Memory hole? 

The only place I’ve seen it mentioned at all is the blogosphere.  Most Americans don’t have a clue that it happened at all.  No need to send it down a memory hole if it never existed in the first place.

White Christian patriarchal men can do no wrong.  Unless they are lone “crazies” and then it doesn’t count.

This has been immensely frustrating to me. And I’ve never heard any member of the media come up with a decent explanation for why “white person commits or attempts to commit act of political violence” doesn’t warrant the same kind of wall-to-wall coverage as “brown person commits or attempts to commit act of political violence.” I really wish there were more reporters and media people who would respond to this sort of question, but nowadays, they ignore all criticism that doesn’t come from the extremist right.

Hope your move went well, BTW.

He’s noting that the explosives weren’t that explosive-y—-they were fireworks, basically

That’s never stopped anyone going full-bore mental when a Muslim tries to detonate a “bomb” made from chapati flour and OTC hair bleach. At least fireworks are liable to actually explode, even if they don’t do it very energetically. A lot of the “bombs” which people have gotten so worked up about wouldn’t even catch fire.

Acts of church sponsored domestic terrorism are so common that they don’t really count as news anymore

Honestly all of his acts seem to have a sound coherence to them.  The only time they could consider him schizophrenic is what he said during a federal trial.  It seems he had a long history of being disturbed due to being in and out of mental hospitals but his violence all seems to have a coherent theme which I think people want to ignore because it’s easier to function with a belief that he’s crazy and not evil.

This has always been the M.O. of the media since it isn’t good print to attempt to explain that his man is simply a horrible human being who also happens to be crazy.  His illnesses don’t explain his acts and frankly his whiteness is a driving motive to maintain a social solidarity on top of all of this.  “Whiteness” is something owned by right-wingers in the media’s view.  The leftist whites (who arguably make up a slim/minor majority) are played down because it breaks the image of racial solidarity which is something the media in their effort to tell stories will not do.  To admit that whites are an ill-defined group that should be more so be defined on class and ethnic lines since they better define would break the back of right-wing politics since they rely on trying to rope in moderate whites or apolitical whites with race and class politics.

I did see this story a few days back on one of my daily MSM homepage headline scans, but I can’t for the life of me recall if it was MSNBC, CNN, Guardian, CBC, BBC, or Herald Trib/NYT. It may very well have been a non-US news org (Canadian or British). But one headline does not, as Amanda points out, much notice make. Talk about the rule-proving exception.

But rest assured that when bringing up things like this, where people actually are arrested and charged, that the wing-nuts will pull out some anon comment on a blog somewhere to show their false equivilence.

Following up on cynickal, if this story had been reported with anything approaching its intrinsic prominence, there would have been no end of RW know-nothings (think, for instance, of the tiny coterie of jackass commenters/sycophants on Althouse) fancifully detailing how Stockham was “really a leftist.”

So fucking predictable.

My boss once said that profiling is great, and that if middle-aged white guys were committing significant amounts of terrorism, he would gladly submit to profiling himself, just to save the non-terrorist groups from the hassle.  Maybe I should send this link to him.

My hometown (Detroit) media is all over this one, naturally. But the side of the story that they play up is the guy in the bar who heard this man talking and called the cops. The “hero” is being feted while the back story of what compelled a wingnut to drive from Nevada to Michigan in the dead of winter is being totally downplayed.

Since I left Michigan, I have lost count of the number of people who were genuinely surprised to find out that the state has a really large population of people of Middle Eastern descent. I don’t think this was well known to most folks in the U.S. (as Detroit is not exactly a top vacation destination) until the right wing made sure people knew it. Now there is no end to the ranting about what a god awful place Dearborn must be. Which isn’t true because it is 1,000 times better than it was in the 60’s and 70’s when Dearborn was ruled with an iron fist by a thoroughly racist mayor.

Doug Muder at “The Weekly Sift” (very recommended, if you don’t know it yet) taught me a new concept:

There’s now a term to describe those who use the media to stir up crazy people to do their dirty work for them: stochastic terrorism. Daily Kos’ G2geek defines:

Stochastic terrorism is the use of mass communications to stir up random lone wolves to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.

You’re all ignoring the fact that this was not an act of domestic terrorism.  This was directed at Muslims who, as we all know, are not real Americans.  Therefore, it doesn’t meet the criteria.  Also, only brown people commit terrorism—white folks are patriots.

It doesn’t look like we’re going to manage to go a week this year without an isolated incident.
They’ll claim it’s all lone nuts until one finally turns up in full Teabagger regalia and starts shooting. Then they’ll claim it was a liberal plant.

At what point do they stop being isolated incidents? Is there a quota per state or city? Maybe 50, so there’s one for every star on the flag?

The Washington Post had a short story at the bottom of page 3 (I think it was) along with some other misc. national stories.

Heaventree, I find your post predicting something that didn’t happen, then labeling that PREDICTION ‘predictable’, ludicrous.

I think the circle of crazy is actually far too restricted. Crazy does not necessarily mean violent.

I think it is completely justifiable to call Sharron Angle totally fucking bonkers. It’s just not expressed by her personally trying to kill people. 

And so, then, perhaps a third of the US population qualifies… and maybe half or more of white men over 50. Which proposition itself sounds crazy, but I cannot escape the apprehension that it is the sad truth.

Totally. Fucking. Nuts.

How do we get out of this?

“Stochastic terrorism is the use of mass communications to stir up random lone wolves to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.”

I guess he read DeLillo’s “Libra” then.

Remember the Muslim kid who bought fake explosives from the FBI in an attempt to blow up some Christmas display? He was led on by the FBI every step of the way and the wingnuts went crazy over it.

But that kid is MUCH more dangerous than this guy, of course. /snark

If your memory needs tweaking

The last article says this guy claims to be a convert to Islam…what?

