So the tighty righties as usual are trying to say that the shooter of a liberal judge and a liberal Congresswoman was, err, a liberal, and they probably are going to convince their echo chamber of gullible people who shout "keep your government hands off my Medicare!" of this "fact". So what, nobody outside their echo chamber of morons, cretins, and venal evil sons of bitches gives a shit anyhow.
But our so-called media is really missing the boat when they focus their sights upon "angry" rhetoric. Look. There's plenty of shit that makes me angry. It makes me angry that in the richest land on the planet, the amount of money that Sheriff Joe Arpaio wastes losing lawsuits over violating the civil rights of his prisoners every year would have saved the lives of at least two people murdered by Republican governor Jan Brewer's death panel. I am angry that my tax dollars are used to kill women and children in Afghanistan. I am angry that every effective method of ending the current recession by creating jobs via government action is stymied by a Republican Party that is more focused on scoring political points in some sick game of one-upmanship than upon the good of our nation.
What I am not, however, is violent. I do not state or imply that entire classes of people are vermin who should be exterminated, the way that mainstream Republican pundits on hate radio and Faux News regularly expound. I do not advocate taking up arms against our democratically elected government. I do not advice killing people, which is what the right wing is saying when they talk about "watering the tree of liberty" -- they're talking about murdering people who don't agree with their ideology. I don't "joke" about killing the staff of the New York Times the way that Ann Coulter "joked", I don't advocate violence in any way or form other than as delivered by the justice system after a fair trial before a jury of one's peers in a duly constituted court of law.
And that is the fundamental difference here between right-wing rhetoric and left-wing rhetoric. Left-wing rhetoric is often angry. But for all of Keith Olbermann's angry rhetoric, can you point me to one instance -- even ONE instance -- where he advocated violence? NO. Because lefties simply do not advocate violence. Even the more radical lefties I know, the ones who wanted George W. Bush hanged for treason, were quick to clarify "after a fair trial in a court of law that finds him guilty" when I cornered them on that statement. Can you point me to *one* mainstream left-wing voice that has ever advocated violence? Hello? Hello? Is anybody out there?
-- Badtux the Nonviolent Penguin
My only quibble is with calling Rep. Giffords a Liberal. She's a blue dog.
ReplyDeleteCheers!
JzB
Preaching to the choir, BT, preaching to the choir.
ReplyDeleteThe folks that should hear us never will, alas.
Did you notice that at least once Faux identified Giffords as "R" implying the shooting was bt a "D" (or DFH)?
Jazz, for Arizona, Giffords is liberal. So when the conservative thuggery does their Radio Rwanda chant of "kill the liberals... kill the liberals... kill the liberals..." (then claims it's a "joke" when called on it), Giffords would definitely have the snipers' cross-hairs on her.
ReplyDelete618, we're not part of their echo chamber so of course they won't hear us. As far as the "keep your government hands off my Medicare!" crowd is concerned, Giffords was a Republican and her shooter was a liberal because that's what they heard on Faux News and that's that. But people *outside* the echo chamber are a different story.
- Badtux the Former Zonie Penguin
Denial is denial, Badtux---whether done by an alcohol addict or someone snorting too much Rush/Beck/Coulter habitually. They will go on insisting the crazed loner who was a liberal teen is none of their fault.
ReplyDeleteMy question, eternal and also unanswerable, is "how angry and stupid can people become before they're no longer functional?" When the inchoate rage and inability to navigate through the changing world's challenges makes it so that a critical mass can't pay their utility bills or come up with food to eat. Where is the crash point on the stupidity/survival scale? And how does it play out? Massive numbers of suicides? Millions of individual gun-rage explosions? Or a steady drip-drip-drip of homelessness, starvation and death from exposure?
ReplyDeleteI used to say I was not afraid of dying because I'd regret the loss of my own existence. What bothered me was that I wouldn't get to see how things turned out. But in light of the die-back bottleneck I see coming for humanity's population, I'm no longer that keen on watching the play-out. Not that I plan on dying anytime soon, but the end of this story is not one I particularly care to view.