Frankly, in a nation where Rush Limbaugh , Sean Hannity , Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, Jonas Goldberg and Michael Savage are considered mainstream conservative opinionmakers, I’m not surprised that some of the audience, after being fed a steady diet of their mental poison, would decide to live out the Rambo fantasy and solve the “problem” with their firearms.
However I thought I’d throw it out to the group: Are the above examples just random nutcases or do they indicate a deeper pathology?
Total coincidence in my book. We don’t yet know many of the details in the murder of Bill Gwatney, the Arkansas Democratic Party Chairman. The motivations may be hard to find out because the killer is dead, but we’ll see. The Unitarian Church shooter didn’t murder a reverend during a service or anything, he shot up a children’s production of Annie. That makes him BatShit CrazyPants as far as I’m concerned. He responded to particular political views in a certain way because he was nuts, but people who spread the viewpoints aren’t responsible.
Minor correction, by the way - the OP is referring to Jonah Goldberg, who pissed me off a few years back when he hijacked the Simpsons anti-French slur “cheese eating surrender monkeys” for political purposes.
I think the fact that Jerome Corsi’s book is expected to be a No. 1 best seller is indicative of a problem in America. I wouldn’t want to spend any time with fire arm owner that that would buy his book.
Well, it is difficult to ascribe motive to crazies, and I do not know if I can come up with a liberal agenda murder for every stated conservative agenda murder, but I would offer Squeeky Fromme’s attempt on Gerald Ford and Arthur Bremmer’s shooting of George Wallace as a starting point.
I’ve never heard anyone ascribe political motives to Squeaky Fromme. Do you mean Sara Jane Moore?
I’d agree that you probably find equal numbers of crazies on both far ends of the political spectrum. Equal numbers of killers, though? I don’t know about that.
Back in February a gunman tried to kill the entire government of the city of Kirkwood, MO and damn near succeeded. His motive appeared to be personal rather than ideological – a non-partisan whackjob, as it were.
If you want to compare Rhodes, Franken, and Maddow to Goldberg and maybe Limbaugh and O’Reilly, I wouldn’t argue with you. I don’t agree, but I wouldn’t go so far as to argue about it. I’ve often conceded that Michael Moore is our Rush Limbaugh, even if I think Moore has added far more to the discourse than Limbaugh ever thought about.
Ann Coulter and Michael Savage have no well-known analogues on the left. You’d have to go down to some pretty obscure bloggers to even get close to their tone.
I suppose that what you say is technically true, if you have an extremely broad definition of “whackjob” that includes nearly any vaguely partisan political pundit. Still, it’s like saying that Roger Federer and I are both tennis players.
Is there some karmic force that makes sure all the various political sides are balanced? This is the same sort of false equivalence the traditional media have been flogging for years, pretending that every side of an argument is equally valid. Sometimes one argument has the facts on its side, and sometimes one end of the political spectrum has a much more violent tone than the other.
Shootings like these are rare enough events that you can’t generalize from them. But if the right-wing tone is such that people can sell T-shirts about shooting liberals, they shouldn’t act shocked when a few liberals get shot.
Wait a second folks. Slight hijack here but I’m still trying to wrap my head around the seemingly tacit acceptance that Rachel Maddow is the analog of Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, or Bill O’Reilly. In what way is Rachel Maddow a whackjob or, worse yet, an ignorance-spewing hate monger, or a borderline racist which, I contend, these other four maniacs are? What, because she’s an avowed, unrepentant liberal she’s automatically a whackjob? Is it because she’s a Gay, avowed, unrepentant liberal?
Back to the OP - Although there’s no information available presently that a political inclination on the part of the perpetrator played a part in the Arkansas case, and we may never know one way or the other, I must admit that, yeah, when I heard the story I expected further information to come out about how his hatred of liberals/love of conservative-religious values drove him to it, and yeah, to be honest, I still do. I’m willing to accept, however, that this guy had just been pushed too far and lost it for completely apolitical reasons.
Your other two examples? Oh yeah. Part of a much larger, seemingly pervasive, and disturbing pattern indicative of a particular self destructive political mindset in this country.
As DrJ says, these are rare events, necessitating a long time line to find comparisons. Also, ascribing motives to nutjobs is gonna by definition be difficult.