Well, the elephant in the room that would exonerate the…well..elephants is that (from wiki) in” 2002 he pled not guilty by reason of insanity to threatening to blow up a Veterans Administration center in Vermont and making threats against President George W. Bush.”

Now we can still railroad the right since they’ve engaged in so much anti-muslin rhetoric. Sharon Angle was referenced here.

However, by that logic all the assassination rhetoric, 911 conspiracy theorues, and diebold theories that we saw coming form the left would mean they would have to take collective moral responsibility for his previous act of political violence.

Thats quite a Faustian Bargain and everyone knows that no one likes to be held to their own standards, so this little terrorist will soon disappear from public meemory. You got nothing.

Following up on cynickal, if this story had been reported with anything approaching its intrinsic prominence, there would have been no end of RW know-nothings (think, for instance, of the tiny coterie of jackass commenters/sycophants on Althouse) fancifully detailing how Stockham was “really a leftist.”

So fucking predictable.

Already happening. Another blog I visit has one of its’ regular trolls going on about how Stockham is a leftist because “he hates George Bush”. And so Loughner is a leftist too. Thus the left-wing are the REAL violent ones. QED. Also, hate site. (Wish I was fucking joking, but… yeah.)

http://zandarvts.blogspot.com/2011/01/last-call_30.html

Also, count me among those who didn’t know that Dearborn had a large muslim population. Neat.

Also, count me among those who didn’t know that Dearborn had a large muslim population. Neat.

Yup, they came to work for Ford back in the early and mid-20th Century. And more recently, Iraqi refugees.  North American Muslims are the best integrated Muslim minority in the western world, and worthless fucks like this asshole want to turn them into an alienated one like in Europe to fulfill their own fantasies.

Many are Christian, too

This is especially true when talking about Lebanese-Americans. They vast majority of them are Christian, it’s one of the reasons Lebanon’s Christian population has shrunk so much since their civil war.

Manju, perhaps you could enlighten us:  how many prominent leftists, liberals, or even Democrats were calling for Bush’s assassination in 2002?  How many political candidates on the liberal side talked about “second amendment remedies” if they didn’t win the election?  How many mainstream cable news outlets were giving hours and hours of air time to 9/11 conspiracy theorists at that time?  And since when is objecting to what any intelligent person can easily see was a highly irregular election in Florida in 2000 an incitement to violence against a sitting president?

False equivalence is false.

Even on Salon, several commentators disparaged this as “only firecrackers.” I’d like to see what would happen if a Muslim turned up at a church with so much as a water pistol.

He served time in jail for pretending to be a Muslim who pretended to threaten George Bush. Or something.  He wanted Muslims to get in trouble for it.

The problem with that is that mental illness is like the common cold—-almost everyone has a touch of it—-so they’ve created a neat little loophole where there is no such thing as a terrorist action, no matter how neatly it ties into paranoid wingnuttery, that will actually “count”.

Except for Muslims or brown people. If a terrorist act is committed by a brown person or a Muslim, it is a pure evil act of terror committed by an evil person who hates us for our freedoms. Doesn’t matter if the Muslim happens to be a U.S. citizen and a member of the U.S. Armed Forces who may be suffering from severe PTSD.

And before anybody jumps to conclusions, I consider Nidal Malik Hasan a terrorist, and I consider what he did to be an act of terrorism. I believe he should probably be incarcerated for life for his crime.

But I also believe that the man may have been suffering from some form of mental illness when he committed his crime, very likely PTSD. I don’t believe that this in any way exonerates him for his actions, and I don’t believe that he shouldn’t be held responsible for what he did. But I do believe that the dude was motivated by more than just pure evil.

And for the record, I believe Jared Loughner was/is probably also suffering from sort of mental illness, very likely mild schizophrenia, BPD, or bipolar disorder. And regardless of that fact, I think he is still a terrorist and I think he should also be punished to the full extent of the law for his crime. Life imprisonment is what I would also give him.

As you pointed out, mental illness, in a very broad sense, is something that affects a huge percentage of people, but there’s a pretty wide gap between someone who suffers from full-blown catatonic schizophrenia and mild depression. I think almost anyone who would maliciously kill other people has something out of whack in their brain functioning, but I don’t think that means they should automatically be freed from moral and social responsibility for their action, nor do I think they should be automatically be exonerated from punishment. It really depends on the situation, but the vast majority of people who commit murder have basically forfeited their right to participate freely in society, and deserve to be incarcerated, and deserve to be scorned for their violent actions.

Manju, perhaps you could enlighten us:  how many prominent leftists, liberals, or even Democrats were calling for Bush’s assassination in 2002?

Well, which prominent righty called for a mosque to be bombed?

How many political candidates on the liberal side talked about “second amendment remedies” if they didn’t win the election?

Well, only 1 repub did. There was a dem who called for the FL gov to be shot though.

How many mainstream cable news outlets were giving hours and hours of air time to 9/11 conspiracy theorists at that time?

Polls indicate that 911 conspiracy theories are roughly as popular on the left as birtherism on the right. I don’t have the data on how many mainstream outlets popularized either theory.

And since when is objecting to what any intelligent person can easily see was a highly irregular election in Florida in 2000 an incitement to violence against a sitting president?

I was thinking of Robert Kennedy’s Diebold conspiracy theory. It undermined the legitimacy of Bush’s 2004 victory and, as the eliminationist theory goes, this could be used as a justification for violence by a mentally unstable person. Indeed, quite a few of these guys hated Bush: Stockhman, the AZ shooter, the holocaust museum shooter, Joe Stack (plane into IRS).

Obviously, asking the mainstream American RWing to own a Bush hater is problematic, No?

9/11 Troofers are neither left nor right, they’re in that scary, dark place where the far-left and far-right meet.

. Indeed, quite a few of these guys hated Bush

So did 70%+ of the whole country by the end of his term in office.

