Note technical problems if readers have problems with links or videos let me know-GORD.
...The shooting in Tucson was not an anomaly. It was an inevitability.
And as long as we continue to play this foolish game of "both sides are just as bad," and rely on trusty old ablism to dismiss Jared Lee Loughner as a crackpot—dutifully ignoring that people with mental illness are more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators; carefully pretending that the existence of people with mental illness who are potentially dangerous somehow absolves us of responsibility for violent rhetoric, as opposed to serving to underline precisely why it's irresponsible—it will be inevitable again.
Let's Get This Straight: There Is No Progressive Equivalent to the Right's Violent Rhetoric via Alternet.org Jan 13, 2011
Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips warned that the Tucson tragedy is part of a "war" between liberals and the Tea Parties, and urged Tea Party supporters to spread the falsehood that Loughner was a "liberal lunatic."from: Tea Party Group Uses Tucson Shootings to Fundraise by Tana Ganeva Via Alternet.org ,Jan. 12, 2011
and :
Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, Savage, O'Reilly and the rest of the right-wing media machine have turned professional victimhood into a license to print money, and people like Sarah Palin are all too happy to jump on that bandwagon. You're losing your country, your rights, your guns, your family, your religion, the sanctity of your marriage, the supremacy of your heterosexuality, my God, you're losing Christmas, for the love of God! You're losing everything (...psssst...they're talking to White Christians when they say this stuff, by the way, which just cracks me all the way up...), and if you don't "take up arms" to stop it, well, it will just make the Baby Jesus weep bitter, bitter tears.From: "Poor, Poor Sarah" by William Rivers Pitt via Truthout.org , January 12, 2011
People For The American Way-Introducing the Tea Party Republicans
Grit TV Jan. 13, 2011
More GRITtv
and here's an example from Coral Ridge Ministries of the over the top rhetoric of the Tea Party Republicans and their uberconservative religious fellow travelers. . This was sent out to those on its mailing list on Jan. 12, 2011 attacking the new health care legislation which they believe is part of the Secular Humanist, liberal communist plot to destroy Traditional American values and institutions.
"Let’s stand together against godless socialism and for the love of Jesus Christ.
National health care is a bad law that allows tax dollars to be used for abortion and will lead to health care rationing for the elderly. As believers we must stand for the sanctity of life, of human life made in the image of God.
God condemned the pagan kingdoms of old for their practice of murdering babies through child sacrifice (“Do not give any of your children to be sacrificed to Molek, for you must not profane the name of your God,” Leviticus 18:21 NKJV says) ... what does He think of a nation that makes taxpayers contribute to the slaughter of babies?
National health care will plunge the nation deeper into socialism and increase the deficit at least another trillion dollars in the decade ahead.
A Rasmussen poll showed that 59% of those who voted in last November’s mid-term election are opposed to Obamacare.
This is a window of opportunity for us to stand together and make our voices heard on this critical issue.
Your gift will also help to transform the future, and our nation, by transforming individual hearts and lives through the power of the Gospel—you'll help air The Coral Ridge Hour and our new Cross Examine program that calls believers back to a biblical worldview. And you'll be part of hard-hitting TV specials that alert Americans to the most critical issues of the day, and more.
Thanks for standing with Coral Ridge Ministries again today.
God bless you, and may God bless America.
Jennifer Kennedy Cassidy
Member, Board of Directors"
Tea Party Republicans while complaining that the democrats and liberals are using the Tucson shooting to gain political points The Tea Party express turns around and uses this tragedy for fund raising. Hypocrites as usual.
Tea Party Group Uses Tucson Shootings to Fundraise by Tana Ganeva Via Alternet.org ,Jan. 12, 2011
The Tea Party Express sent an email to supporters this morning asking for money to fight against alleged liberal attacks in the wake of the shooting.
Since the mass shooting that killed 6 and left Rep. Gabrielle Giffords fighting for her life, people across the political spectrum have called on the American right to tone down the extremist rhetoric that paints liberals, progressives, Democrats and minority groups as enemies bent on destroying America.
In a wholly predictable development, tea party leaders and right-wing media stars have mainly responded by railing about a leftist plot to silence them. Last night, preempting Obama's upcoming speech honoring victims of the massacre, Sarah Palin released a slick video in which she glares at the camera and accuses opponents of "blood libel," a term that refers to anti-semitic myths historically used to instigate pogroms and other campaigns of violence against Jews. Rush Limbaugh actually accused liberals of literally rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect of using the shooting to censor conservatives -- or "shut 'em up and shut 'em down."
Think Progress tracked an online forum discussion in which Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips warned that the Tucson tragedy is part of a "war" between liberals and the Tea Parties, and urged Tea Party supporters to spread the falsehood that Loughner was a "liberal lunatic."