For someone like myself who does not feel comfortable with the discourse from either the right or the left, yes, those who are vehement that their view is correct are extremist in their point of view. I think that it is easier to accept someone whose views are close to yours as being wise, but for someone with my views, those espousing either end of the spectrum appear equally crazed.
I completely disagree. Al Fraken is running for a Senate seat in Minnesota and has a good chance of winning; I doubt any of the commentators I mentioned from the right would get anywhere near a run for public office. Rachel Maddow is not at all comparable to the kind of spew you find on Hannity, Limbaugh, or Savage…I know such arguments are tough to quantify, but seriously, it isn’t even close. Randi Rhodes is about as shrill as you get among well-know left-wing commentators; for the sake of argument I’ll give you that one. I also notice no one has mentioned Keith Olberman…but does anyone here think he’s equivalent to the Limbaugh-wannabe Glenn Beck?
The lazy assumption that “liberals are just as extremist” is belied by the facts. The Rush Limbaugh Show–pumped out daily on 600 radio station with a Arbitron-measured audience of 13.5 million weekly listeners–is by definition the mainstream of popular conservative thought. This is a program which, in the last week, claimed that Barack Obama voted three times to “allow doctors and patients to murder babies” (not fetuses, but babies outside the womb–he made this point very clear). I’d like someone to point to a similar outlandish claim by a comparably-popular left-wing pundit. Then maybe I’ll take the claim that “they’re all just as bad” seriously.
your site is 501 3 c group set up to “monitor” conservatives
the page you linked did not deny Obama voted down the legislation and instead posted this: **a bill that amended the Illinois Abortion Law of 1975 and, as Media Matters for America has noted, that opponents said was unnecessary, as the Illinois criminal code unequivocally prohibits killing children, and that it posed a threat to abortion rights. ** - Obama did indeed vote down the Illinois bill after he approved the changes copied from the Federally approved law that added neutral language that would not interfere with Roe versus Wade laws.
NOTE: the link on their page to an Obama site discussing this triggered an Adobe security alert that states it is trying to contact admin.brightcove.com. You can read his response directly from his website then click on “Learn” then “know the Facts”, then go down to the bottom of the page and click on archives and then look under the month of June ( June 30th 2008 - Fact Check on CNN AND Bennet’s…)
You missed the point entirely. The claim was not that Barack Obama voted “present” on a bill he felt was a back-door attempt to regulate abortion (a more pressing issue at the state level since abortion is regulated by the states), or even the simpler truth that Obama voted to support abortion rights. The exact claim was that Barack Obama voted three times to “allow doctors and patients to murder babies.”
Now, you may not see much difference in that bit of rhetoric and the actual facts; fair enough. Still, wouldn’t you agree that if I truly believed Barack Obama was in favor of murdering infants or even connived at their slaughter (not hard if you listen to enough right-wing talk radio on a daily basis), I would be more likely to pick up a weapon and “do something” about it? I doubt you could make the same violent connection with mainstream liberal claims about John McCain (he’s old, out of touch, has a bad economic plan, wants to drill off-shore–hardly shooting offenses).
Limbaugh is playing with fire, and he does it simply for the shock reaction he knows it will generate in his audience. To be clear, I don’t question his right to say whatever he wants on his radio show, but I do question his judgment. Mainstream right-wing punditry doesn’t criticize the left for wanting more gun control, they instead claim “the liberals are coming to take your guns” and “aim for the head” of ATF agents. They don’t just oppose Democratic politicians, they openly “dream” of “riots in Denver” for the good of the country. In that kind of “intellectual” climate, I’m not surprised that a few will take the message literally.
In a delicious bit of irony, it was Roseanne Barr who actually called for riots in Chicago on Air America, Rush just said he “dreamed of riots” because it would ensure that a Democrat was not elected.
And you can poo-poo or excuse Obama’s vote for infanticide all you want, but even his camp admitted over the weekend that it happened. Saying he was worried about an attempt to undermine Roe v Wade when the state legislation he was against is exactly the same as federal legislation he claims to support is weak, the fact that even NARAL didn’t oppose the bill makes it doubly weak. He’s going to have to deal with the issue as the campaign goes on.