I saw a blurb about this on Yahoo a while ago—not even a full-sized article or links anywhere with a fuller discussion. Shocking that everyone is sweeping this under the rug, innit. 9.9

And do I even have to describe the comment breakdown on it? Nice mix of “lol fireworks” and “lol fireworks; hand that man some real ammo.” Stay classy (mostly) Christians.

However, by that logic all the assassination rhetoric, 911 conspiracy theorues, and diebold theories that we saw coming form the left would mean they would have to take collective moral responsibility for his previous act of political violence.

“All the assassination rhetoric”?

Seriously?

A few random idiots carrying “Death to Bush” signs at anti-war rallies in 2002 is hardly representative of the left as a whole, namely because no mainstream liberal pundits or politicians or activists were ever speaking in defense of the tiny group of people who did that. They were pretty universally repudiated by virtually everyone on the left.

9/11 Truthers represent an even more fringe group on the left than Birthers on the right. How many Democratic U.S. Congresspersons have ever aligned themselves with Truthers? Can you say the same thing about Republican Congresspersons and Birthers? How many liberal talking heads have done so? Olbermann, Maddow, Schultz - they all pretty universally dismiss Truthers. Bill Maher threatened to kick some Truthers out of his studio during a taping of Real Time because they wouldn’t shut up. I can tell you that much larger percentage of conservatives give credence to Birtherism than do liberals who give credence to Trutherism.

As for the protestations surrounding the 2000 election, there was legitimacy to it, considering it was the most controversial U.S. Presidential Election in history and only the second time in U.S. history in which the candidate with more total popular votes didn’t win the Electoral Vote. It was an election whose outcome was ultimately decided for the Republican candidate by a Supreme Court made up of justices who were almost all appointed by Republican presidents. Yeah, there’s nothing controversial about that at all. If the outcome had been that Gore was ultimately declared the winner instead and you think Republicans would have just sat down and accepted it, I’ve got some beachfront property in Nebraska to sell you.

So did 70%+ of the whole country by the end of his term in office.

Them why blame the remaining 30.

Also, I’m seriously starting to believe that when rightwingers say some teabagging white domestic terrorist is “crazy” they mean it like “girl, you so crazy! I love it!”

“Crazy dude” = secret racist wish fulfillment jackoff fantasy extravaganza!

Them why blame the remaining 30.

Because a large number of people who hated Bush hated him because he wasn’t right-wing enough. Remember all the screaming about the “NAFTA Superhighway” and the “North American Union” and the “Amero” circa 2006? Exclusively from the right wing, and they blamed Bush for it. And they doubly hated him for trying to push immigration reform.

He served time in jail for pretending to be a Muslim who pretended to threaten George Bush. Or something.  He wanted Muslims to get in trouble for it.

Sounds made-up. I mean, this would be terrific evidence for your side so the lack of a source here makes me suspicious.

After all, according to wiki he converted to Islam in ‘79: “On September 1, 1979, the Merced Sun-Star reported that Stockham, whom it described as a “32-year-old Moslem convert”...”

“There was a dem who called for the FL gov to be shot though.”

Who?

Because a large number of people who hated Bush hated him because he wasn’t right-wing enough. Remember all the screaming about the “NAFTA Superhighway” and the “North American Union” and the “Amero” circa 2006? Exclusively from the right wing, and they blamed Bush for it. And they doubly hated him for trying to push immigration reform.

Well, then you would have an Oswald situation. Yes the far-RW is opposed to globalization, etc but that’s why Pat Buchanan left the repub party. Also, biing anti-nafta is actually mainstream on the left Obama and Clinton were practically falling over each other in Ohio trying to bash nafta.

Plus you don’t make your case. Name the anti-nafta terrorist. If I recall, there was one guy who David Niewert and others labeled as part of the RW who went after the pentagon and hated bush because of the war. He seemed libertarian but was a registered dem.  Anti-war and 911 seems to be the most prevalent issue, not nafta,  but I’m willing to look at data.

Mark:

Rep. Paul Kanjorski said of Rick Scott: “Instead of running for governor of Florida, they ought to have him and shoot him. Put him against the wall and shoot him

Try again Manju.  You said in your earlier post that assassination rhetoric was coming out of the left.  You then referenced one dem (no name mentioned) who allegedly threatened to shoot Jeb Bush.  Again, I ask, who is this person?  If this actually happened, then that person was in the wrong, but such an attitude was hardly typical at the time.

I also fail to see how anything RFK jr. said in 2004 could possibly have influenced events that occurred in 2002—unless of course our would-be assassin had a time machine.  Next thing you know you’ll be blaming it all on Michael Moore. 

roscoe3680 has cogently addressed your other points.  The simple fact is that the loony right has had a lot more mainstream press, attention, and even promotion than the loony left ever had—thus, their potential to influence people bent on political violence is that much greater.  The loony right also has the tacit approval, if not the outright support, of the Republican party.  Can you name a Democratic politician that would give the 9/11 truthers the time of day?  Yet you seem intent on pushing the “pox on both your houses” false equivalence narrative.  Left wing terrorism (aimed at people, not property) hasn’t been significant issue since the early 70s, and yet people like you persist in the belief that “both sides do it.”  I suppose that position has it’s appeal, as it allows you to feel superior to the rest of us peasants who just don’t get it, but it flies in the face of objective reality.

I really need to (re)retry that show—it’s got such cool concepts but inevitably I get like 2 episodes in and say “...eh” and stop watching for years. (Do the characters become… likeable? at any point?) :p

Yes the far-RW is opposed to globalization, etc but that’s why Pat Buchanan left the repub party.

Not really. When asked about it he replies “I live in Virginia, we don’t have party registration” (which is entirely true, technically I’m an independent because of this). He loves him some Sarah Palin, though.

