And there is always the vested interests in the huge money and right wing media propaganda machines like Fox… the fomenters and originators of this tragedy along with their GOP and Tea Party creations and collaborationists. I hear a lot of the Talking Heads deflecting attention and coming up with every possible stupid deflection away from their responsibility in this situation, but their Hate Spew and irr3esponsible spin on news is greatly to blame. I think Fox News and other Conservative media conglomerates are treasonous, terroristic, and seditious organizations and they should be treated under the same letter of the law of the Patriot act and its various deprivations of rights and property that is reserved for Terrorist organizations. It would only seem ironic for a second… then just.
Thread title edited for clarity, and to prevent duplication.
OK. You’re going to honestly tell us that you can’t imagine any other motivation? Really???
In Palin’s case, I’d say it’s about her raking in the dough.
Seems to me, if people are giving you their money, you’ve influenced them in a very real, tangible way. I try it, all I ever get are restraining orders.
You don’t think there is a stronger correlation between Republicans and pro-life/racism than there is between Democrats and pr0-life/racism?
This post makes me wonder how someone this stupid can operate a computer.
We’re talking about the motivation a person has for saying something. Note:
The implication being that the likes of SP talk about “reloading” because they want people to commit acts of violence, and that there could be no other motivation. I suggested an alternative motivation. One that has been known to be very “motivating”.
Its called projection. He thinks about how much political hay he would make out of this tragedy if the roles were reversed and assume that Democrats would do the same (and I’m sure some will).
The only ones that have projected anything are the poor, and disenfranchised, the weak-minded, and those clinging to money and power. Those who are hopeless. The rich and famous.
I don’t know that that is really what I was saying. I don’t listen to Rush. I don’t watch Fox (or any other news on television for that matter). I don’t like Palin. Beck from what I can tell is a loser. I read CNN.com and that’s about it. I haven’t heard much if any of this “vile, evil right-wing rhetoric” coming from elected officials until this thread. Maybe I’m wrong about it. I still can’t believe that there are people really that weak-minded and stupid that would literally take to heart some of the vaguely threatening things I’ve read some of these morons say by reading them here.
To be sure, calling for the abolition of a government agency isn’t the same as saying its “unconstitutional”. Maybe its in the link.
Pretty much.
If anyone has proof of Anyhing, I’d urge them to turn it over to Law Enforcement and not to make the slightest whiff/hint that it exists via post on an internet message board. America deserves every opportunity to fully trace and prosecute this back up to its root-source, to the fullest extent of the law.
Finally ‘The Patriot Act’ can be put to good use.
She gets her money by influencing others to believe what she is saying. She sells her books and gets interviews precisely because there are legions of dumbfucks who believe her.
Did anyone post this NY Times article yet? It has some insight into this insane idiot, including a claim by a friend that Loughner was a liberal extremist.
There are always people that are pretty crazy but not quite ready to act upon it.
I have a hard time believing, as a reader of the boards, that you haven’t heard about how Sharon Angle said we’d need to drive Reid out in the election so we wouldn’t have to take him out with “second amendment solutions”. Sarah Palin putting targetting reticles on congressman, talking about how we shouldn’t retreat, but reload… the thinly veiled incitements as rhetoric are pretty common.
Even if you haven’t come across those specific cases, you just need to look at the general political discourse. Modern republican propoganda is not of the “we disagree on how to run government, their policies will damage the country” nature. They are of “AN EVIL OUTSIDER IS TRYING TO RUIN EVERYTHING YOU LOVE! HE WILL TURN US COMMUNIST AND KILL YOUR GRANDPARENTS FOR BEING OLD! WE’RE THE REAL AMERICANS, AND THEY ARE ALL TRAITORS!”
When you talk in such terms, radicalize the people who listen to you, and you empower the crazies. People with fringe views that might otherwise not become violent will feel as though their view is now not only mainstream, but they’d be the hero of the “real americans” if they read behind the lines of the thinly veiled incitements and took action against the evil socialist conspiracy to destroy our country.
This sort of rhetoric absolutely would inspire people to rise up and take action. Your defense is essentially “well, sane, moderate people won’t listen to that shit” and that’s true, but you have a wide spectrum of sanity and radicalism. In the past, the mainstream - the pundits on major networks, the actual elected officials, would take sane and moderate positions. But over the last few years, the Republicans have gone off their fucking rocker and embraced shit that used to be marginalized crazy shit as mainstream.