It would seem that the Tea Party Express, one of the largest Tea Party groups, has found an even more direct way to capitalize on the grievance ideology that fuels so much of that movement. On Monday the group sent a letter requesting donations. In an email sent to supporters this morning, they ran down a litany of alleged injustices perpetrated against conservatives in the wake of the tragedy and pledged to fight back -- ideally, with donations from their supporters:
"Instead of prayers for the victims and their families, the Left was consumed with using this massacre to score political points by blaming the tea party movement, Gov. Sarah Palin and now Rush Limbaugh."
"Who do these people think they are? First they have the audacity to blame us for a mass murder, and now they try to tell us what we can or cannot say and/or do. They think they can dictate what kind of defense we are allowed to offer for ourselves after they falsely accuse us of being responsible for the wrongdoing of a mentally ill member of society."
Sorry, but we're not going to stand for that kind of treatment. We here in the tea party movement have done absolutely nothing wrong. And we are not going to be told to shut up and sit down, when this tragedy has nothing to do with the wonderful, patriotic and peaceful tea party movement.
If liberals think they can engage in such outrageous behavior than they need to realize it will backfire on them. No friends, we won't be silenced, instead we will show them that their attacks on us will only result in us being stronger.
That's why we've asked you for your support. Let's show the Left that instead of us being silenced, that there awful attacks on us will only backfire and that the tea party movement will be stronger than ever!
Please, make a contribution online right now to the Tea Party Express -
So according to the Tea Party Republicans they are the real victims of the Tuscon shooting because they are being attacked for their over the top inflammatory rhetoric claiming that Obama and his supporters and liberals in general whom they argue are out to destroy America and create a Nazi/Communist Totalitarian state.
They have over and over again characterized all liberals as being unAmerican that only they the Tea Party gang are the only true Americans.
"Poor, Poor Sarah" by William rivers Pitt via Truthout.org , January 12, 2011
Twenty people were gunned down at a supermarket in Arizona on Saturday. Six were killed, including a nine-year-old girl. Fourteen others were wounded, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was the main target of the attack, and who was shot through the head. She is currently lying in a hospital bed with half of her skull removed because brain swelling from her bullet wound could kill her.
Twenty people shot.
Six killed.
Fourteen wounded.
And guess what?
It appears Sarah Palin is the principal victim of the shooting.
Don't believe me? Watch the video she posted to her Facebook page. There she sits, in front of a fireplace and beside an American flag like some cruel joke on Franklin Delano Roosevelt, wreathing herself in pity because people are coming to the conclusion that politicians like her - the ones who have spent the last two years talking about guns and civil war and reloading and such - should bear some of the blame for what happened in Arizona.
How on Earth could anyone come to such an irresponsible and reprehensible conclusion?
Hm.
In a message posted on her Facebook page Sunday afternoon, Sarah Palin reiterated her call for supporters to "reload" in the battle against health care reform, a term that provoked controversy last week after critics accused her of inciting violence against members of Congress. Presenting her message as an exhortation to college basketball teams competing in March Madness, Palin stood her ground in using firearm imagery against the administration.
"The crossfire is intense, so penetrate through enemy territory by bombing through the press, and use your strong weapons - your Big Guns - to drive to the hole. Shoot with accuracy; aim high and remember it takes blood, sweat and tears to win," Palin wrote. In the headline of her update, she mockingly predicted that the message would be "subject to new politically correct language police censorship."
(Emphasis added)
That was supposed to be about basketball, and as usual, all sorts of mean people jumped up and down on her for once again vomiting gun-violence rhetoric into the political debate. Yup, she was the victim then, and is now the victim once again.
Poor, poor Sarah.
Before you start spluttering and staggering in an attempt to comprehend the sheer galactic magnitude of this new round of idiocy - "Who the what the where the when the why the how the what?!" was my initial response - stop a second and remember that this is how people like Sarah Palin operate. This is how they get others to follow them. They make themselves out to be victims, and convince their followers that they, too, are victims.
Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, Savage, O'Reilly and the rest of the right-wing media machine have turned professional victimhood into a license to print money, and people like Sarah Palin are all too happy to jump on that bandwagon. You're losing your country, your rights, your guns, your family, your religion, the sanctity of your marriage, the supremacy of your heterosexuality, my God, you're losing Christmas, for the love of God! You're losing everything (...psssst...they're talking to White Christians when they say this stuff, by the way, which just cracks me all the way up...), and if you don't "take up arms" to stop it, well, it will just make the Baby Jesus weep bitter, bitter tears.