It’s silly most of the time to put domestic terrorists/assassins on the political spectrum, though. Most of the time, anyway, there are exceptions like John Wilkes Booth, Timothy McVeigh, and the Unabomber, but most of the time they’re in the scary dark place where far-left and far-right meet (obsessing over the “purity” and value of currency, NWO paranoia, anti-semitism, hatred and distrust of any kind of international institutions and foreigners,  etc.).

And Ron Paul is very popular on the loony, isolationist, anti-globalization (and currency-obsessed) right, and he’s very much a Republican.

Rick Scott didn’t run for FLA gov until 2010.  Were Kanjorski’s admittedly wrongheaded remarks able to influence our would-be Bush assassin all the way back in 2002?  Did Kanjo’s remarks against the FLA gubernatorial candidate somehow inflame our would-be killer of Muslims to somehow want to kill Muslims?  How exactly, Manju, do you imagine that this chain of causality worked?  Please, do tell.

@ Bitter Scribe:  I noticed the same thing there, and couldn’t believe the blase attitude.  You would think anything that can blow your hand off your arm would be recognized by most rational people as “dangerous.”  Sheesh.

Try again Manju.  You said in your earlier post that assassination rhetoric was coming out of the left.  You then referenced one dem (no name mentioned) who allegedly threatened to shoot Jeb Bush.

The simple fact is that the loony right has had a lot more mainstream press, attention, and even promotion than the loony left ever had—thus, their potential to influence people bent on political violence is that much greater.

The fact that your not aware of the incident referenced in the first quote (i name names above)  should lead you to question whether you have all the facts. How can you come to the conclusion you do in the 2nd quote if you’ve only looked at rhetoric and political violence from one side. And even when the violence is aimed against the right its still labled RW Violence.

Just a few days ago man was arrested for threatening repub William Snyder of Fl. Anti-Wlamart activists passed out fliers that put a “target” on the developers home. UCLA neuroscientist J. David Jentsch life has been threated by animal rights activists. The discovery channel shooter actaully referenced al gore’s work. There was a plot to bomb the RNC that resulted in arrests and convictions.

None of these incidents are covered here afaik, and certainly not at Crooks and liars, here the point man for this theory resides.

So, isn’t it possible you’re suffering from observer bias and a skewed sample?

Rick Scott didn’t run for FLA gov until 2010.  Were Kanjorski’s admittedly wrongheaded remarks able to influence our would-be Bush assassin all the way back in 2002?  Did Kanjo’s remarks against the FLA gubernatorial candidate somehow inflame our would-be killer of Muslims to somehow want to kill Muslims?  How exactly, Manju, do you imagine that this chain of causality worked?  Please, do tell.

Well, I was replying to “2nd amendment remedies” which was not aimed at Muslims just as Kanjorski’s was not aimed at Bush. Just pointing out general eliminationist rhetoric that enters the atmosphere as the theory goes.

I suppose yo could tie Kanjorski into the threat against Rep Snyder. I mean, there’s no evidence he heard Kanjorski but there’s no evidence the Az shooter saw Palin’s map.

How many Democratic U.S. Congresspersons have ever aligned themselves with Truthers?

One, the woman from Georgia, and she lost her primary and became a Green.

“White Christian patriarchal men can do no wrong.  Unless they are lone “crazies” and then it doesn’t count.”

That is so ableist and islamophobic really - not that you write this, since you’re obviously sarcastic, but that people really do think this.

Manju must believe there a dozen terrifying terrist left-wing attacks on Real Americans for every right-wing attack (by someone who is just a lone nut, probably a secret liberal, and definitely crazy — “crazy” defined as “not a wingnut”), but the Evil Liberal Media is covering it all up because George Soros told them to do so.

The irony here is that if Rupert Murdoch declared his media outlets were to call the color of the sky “red”, there would be nimrods like Manju explaining how the sky just isn’t as blue as it was, and as a matter of opinion it was perfectly reasonable to call the sky “red”, and besides, there was a guy on Daily Kos who wrote a diary referring to the “red” sky, so it’s just as common on the Left to believe the sky is actually red.

Keep drinking that poisoned FlavorAid…

Bagelsan - Do the characters become… likeable? at any point?

Depends on how you define “likable.”  They never become particularly nice, but they do get more…defined, I suppose is the best word.

I too have seen zero coverage of the Stockham case in the national media; this was literally the first I heard of it. Looking through a bunch of stories on him I’ve found on google news—most seem to be from either Reno or Detroit papers—it’s really astounding to me how much shit he’s been involved in over the years. Shouldn’t someone go to jail for a very long time—more than the ten years he got—if they try to pipe bomb an airport? Especially when this is on the heels of him making threats against a president and, well, all of this:

Prior to his Reno airport bomb arrest, Stockham had been found not guilty by reason of insanity for blowing up an oil tank in Lompoc, Calif., while he was on bail for kidnapping his son from a foster home and flying him in a rented plane to Los Angeles where he crashed into a peninsula, and was arrested.

In 1977, he armed himself with bombs and a pistol and took his Century City, Calif., psychologist hostage. He surrendered hours later after meeting with an L.A. Times reporter.

And that’s just a small portion of his long career.

“White Christian patriarchal men can do no wrong.  Unless they are lone “crazies” and then it doesn’t count.”

WCPM don’t exist if you are one - no more than air or gravity exist if you’re not looking for them.

I actually was thinking it was Ann Arbor, not Dearborn, that had the large population of muslims/people of middle eastern descent (not equivalent to us, but to RW nuts?)

My understanding is that Manju’s shtick is to argue that liberals are somehow “just as bad” if not worse than conservatives when trying to defend or distract fro conservatives’ moral lapses with respect to cvil rights, torture, and advocacy of violence as an intimidation tactic. I part I understand—he wants to justify how he’s not morally culpable and morally suspect for his adherence to the rather hateful and irrational modern republican party, but his arguments can be presupposes to be disingenuous bullshit.

