Listening to the carrion worms of Fox tonight and to liberals insisting on balance ……
Among the evasions of the Fox right, has been the claim that their rhetoric had nothing to do with the Arizona massacre. They claim to be fair and balanced. Yet, somehow, the violence we have seen since Tim McVeigh has all come from two sources that are eerily similar .. the fatwa wielding pronouncements of the Islamic right and the feminazi, Beck madness of the oh-so-Christian right.
On the left, too tolerant liberals apologize for the sarcasm of a Bill Mahr or the enthusiasm of Keith Obermnann. Politically correct liberals, like Lee at HorsesAss, try to paint the Islamic extremists as loners and paint over the real and serious problems created by Wahabi-based eduction even among Muslim Americans. There is no reason for tolerance to extent to the teaching of hatred.
This feigned tolerance is sad on the left, a kind of sad effort to shield others from exposure. The difference between liberal apologists and radical right apologists is that the latter are covering their own gonads.
Intolerance is called for when dealing with bigotry, especially the pernicious bigotry behind the jehadis and their American colleagues, the gun toting American radical right. Anyone, liberal or conservative, who does not see Beck, O’Reilly, Palin, Limbaugh as pornographers has no right to make any comment on anyone else’s morality.
Beck and Osama are the same, fucking thing … disgusting, bigots.
Anyhow, after listening to far to much of Larry O’Donnel’ on MSNBC trying to cover Beck’s nakedness, i read Larry Rosenthal’s essay on the Berkeley Blog. This is well worth a read.
excerpted from Berkeley Blog by Lawrence Rosenthal, executive director, Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements
His Center also hosted a day long seminar on the Tea Party, see it here.
The murders and attempted assassination this weekend in Tucson have thrown this heated rhetoric into question—what is the connection between the rhetoric and the violence? From the right, the answer seems to be: none at all. And further, that raising this question in the first place is an attempt to muzzle the right. William Kristol calls it “McCarthyism.”
From the left, the dominant conviction is that the rhetoric, and the failure of Republican Party officials to denounce it, has created a climate that makes this sort of violence inevitable. Never mind, as the right argues, that the would-be assassin seems clearly crazy. The climate of intimidation and threat of violence is just the thing that pushes such a mind over the edge.
For the Republicans, or the Tea Party, or Fox, this argument is anathema. To accept it in any manner is to concede the premise that something has been amiss, that some foul genie has been loosed, on the right.
Locally, we’ve had a near-miss on this score. Last July, Byron Williams, in body armor, engaged Oakland police in a furious freeway gun battle as he was stopped on his way to San Francisco to shoot up the offices and kill leading members of the ACLU and the Tides Foundation. He has been explicit about learning of Tides from the blackboard of Glenn Beck. Yet nothing in this incident has had any impact on the rhetoric of either Beck or the right generally.
The ability of the right to escape responsibility or consequences for Byron Williams foreshadows the likely impact—or, better, lack of impact—of the events of Tucson. Unlike in the case of Oklahoma City, where the perpetrator was explicit in his insurrectionary aim and managed to pull off his catastrophe, in Tucson there is enough ambiguity about the perpetrator that radicalism on the right is unlikely to feel the need to abate. In the absence of, as it were, a smoking gun—the perpetrator himself assuming responsibility in the name of the movement—the impact of Tucson is likely to be an amplification rather than any amelioration of the fierceness of our political climate.