Tea Party extremist appear to believe that only violence committed by Muslims can be characterized as terrorism. But this to some extent has been a problem for the right for decades since acts of violence committed by the KKK or anti-abortionists or white supremacists or by those who are anti-government they refuse to call "domestic terrorism". When the police or National Guard beat up or kill peaceful protesters who are "liberals" the Uberconservatives see these actions as appropriate
The Tea Party's Homegrown Terror Blind Spot via Daily Beast Jan. 10, 2011
The Giffords shooting doesn’t prove that Sarah Palin has blood on her hands. What it does prove is that when it comes to terrorism, people like Sarah Palin have a serious blind spot. On the political right, and at times even the political center, there is a casual assumption—so taken for granted that it is rarely even spoken—that the only terrorist threat America faces is from jihadist Islam.
...Well, we’ve just experienced a terrorist attack over the holiday season, and it was indeed homegrown. Had the shooters’ name been Abdul Mohammed, you’d be hearing the familiar drumbeat about the need for profiling and the pathologies of Islam. But since his name was Jared Lee Loughner, he gets called “mentally unstable”; the word “terrorist” rarely comes up.
When are we going to acknowledge that good old-fashioned white Americans are every bit as capable of killing civilians for a political cause as people with brown skin who pray to Allah? There’s a tradition here. Historically, American elites, especially conservative American elites, have tended to reserve the term “terrorism” for political violence committed by foreigners.
In the early 20th century, for instance, there was enormous fear, even hysteria, about the terrorist threat from anarchist and communist immigrants from Eastern or Southern Europe, people like Sacco and Vanzetti. In the aftermath of World War I, large numbers of immigrant radicals were arrested and deported. Nothing similar happened to members of the white, protestant Ku Klux Klan, even though its violence was more widespread.
...Similarly today, the media spends the Christmas season worrying how another attack by radical Muslims might undermine President Obama’s national-security credentials. But when Jared Lee Loughner shoots 20 people at a Safeway, barely anyone even comments on what it says about the president’s anti-terror bona fides. And yet Loughner’s attack is, to a significant degree, what American terror looks like. Obviously, jihadists have committed their share of terrorism on American soil in the last couple of decades—from the attempted bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 to the 9/11 attacks to Army psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan’s murder of 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009.
But there have been at least as many attacks by white Americans angry at their own government or society.
For almost two decades, culminating in 1995, Unabomber Ted Kaczynski sent mail bombs to people he considered complicit in industrial America’s assault on nature. (A surprising amount of recent American terrorism comes from militant environmentalists.) That same year, Timothy McVeigh blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, the second-largest recent terrorist attack on U.S. soil after 9/11. In 1996, Eric Rudolph bombed the Atlanta Olympics to protest abortion and international socialism. According to the FBI, opposition to abortion also played a role in the 2001 anthrax attacks (you know, the ones Dick Cheney were sure had been masterminded by Saddam Hussein). In 2009, Wichita, Kansas, abortion doctor George Tiller was murdered. (He had already been shot once, and his clinic had been bombed.) That same year octogenarian neo-Nazi James Wenneker von Brunn shot a security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Last February, a man angry at the federal government flew a small plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas
Queen of the Internment Camps for Muslim Americans Michelle Malkin chimes in after the shootings in Tuscon that it is being used by liberals to attack the Right including her and the Tea Party Republicans. So she too sees herself as a victim never mind those shot and wounded or killed in Tuscon.
The problem these uberconservatives have is to insist on the one hand that their incendiary rhetoric and talk about taking up arms to fight Obama is not to blame for such acts of violence.
Secondly they have to speak up in order to drown out any legitimate concerns and thoughtful discussions on the issue of "Gun Control".
They believe there should be no regulations on the purchase and storing of guns period.
Another issue in this case is that of cut backs in mental health care. Malkin and the rest believe that mental health care is just another way to coddle criminals .
These uberconservatives after all are in favor of stiff sentencing of criminals and the use of the Death Penalty even for children, the mentally retarded and the mentally unstable and they see nothing wrong with executing an individual even when new evidence is available which might show the person in question to be innocent.
Their belief seems to be that anyone arrested by the police is guilty until proven innocent.
These are also the same Uberconservatives who have for example calling for an extrajudicial assassination of Wikileaks' Julian Assange.
More Right-Wing Spin on Tucson Shootings; Malkin Sees Campaign to “Criminalize Conservativism” Jan. 2011
While Sarah Palin tries to make herself out as the real victim of the shootings in Arizona, even going so far as to compare herself to Jewish victims of “blood libels,” the right-wing echo-chamber has been busy spinning the shootings in Tucson.
After Tea Party Nation head Judson Phillips called Jared Lee Loughner “a liberal lunatic,” conservatives eagerly promoted his claims. NewsMax claimed that Loughner has links to “left-wing politics” since his favorite books include “‘The Communist Manifesto’ by Karl Marx, Adolf Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf,’ and the fiction classic ‘One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest.’”