IMO Fox news is directly responsible for at least several murders.  Certainly you can’t even argue with a straight face that they put the hit on Tiller.  Beck is responsible for several other murders.  And they are ramping it STRAIGHT UP.

Today I found out that Jessica Valenti took a gig as a weekly columinist at The Daily, Rupert Murdoch’s new IPAD news venture.  I am amazed, nearly daily, at the depths some liberals will crawl to for a buck and some expousure.  And she is peddling it on twitter hoping for followers.  It costs money every week to get The Daily.  And that money funds terrorists, again, IMO.

I’m getting a little fed up with the professional left, but not for the same reasons that Gibbs is fed up with them.

I hope I never see Amanda pulling that shit.  But anyone who does, doesn’t ever get a click from me again.

Not just false equivalency, but ever moving goal posts.  Only mildly surprised it took 21 posts for the denialists to crawl out of the interwebs.

Strange how Fox Nation has the William Snyder’s case on the front page, but nothing on Roger Stockham.  I guess it’s best that the federal government has kept us lefties under their watchful eye since the Ludlow Massacre.  No telling what demanding equal rights, fair pay or the hope for health and happiness will lead to if we aren’t violently kept in our place.

Yet another single white loser has surfaced, making threats. Watch this one disappear: guy threatens to blow up Wadena, Minnesota courthouse, referring to Jared Lee Loughner as a ‘hero.’ 

What’s that you say, Manju? He was probably a secret Muslim?

Shit. Is there two of them? Two different guys making threats?

http://www.kare11.com/news/article/905080/396/Police-Man-threatens-to-blow-up-MN-buildings-calls-Loughner-hero

http://ksax.com/article/stories/S1570054.shtml?cat=0

“No telling what demanding equal rights, fair pay or the hope for health and happiness will lead to if we aren’t violently kept in our place.”

You jest, but our Wall Street overlords take this stuff very seriously. 

Every billion in taxes on the rich is a billion that can’t be used on immense mansions (so many you can’t keep track of how many you have, eh McCain?), limousines, private jets, celebrity chefs, designer everything, etc.  If it’s a matter of very-slightly less luxury for them (so the little people get things like equal rights, fair pay, health coverage) versus violent repression and death for us, we know what they’d choose.

If Bush Jr. and Darth Cheney were the avatars of America v2.0 - A Fascist Police State Isn’t as Bad as You Think, then we’re beta testing the new America v3.0 - Civil Rights?  Civil Rights are for those can pay for them…

Manboobz @ 56: is it just me, or did your entire comment need to end with “...like a BOSS”? :p (Which is to say, wtf, that is some ridiculous nuts shit that guy’s been up to.)

Bagelsan: I really need to (re)retry that show—it’s got such cool concepts but inevitably I get like 2 episodes in and say “...eh” and stop watching for years. (Do the characters become… likeable? at any point?)

Batou gets more likable. Togusa grows a spine. The Major engages in awesome gunfights while still being a complete emotional cipher. Honestly, GITS isn’t an anime you watch for characterization, but for cool explosions mixed with philosophical musings.

Yet another single white loser has surfaced, making threats. Watch this one disappear: guy threatens to blow up Wadena, Minnesota courthouse, referring to Jared Lee Loughner as a ‘hero.’

What’s that you say, Manju? He was probably a secret Muslim?

Well, if the salient characteristics are that he’s single, white, and a loser, I don’t necessarily have a problem with your focus, providing you can demonstrate that people possessing those characteristics are more likely to commit acts of political violence. I haven’t the slightest iea if they do or not and it doesn’t sound like anyone else here has gone beyond the anecdotal. 

But I thought we were talking about RW terror enabled by the mainstream right. I see this new guy has targeted several churches and last I checked the Christian right was a major part of the American conservative movement. its not looking good for those trying to fit him into the eliminationist meme.

He was also inspired by Jared Loughtner, a Bush-hating 911 truther who also had anti-christian views. Early reports of connections to RW anti-govt groups have been completely debunked and it turns out his odd anti-govt conspiracy language came from an anti-capitalist pro-environmental film called zeitgieist. The langauge thing appears to be the most important factor in his crime since he thought Giffords was a “fake” and was infuriated by her refusal to answer the question: “What is government if words have no meaning?”

To be fair, his one RW characteristic is being anti-abortion. But unlike Tiller’s assassin he was not aligned with any group and that doesn’t appear to have motivated this shooting. His friends say he was either apolitical or liberal.

Despite testimony from his best friend that “He did not watch TV, he disliked the news, he didn’t listen to political radio, he didn’t take sides, he wasn’t on the Left, he wasn’t on the Right” you continue to try to link the crime to RW rhetoric, even after our President has dismissed you all. Given the anti-capitalist and environmentalist theme of zeitgeist, and since that was his major obsession leading to the crime, I’m tempted to say he’s on the left, but I don’t want to become what you guys are.

No wonder the Obama admoinistration dismisses the professional left.

God,  Manju,  you’re such a fucking liar it’s not even funny. Amanda herself cited the bit about the guy trying to put Muslims in for the shooting in the goddamned piece.  Which you didn’t bother reading before you leapt into “LIe about Reichwiners! NOW!”

A Bush-hating Truther? Are you on crack? He cited shit that’s been enshrined in far right wing rhetoric since the rise of the Birthers and the Paulites, but hey, go ahead,  sob into your pillow about it.

And violence, per se, is proof of mainstream conservative motives, which is consumed with racism, sexism,  power, control, homophobia,  Islamophobia, and hatred of anybody who’s not a rich white guy.  Glenn Beck’s been implicated in at least two attempted shootings. Churches are sacred to Reighwingers? Tell that to any black person who survived conservative white assholes killing four little girls at that Church in Birmingham.  Or tell that to any American Muslim who’s seen attacks on mosques go ignored by the mainstream press. A mosque, needless to say, is the equivalent of a church. If you had any integrity, that is, which you don’t. 

