in evading capture. I know it’s kinda lame, but my point would be to Horton that you can’t extrapolate a truth or even sound reasoning by a link to the FBI domestic terrorism list.
John Brown said, according to Henry David Thoreau, that “It is a mistake, sir, that our people make, when they think that bullies are the best fighters, or that they are the fit men to oppose these Southerners. Give me men of good principles,–God-fearing men,–men who respect themselves, and with a dozen of them I will oppose any hundred such men as these Buford ruffians.'”
All of these terrorists believe themselves to be god-fearing men with good principles. It’s their firmness in the right, as God sees fit for them to see the right, that makes them so dangerous.
“They complain about “political correctness,†but no one dares not be “conservatively correct†in America.”
One of the things I really like about you maha is that you often come to the same observations that I myself am having.
I live in a very conservative area and it is easy as pie for me to understand that the political correctness insisted on these days is from the right.
I often tell people around here at the start of a conversation that I am not politically correct. That usually doesn’t bother them until they suddenly understand what I mean.
I think our definitions are askew.
Shrinks tell us that many terrorists are not mentally unbalanced inasmuch as they believe they’re fighting a war. Those who commit murder for monetary gain or in a fit of anger are considered criminals. If people can be fooled into believing a host of looney, false narratives without being crazy then why is retaliating in anger at those accused of awful things by some false narrative insanity? Conventional wisdom relies on circular definitions with Loughner’s actions proving insanity but having committed them only because he was insane. Is insanity just a peculiar combination of circumstances which do not reflect insanity when taken singly?
Maybe there’s more of a continuum than we’d like to believe and that those such as Loughner are just the statistical outuer reaches on the bell curve and expected products of a culture which does not get a clean bill of health itself.
Psychiatrist R.D. Laing had a lot to say about contempoorary ideas on insanity:
“Insanity – a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.”
“Normality highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100, 000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.â€
Naturally, the count has gone up since the time R.D. Laing. first wrote those words. It almost seems as if we use insanity as a way of suggesting that a given behavior was not influenced by the environment. Certainly this holds some appeal for a large group of armchair psychiatrists and conservatives who’d aided and abetted.
Certainly brain chemistry matters and could have been at play but I’m not certain whether there’s a test for that, is there?
No doubt shrinks willl be picking his brain to better understand what we can only guess at without much basis.
.
I’m not a psychologist, but I’ve read enough about it that I think I have a very basic grasp of some things. “Mental illness” all kind of looks alike to us laypeople, but I’ve come to understand there are various kinds of “head issues” that can be as different from one another as a broken leg is from smallpox. Psychosis, for example, is definitely in a class by itself as head problems go.
On the other hand, to the shrinks, someone who is merely “delusional” is probably not “psychotic.” The basic difference, as I understand it, is that a delusional person can have fixed, delusional ideas about certain things but maintain basically normal thought processes, while a psychotic person’s thought processes are utterly scrambled.
And psychopathy / sociopathy is entirely different from being psychotic or delusional, as is being obsessive/compulsive. Those are all entirely different.
And it’s important to keep these distinctions straight, because you can have most of these aforementioned pathologies and still be as capable of making reasoned decisions about your own behavior as most other people on the planet, if you choose to do so. Psychosis is the exception; psychotics really can’t make reasoned decisions about anything.
FBI does go after right wing terror organizations – that crypto-Christian militia in Michigan last year for example.
This is a very recent development. I doubt we would have heard anything about that crypto-Christian group while Bush was president.