The American Family Association’s news service declared the “AZ shooter a leftist, not tea party supporter,” quoting Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America who “believes there is substantial evidence to show that suspect, Jared Lee Loughner, is an angry leftist who hates America and Christianity.”
The RightNetwork’s Gateway Pundit maintained that Loughner is a “Left-Winger” because he “likes watching US flags burn & favorite book is ‘Communist Manifesto,’” and WorldNetDaily said Loughner may have been influenced by a “liberal group founded by Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers and funded by President Obama.”
Rush Limbaugh even alleged that Loughner “has the full support of a major political party in this country. He's sitting there in jail; he knows what's going on. He knows that a Democrat [sic] Party -- the Democrat [sic] Party -- is attempting to find anybody but him to blame.”
But when the Right isn’t attempting to paint Loughner as a liberal, they try to demonize Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik. Right-wing writer Michelle Malkin today called Dupnik “The Worst Sheriff in America” and condemned his “vulture-like exploitation of the shooting rampage.” Dupnik, who has spoken out against the role of violence and hate mongering in politics, has found himself in the crosshairs of conservative pundits and politicians. Now, Malkin seeks to blame the Sheriff for the shooting and accuses him of seeking publicity for himself and attempting to “criminalize conservatism”
...The shooting in Tucson was not an anomaly. It was an inevitability.
And as long as we continue to play this foolish game of "both sides are just as bad," and rely on trusty old ablism to dismiss Jared Lee Loughner as a crackpot—dutifully ignoring that people with mental illness are more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators; carefully pretending that the existence of people with mental illness who are potentially dangerous somehow absolves us of responsibility for violent rhetoric, as opposed to serving to underline precisely why it's irresponsible—it will be inevitable again.
Let's Get This Straight: There Is No Progressive Equivalent to the Right's Violent Rhetoric via Alternet.org Jan 13, 2011
The shooting in Tucson was not an anomaly. It was an inevitability, and as long as we play this foolish game of "both sides are just as bad," it will be inevitable again.
Both sides are, in fact, not "just as bad," when it comes to institutionally sanctioned violent and eliminationist rhetoric.
There is, demonstrably, no leftist equivalent to Sarah Palin...who uses gun imagery (rifle sights) and language ("Don't Retreat, RELOAD") to exhort her followers to action.
There is no leftist equivalent to the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), a group which was created from the mailing list of the old white supremacist White Citizens Councils and has been noted as becoming increasingly "radical and racist" by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which classifies the CCC as a hate group—and is nonetheless considered an acceptable association by prominent members of the Republican Party...
There is no leftist equivalent to Glenn Beck...longtime user of eliminationist rhetoric, including equating universal healthcare to rape, joking about victims of forest fires being America-hating liberals, comparing Al Gore to Hitler, condoning the murder of Michael Moore, accusing Holocaust survivor George Soros of being a Nazi collaborator, joking about poisoning Nancy Pelosi, equating immigration reform with burning US citizens alive, publicly endorsing violent revolution, and winkingly telling his viewers not to get violent...
There is no leftist equivalent to Ann Coulter or to Bill O'Reilly Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, Pat Robertson etc....who said that a baseball bat is "the most effective way" to talk to liberals, as well as: "My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building."...
There is no leftist equivalent to Bill O'Reilly...(who)lied about and stalked his critics, said that progressive bloggers should be dealt with "with a hand grenade," said Air America hosts were traitors and should be "put in chains"...
There is no leftist equivalent to Rush "I tell people don't kill all the liberals. Leave enough so we can have two on every campus—living fossils—so we will never forget what these people stood for" ...
There is no leftist equivalent to Michelle "In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror" Malkin....
There is no leftist equivalent to Pat "The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians" Robertson, host of The 700 Club...
Only progressives "infect" the culture, but conservative hate speech exists in a void.
That's what we're meant to believe, anyway. But we know it is not true. This culture, this habit, of eliminationist rhetoric is not happening in a vacuum. It's happening in a culture of widely-available guns (thanks to conservative policies), of underfunded and unavailable medical care, especially mental health care (thanks to conservative policies), of a widespread belief that government is the enemy of the people (thanks to conservative rhetoric), and of millions of increasingly desperate people (thanks to an conservative governance...Faced with the overwhelming evidence of the violent rhetoric absolutely permeating the discourse emanating from their side of the aisle, conservatives adopt the approach of a petulant child—deny, obfuscate, and lash out defensively.
...The shooting in Tucson was not an anomaly. It was an inevitability.
And as long as we continue to play this foolish game of "both sides are just as bad," and rely on trusty old ablism to dismiss Jared Lee Loughner as a crackpot—dutifully ignoring that people with mental illness are more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators; carefully pretending that the existence of people with mental illness who are potentially dangerous somehow absolves us of responsibility for violent rhetoric, as opposed to serving to underline precisely why it's irresponsible—it will be inevitable again.
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