  All of which is basic reality. Conservatives hate liberals, they hate women, they hate black people, they hate gays, they hate Muslims, and they hate anybody who’s not a straight white guy.  Thirty years of hatred can’t be denied no matter how much you whine and try and argue with whatever bullshit talking points you got from Glenn Beck’s show yesterday.  It’s like arguing that the KKK is just a harmless lil ole social club.  It’s getting sickening. 

  All of which Amanda has covered here, all of which you whine and lie about. Go ahead. Tell me again how Glenn Beck’s not a hatemongering racist scumbag. That never gets old.

...there are none so blind as those who will not see…

“But I thought we were talking about RW terror enabled by the mainstream right.”

“Enable”?  Sometimes, mostly the extreme anti-abortion terrorists who kill and maim.

But “enabling” (as in providing material support and help) isn’t the problem.  Encouraging is.

Spouting off the modern equivalent of “will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” and then pretending there couldn’t possibly be a connection is ridiculous, and a basic lie those on the Right like to tell themselves…

blockquote>God, Manju, you’re such a fucking liar it’s not even funny. Amanda herself cited the bit about the guy trying to put Muslims in for the shooting in the goddamned piece. Which you didn’t bother reading before you leapt into “LIe about Reichwiners! NOW!”</blockquote>

I read it, but unlike you I also read the linked piece only to discover that amanda’s assertion that he “tried to kill a bunch of people so he could blame it on Muslims” was exactly that: Amanda’s assertion. She made it up. No where in the piece does it say that, which makes sense since the guy’s been a self-described muslim convert since ‘79. Not that I would pin this on islam. I’m not you.

But the fact that he’s a Muslim (as well as hating Bush) problematizes the narrative. So Amanda pulls a trick out of the conspiracy theorist book: unfalsifiablity. Evidence contradicting the theory now becomes evidence for it. All we have to do is take a leap of faith that he was trying to set up Muslims and his self-described conversion then actually lends credence to him being a RWinger. There’s no way out of the ideology.

A Bush-hating Truther? Are you on crack? He cited shit that’s been enshrined in far right wing rhetoric since the rise of the Birthers and the Paulites

Again with the unfalsifiablity. Even though being a bush-hater and 911truther is well out of the mainstream right and much more in line with the left, since there’s also a faction of the right that holds these views, he’s still RW.never mind that there is no actual connection to the Ron Paul or the John Birch Society.

its a trap. if a terorist is anti-abortion they are RW. Pro-abortion well you could be a libertarian so your still RW. Anti-gay marriage, RW of course. Pro- gay marriage, hey Ayn Rand was too! Pro-nafta=corporate RWinger, Aniti nafta, hey Pat Buchanan! See how this works.

Tell that to any black person who survived conservative white assholes killing four little girls at that Church in Birmingham.

You’ve offered no proof that those men were conservatives. But after the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing the civil rights movement led by MLK blamed one man in particular: George Wallace, the Govenor of Alabama.

And we know what Wallace was: he was a Democrat and a Liberal. Thats why he never switched to the more conservative party. He was a New Dealer, well known for his economic populism…in great contrast to movement conservatism which was anti-new-deal, pro corporate, and anti-welfare state.

After becoming a born-again Christian he renounced segregation. But his policies never changed. He was still an economic populist. Civil rights veterans forgave hm and he won the Black vote as a Democrat in his later runs for political office.

His fate was very similar to Orville Faubus of Little Rock fame. Faubus was even more left, so much so that he was red-baited in his early political career. After clashing wiht Ike over segregation he had cordial relationships with fellow-liberals JFK and LBJ. He was even able to win a the black vote even before he explicitly renounced segregtion, since his republican challenger was economically conservative. He was so left that in his later years he endorsed Jesse Jackson!

They not alone. Claude pepper, famous for supporting lynching was so left that Truman thought he was a communist. He had George Smathers run against him for the Fl senate. Smaters was also a liberal who was JFK’s best frind in the senate and was almost his VP. He was a segregationist (as was LBJ at the time, another pro-jim crow liberal.)

William fullbrights was famous for being anti-war and being a liberal intellectual and Clinton’s mentor. Al Gore (nuff said). Robert Byrd (lowest hanging fruit). These distinctly left of center politicians flibustered the 64 cra. liberal icons FDR, Adlai Stevenson, and JFK all ran for President with segregationists as their running mates. Yet you reduce exclusively democratic political violence to “conservativsm” even though Jim Crow benefited the more progresisve party. And I bet you simultanesly make fun of the Texas school board for their racsit historical revisonism. You have more in common with them than you know.

Let’s see, which party has made it a part of its platform to outlaw abortion?  To support sexist pahrmacist who want to deny women birth control?  Which TV network features a commentator who, for two months prior to Dr. George Tiller’s murder, referred to him as “Tiller the Killer” or “Tiller the Baby Killer” twenty seven times? Which political party made it its platform to fight against womens’ rights, gay rights, civil rights, and gay marriage? Which party has been this way since they courted the religious right in the Eghties? Which party had Pat Robertson make the keynote address from the GOP RNC where he famously said, “Feminism makes women turn into lesbians, practice witchcraft, abandon their families, and kill thier husbands?”  Which political party has Rush Limbaugh as its most popular mouthpiece, followed only by race baiting hatemonger and Jew-basher Glenn Beck, amongst many other things? Which party, Manju? That’s a direct question, and I want a direction answer.  Which TV network openly supports just one political party, and it’s not the one Manju likes to demonize? Huh, Manju? 

