For me, it's kind of a big deal, because I honestly don't expect Fox News talkers to be in touch with reality. Nice to see, but what he says is scary.
In the last year, we've seen a guy shoot up a church because he wanted to kill liberals. We've seen a guy kill three cops because he thought Obama was going to take away his guns.
We've seen a guy assasinate a ob/gyn physician in his church.
We've seen a guy who hated Jews and Blacks and questioned Obama's birth certificate go on a rampage and kill a security guard at the Holocaust museum.
You can say these were all lunatics and loners if you want. But don't tell me these are isolated incidents. This is a trend. This is exactly what the DHS memo on right-wing violence predicted.
"...conservative commentators tried mightily to paint the memo as an underhanded attempt by the Obama administration to smear its honorable critics by equating "right-wing" with "terrorism." It made no difference to these loudmouths that the number of hate groups around the country has increased by more than 50 percent since 2000, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. It didn't matter that the memo was backed up by solid intelligence and analysis. For these infotainers, the point isn't to illuminate a subject with light but to blast it with heat."
-Eugene Robinson
(I highly recommend you read that article, by the way.)
Those "infotainers" have always bothered me, and never more so than now, when they daily rail against Obama, calling him a socialist, communist, fascist, saying he is destroying the country. A couple weeks ago I saw a clip of O'Reilly and Beck talking about how they "believed" Obama supported the Black Panther ideology. "I can't prove it, I don't have evidence, but I believe that," O'Reilly said. What a statement. And it sums up too many on the right. They want to believe the worst about Obama, so they do. No evidence required. If they say it, it's so.
If you think that violent movies and video games influence people to become more violent, what effect do you think this daily barrage of hate has? Glen Beck is the most delusional, paranoid person I have ever seen on television, and he's a huge hit with the Fox viewers. The same viewers Shep Smith was talking about.
In the end, I have only a question, not a solution.
Where is this all going to end up?
1 comment:
Q: Where is this all going to end up?
A: Exactly where it usually does. No where except in the media circus that tries to pass itself off as news.
Since the mid-80s, whichever party has held the White House has faced nearly constant media harassment from the infotainers that support the other side. It seemed like the Bush-bashing that went on after '04 might have even swayed the election in Obama's favor, because people were so sick and tired of hearing about how bad Bush was. Now it's Obama's turn.
There have also always been right-wing extremists committing acts of domestic terrorism. The increase in the number reported by the SPLC is interesting, but, statistically, this is not surprising. It's likely that the percentage of citizens who are going to do something totally crazy hasn't changed, but the number of citizens has gone up, so there are more actual incidents.
However, this doesn't seem much like an alarming trend. The mid-90s brought us several high profile bombings (Oklahoma City, Olympics, abortion clinic) and a serial bomber (Unabomber)-all of which were perpetrated by right wing domestic terrorists. At least the current incidents had a lower body count.
The underlying motivator for this seems to be 2-pronged: economics and age. People who are laid off and angry tend to put that energy somewhere. On top of that, we have a whole generation of people aging into retirement who've been nursing grudges for a long time. Again, that energy has to go some place...as we saw at the Holocaust museum.
Homeland Security was right to issue the memo. Do you think people have become more vigilant and that's why the incidents have yielded fewer victims OR do we need to step up our watchfulness of the crazy neighbor we've known about for some time?
EFT
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