I’d rather have people throwing pies than hiring hitmen to kill a judge and a private citizen that the right-wing establishment spent plenty of energy trying to paint as Satan’s minions (and yes, some lefties were pro-tube too, but they didn’t have a 24/7 media machine blaring that Michael Schiavo and Greer were tyrranical scum that deserved anything they got, have their lives ruined, etc.). Then again, I’d rather not have pies either. It’s fucking stupid. Not to mention that crackpot French performance artists did it first.
What do you want? It’s Moto. He is nobler than thou.
Also Marcelino Corniel, who charged at the front of the White House with a knife. Rather a lame attempt, but his intent was clear. I’m still searching for the other one.
As for Pat Buchanan, just run through a list of his lifetime greatest hits. You’ve got his wacky antisemitic conspiracy theories, his constant racist comments about immigrants, his half-compliments to Hitler, and in his book The Death of the West he basically said that only White Christians are capable of running a successful modern society. A person who acts that way and then gives speeches in strongly left-leaning areas is asking for trouble.
There is no a constitutional right to shout someone down. That qualifies as disturbing the peace. Free speach is certainly a function of liberty. However, it does not mean that someone has to listen to you. Stated differently, it means you cannot force someone to listen to you. When there is a speaking engagement there is a clear delineation of who the speaker is. If it is a debate then the people invited to debate are the speakers.
The point that Mr. Moto is trying to make, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that while the left is using shoes, salad dressing, and pies the right is using guns, bombs, and planes. To more effect.
There are morons on both sides of the fence. If you want to talk about Mr. Bullhorn types, look no further than the circus outside the hospice where Terry Schiavo was. Nobody seemed to care about disrupting the desire for peace and quiet of other people staying there. Look at those who advocate bombing family planning offices. Sure the “left” has loonies. But so does the right. We, both sides, have our share of assholes, to which we might say "We don’t want your “help”.
Can’t speak for Mr. Moto, but the OP says nothing about guns, bombs and planes. And the government is using those in the ME, not as a tool of political discourse here in the U.S. Yet. [crosses fingers]
Sorry, but if Mr. Moto was gonna paint with a very wide brush, I was gonna show him how to do it right by using a roller. It was meant to be an instructive exercise in hyperbole, underlining points made by my betters. To wit: if the best he can come up with in his cherry-picking is a tossed shoe and some spilled salad dressing to decry the vulgarity of “the left,” while pointedly ignoring the evil that can just as easily be ascribed to “the right” by his rigorous rules of logic, well, then, …that boy ain’t right.
I think NurseCarmen was referring to incidents already mentioned in this thread of right-wingers using guns (posts 39,41), bombs (7,15), and planes (40) as a means of political expression here in the U.S.
The thing is, the left, as previously pointed out, is overly fond of political theater. I ended up bowing out of radical leftist politics in the mid-nineties for precisely this reason: there was an overemphasis on the symbolic action, and an underemphasis on taking actions that had positive effect. It pissed me off.
That said, the worst that leftists tend to do in this country is smash windows–bad, to be sure, but not atrocious. The worst that the rightests tend to do involves assassination attempts and mass terrorism.
As for the fourth assassination attempt against Clinton, there’s the Republic of Texas yahoos who planned to poison Clinton with a thorn shot from a modified cigarette lighter. Granted, the Republic of Texas is a bunch of bongo-playing Democrats, at least in BrutusLand (o noes!!!111!one).
Apparently, according to a Republican Senator, murdering judges families or shooting them in court is just the more sincere version of expression of the frustration all on the right-wing have been instructed to feel:
SENATOR JOHN CORNYN: “I don’t know if there is a cause-and-effect connection but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country. Certainly nothing new, but we seem to have run through a spate of courthouse violence recently that’s been on the news and I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters on some occasions where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in - engage in violence.” [Senate Floor, 4/4/05]
In current threads dealing with abortion protesters and Senator Cornyn, I took both to task for tactics that went way past what could be called civil political discourse. I’m sure you could find these if you want to look for them. If not, I will happily cite them.
I’m making a real effort to apply this standard fairly across the board. If I screw up with it, I’m sure you’ll call me on it.
Mr. Moto, do you agree that there’s a serious difference between (say) throwing salad dressing on a person, and offering a quarter-million-dollar bounty for their assassination?
Do you agree that leftist wackos have an inordinate fondness for salad-dressing stunts, and rightist wackos have an inordinate fondness for death threats?
It does seem to me that, because the salad dressing stunts are so relatively harmless, there’s a lot less condemnation of them on the left than there is condemnation of death threats on the right. I think that’s as it should be: death threats deserve more condemnation. However, I will agree with you that there’s insufficient condemnation of salad-dressing stunts from the left.
Such stunts may be juvenile and stupid and relatively harmless, but that doesn’t mean they’re completely harmless; and one of their greatest harms is that they poison political debate, distract from real debate. As such, everyone interested in real debate should oppose them.
Can’t speak for Mr. Moto, but the OP says nothing about guns, bombs and planes. And the government is using those in the ME, not as a tool of political discourse here in the U.S. Yet. [crosses fingers]