The then 38-year-old decorated Vietnam War pilot called the FBI and the Reno Gazette-Journal and told them what he’d done, identifying himself with a self-given Muslim name.. says he’s an Islam convert.  Gee, he SAYS he’s a convert to Islam.  Let’s believe this violent guy who I notice you forgot to mention also threatened Jimmy Carter,  because that destroys your narrative of oh noes the Reighwingers are being unfairly targeted for their actions, policies, and words!

Let’s listen to this scumbag, by all means. Let’s ignore the fact that he targeted a mosque. Who targets mosques? Why, which party likes to promote the idea that they’re all terrorists? Which party opposed the Park 51 community center, to the point where they—and their puppet network Faux—-called it the “Ground Zero Mosque”? 

  Manju has a vested interest in trying to whine that we should listen to this asshole, because obviously conservatives like to lie about what they’re doing. They talk about the family….but want to prevent gay families from becoming whole. They talk about the sanctity of marriage but they want to keep a large segment of the population from marrying. They talk about baybeez, but all their policies do it make it is make it impossible for women to be in control of their own bodies. They talk about small government but mention that just for white male Repubs.  And so on.  They talk about the Concerned Citizens Committee and neglect to mention it was a bunch of all white dudes who went around lynching blacks.

They want to talk about all kinds of bullshit….but then they bomb, shoot, murder, harass, threaten, and persecute only certain kinds of people.  They call a President who wants to provide people with health care a Nazi.  That’s the mindset that Manju is coming from. 

Go on, Manju, tell me about how the KKK is really just a social club for harmless white guys.

“See how this works.”

Yeah, we see how it works.  Every.  Fucking.  Day.

Everything can be tortured and twisted into relieving the Reichwing of all responsibility for everything while placing responsibility for everything on the Left.

From my 20s through my 30s, Jimmy Carter was somehow responsible for everything bad that happened in the US: The Economy, Foreign Affairs, the weather.  And even though Ronnie Reagan and Bush 1st managed to rack up a quadrupling (or was it quintupling?) of the National Debt, that was Carter’s fault too, if it wasn’t Johnson’s.

Then Clinton came along and has now become responsible for everything bad that was done by Bush Jr., and now Obama can be blamed for everything bad that happens for the next two decades or so, regardless of reality.  You morons have even tried to blame Obama for the bad US economy that was already going down the shitter during the last couple years of Bush Jr. — before Obama was even elected.

Why is it the “Party of Personal Responsibility” is never actually responsible?

I think this sums up my experience with the Right-wing over the last 50-years: “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”...

You’re a disgenuous lying sack of shit, Manju. Think, asshole.  Who hates black people enough to attack them? Why, that would be conservative white men. In case you haven’t been keeping up on current events,  you’re using definitions that flipped flopped when the Republicans decided to appeal to all the racist white assholes.  Calling George Wallace a liberal is like calling the KKK a social club.

In your eagerness to try and act like fifty years ago is going you to enable to hide from the Repubs’  present, you’re ignoring the fact that you guys like to talk a lot but you still hate blacks, women, gays, Muslims, and anybodywho’s not a rich white guy, and your policies and your favorite network show that.  So try again.

  I can’t believe it. Manju actually tried to argue that the Sixteenth Street bombing was the work of something other than racist conservative white guys. Tell me, dickwad, do you bomb people you’re fond of? Is that how you demonstrate affection, an appreciation of their policies?

Conservatives spend a lot of time arguing about what ‘is’ is but the fact is, they’re the ones yearning for the Good Ole Days——when white men ruled the country and everybody who wasn’t straight, white, and male had to cower in fear.

I can’t believe this fucker actually tried to argue that just because they bombed the famous black church that doesn’t mean they weren’t conservatives. Because liberals, who fight to preserve or obtain rights, SO love to bomb the churches of their constituency.  Yeah. That makes sense.  If you’ve been watching FAux News.

So, Manju, why don’t you tell me how the KKK is just a harmless widdle social club?

“So, Manju, why don’t you tell me how the KKK is just a harmless widdle social club?”

Haven’t you heard, ginmar?  According to the leading historians in the “conservative movement” (like Jonah Goldberg), the KKK is actually a radical leftist organization, along with every other political or cultural movement the wingnuts don’t like.  History is just funny that way, I guess…

Jesus, I’d forgotten about that. Obviously Manju is a big Goldberg reader. Who in their right mind would accept the idea that Hitler was liberal?

Haven’t you heard, ginmar?  According to the leading historians in the “conservative movement” (like Jonah Goldberg), the KKK is actually a radical leftist organization, along with every other political or cultural movement the wingnuts don’t like.  History is just funny that way, I guess…

MikeEss: weren’t you one of the people who tought it riduclous to say Strom thurmond was the only senator who filibustered th 64cra to switch parties? You were proven wrong and yet you still persist.

I’ve never read Jonah Goldberg. If your’re serious about civil rights history, particularity in regards to the the 2nd Klan’s relationship to the progressive movement i would suggest Prof David Southern’s The Progressive Era And Race. You do know that the KKK was an official part of the dem party don’t you? You do knw that woodrow wilsn, arguably the most progressive prez in history (moreso than FDR bacause he was intellectually so) helped popularize the 2nd Klan (thru Birth of a Nation). A Blurb:

In this comprehensive, unflinching account, David W. Southern persuasively argues that race was the primary blind spot of the Progressive Movement. Based on the voluminous secondary works produced over the last forty years and his own primary research, SouthernÂ’s synthesis vividly portrays the ruthless exploitation, brutality, and violence that whites inflicted on African Americans in the first two decades of the twentieth century. In the former Confederate states, where almost 90 percent of blacks resided, white progressives followed the lead of racist demagogues such as “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman and James Vardaman by consolidating the Jim Crow system of legal segregation and the disfranchisement of blacks, resulting in the emergence of the one-party Democratic South. When legal discrimination did not sufficiently subordinate blacks, southern whites resorted liberally to fraud, intimidation, and violence—most notably in ghastly lynchings and urban race riots. Yet! , most northern progressives were either indifferent to the fate of southern blacks or actively supported the social system in the South. Yankee reformers obsessed over the concept of race and became ensnared in a web of “scientific racism” that convinced them that blacks belonged to an inferior breed of human beings. The tenures of both Theodore Roosevelt, who wrote more about race than any other American president, and Woodrow Wilson, who was reared in the Deep South, proved disastrous for African Americans, who reached their “nadir” even as Wilson led the United States on a crusade to make the world safe for democracy

Calling George Wallace a liberal is like calling the KKK a social club.