It only takes the fringes becoming empowered to see people take action like this, and when you cater your rhetoric to make people as radicalized as possible, you embolden the previously ostracized fringe.
It’s quite frankly amazing that the level of fury and crazy that the republican pundits are inspiring hasn’t lead to more violence.
He sounds like an anarchist, so liberal extremist/radical leftwing would fit. Of course, when you go that far to extremes you can’t really be compared to sane liberals or conservatives anyway.
The lack of irony with which people are desperately attempting to link it to “the other side” (be it left or right) is disturbing. Can’t you see that the political culture in the US, with treating the other side as not someone to be debated but instead the ultimate evil, is in all likelihood why this is actually happened?
This is a very, very strange thread.
I’m going to have to go with the viewpoint that whether or not the fear-mongering and crypto-violent rhetoric of Limbaugh, Beck, Palin, Bachmann, Angle and their fellow travelers can be shown to have directly influenced the Tucson shooter, it surely has not had any great benefit. I’ve seen it frequently mentioned in the past 24 hours that threats against elected officials are up considerably from just a couple of years ago, and find it hard to assume that comes from nowhere.
At this early time, the shooter appears pretty clearly to be a deranged individual, so I suppose it is possible that if he had not happened to open fire at a Democrat, he might have instead found a Republican (or Libertarian/Green/whatever) to fill with lead instead. I don’t suppose we can ever know, unless the shooter himself says so, how much of an influence the overheated, falsely apocalyptic partisan rhetoric of the past few years may have affected his action. Nevertheless, most of that rhetoric has come from self-professed right-wingers, and a common feature of persons with disordered thinking of the shooter’s type seems to be an obsessive search for facts and patterns that support their odd interpretations of the world around them. While it’s still too early to know for sure whether, say, Angle’s notorious comment about ‘second amendment solutions’ directly influenced the shooter, if he knew of it it surely didn’t help, did it?
In any event, the things that have been said by the various mooks named above cannot be unsaid; what I do hope to hear going forward is frequent, loud and unequivocal denunciation of their tactics from the mainstream of the Republican party. Now we shall see whether that happens.
Someone already tried this one. If you criticize people for their over the top rhetoric and incitement to violence, or people who actually do that violence, then you’re just doing the same thing as them! The difference between their murder and your criticism of their speech is only a matter of degree!!!1111
There’s no “desperately attemping to link”. Elected Republicans officials and pundits with major airtime are implicitly inciting violence, and we’re saying “well, it looks like you got what you’re trying for” - to try to make those into equivelant actions is absurd.
Seriously, all of you only have the defense of “if I can vaguely link two actions to be similar, then all sides are equally guilty and criticisms against my side are dismissed!” and you trot it out fucking constantly. It’s tired and stupid.
I don’t believe any politician is seriously inciting people to shoot other people, not even Sharron Angle. I think they’re just playing with fire in the form of violent revolutionary rhetoric which serves to intimidate liberals into expressing public fear, knowing that liberal expressions of fear are to conservatives like the scent of blood in the water to sharks. But as far as sane people go, I’m not going to blood-libel even the craziest conservative by saying that they would go around assassinating their political enemies.
The problem as I see it… they’re not just bringing all this musket-loading rhetoric into their tent… they are also bringing bringing actual insane people into their tent. There is no element too fringey for them to court. So when you are actively cultivating the nut fringe, and then whipping up violent rhetoric… if you say you couldn’t possibly have guessed that anyone would get hurt, you look either extremely dishonest or extremely stupid. I look forward to Palin’s public statement on this to see which way she plans to go. Of course it’s also possible she will outright escalate the crazy by saying ‘things like this will happen when the leaders ignore the people!’
Posts in which “people” are being accused of doing something are really unhelpful. If you’ve paid enough attention to the thread to be able to make this generalizations, you can use the names of specific posters who are doing what you say. If you cannot name specific posters, then you’re generalizing without looking at the substance of posts. Not everyone is doing what you’re saying and I’m rather offended this post came right after mine. I for one am not in here trying to play the blame game.