Wallace was a democrat and, outside of civil rights, a liberal, ie a new dealer. Unlike Thurmond he never switched partys so like Byrd, Stennis, etc, liberals own him as much as conservatives own Strom.

King blamed Wallace for the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing so how in the world do you expect conservatives to feel responsible for what happens under the watch of a liberal-dem who never joined the conservative movement, opposed conservative economic policy, was a dem in good-standing to his dying day, and opposed Nixon who was to his right.

republicans and conservatives did not benefit from the racially coercive one-pary state of the jim crow era. That was the heyday of the new deal coalition, who the segregationists almost to a man were part off. Why can’t you own that? Thats american racism. thats why its profound, bacause it co-existed with liberalism, beginning with the founding and thomas jefferson.

But MLK was indeed a progressive, if it makes you feel any better.

Repubicans and cons did not benefit from the….Are you brain damaged?  Seriously, how stupid are you?  Thanks to assholes like you—-and by the way, asshole, where’s my answer?——-white men ran roughshod over the South decades before the New Deal attemped to right some of the abuses that white men like you claimed as their conservative white male right. You can quibble all you want, you mendacious little shit,  but conservatism is not about moving forward. It’s about living in the past, and as you so aptly demonstrate, lying when the facts are so very obviously against you.

White men denied black people the vote and without the ability to make their voices heard they suffered through a kind of de facto slavery in which they were kept illiterate,  fearful, and unable to inform themselves as to what rights they actually had. Conservative white men like you did everything possible to suppress and intimidate these people. The New Deal, you dipshit, came at least a half a century later and was due in part to abuses like lying shitholes like you.

Conservative white men, like yourself, in contrast to your idiotic assertions,  benefited form having their labor pool live in fear because this saved them money on employees.  Black people were intimidated and often outright murdered if they got uppity. You can protest all you want that these were Dems, dammit, but the fact is that the Dems of the day were in fact Repubicans.

YOu’re lying about MLK, but it’s entirely possible you’re too stupid to understand any sentence more complicated than what your idols tel you, which apparently includes Jonah Goldberg’s lies. MLK blamed Wallace for creating and promoting a climate of violence.  The actual bombers were KKK members. Now aren’t you going to claim that the KKK was actually a social club?

Tell me again how the Dems of the Nineteenth Century—-today’s Repubs—-are the same as today’s Dems. That never gets old. It does make you look ever more idiotic, however. 

You didn’t answer my questions, asshole. Answer them or fuck off.  The lies are so staggering in their ambition and shamelessness that any decent person has to find them shocking.  One has to look at Glenn Beck or Limbaugh to see this kind of shameless bullshit.

Just wait. Pretty soon Manju’s going to argue outright that it’s all a plot on the order of Truthers, where liberals go around attacking gays, womens’ clinics, and mosques so as to gaslight everybody. Oh, wait, the Baggers already tried that.

Manju still can’t tell the difference between Democrat and Conservative and Republican and Liberal.

Way, way back in American history, there conservative Democrats.  And there were liberal Republicans.  And there were all flavors in-between.

The triumph of the Republican Party, as helmed by Dick Nixon and later Ronnie Reagan (actually the assholes surrounding Reagan — Reagan was already pretty much brain-dead when he was elected) was to gather up the conservative Democrats, and purge the liberal (and now even moderate) Republicans, thereby “purifying” (nice fascist word) the parties into what they are now:  A “conservative” party (now with a definition of “conservative” that is pretty much insane — the idea of radical “conservatives” is a contradiction in terms, yet there they are) and a “not-quite-as-conservative” party.

(There are very few actual liberals, and while they might be more attracted to the Democratic Party, as it has existed since the Southern Strategy, they don’t really have much of a home there.)

This strategy worked so well that there are whole generations of Americans who actually believe a moderate-to-conservative Democrat like Obama is some Das-Kapital-waving marxist radical.  Americans like you.

By today’s standards, Richard Nixon (no liberal he) would be considered moderate to liberal and would not find a home in the current Republican Party, and Dwight Eisenhower would be seen as some sort of flag-burning pinko liberal hippie.

The other triumph of the Nixon/Reagan era was to make even the idea of progress toxic, along with the idea that government served any other function than to impede American Capitalism, American Religion, and American Exceptionalism.

You can argue all day and all night that the two parties didn’t switch places during the last 45-50 years.  But it happened, I’m old enough to have watched it happen, and so are a lot of other Americans who aren’t doctrinaire “conservatives” in denial about actual history…

BTW, the only practical difference between a guy like Glenn Beck and a guy like Adolph Hitler (circa 1932-33 or so) is Hitler had a stupid-looking mustache and Beck has TV.  Limbaugh is the same type, but he doesn’t do well on TV so he’s at a disadvantage.

All you have to do is substitute “liberal” for Jew and I bet Beck could read some of Hitler’s speeches and no one would be able to tell the difference.

A little something you can be proud about, I’m sure…

Repubicans and cons did not benefit from the….Are you brain damaged?

Ginmar: you appear unaware that Jim Crow was a racially coercive one-pary region enforced by Lynchiing. Republicans could not win in the south untul Jim Crow fell.

FDR won the south (and agreed to overlook lynching). The New Deal was built on racsim. Truman lost the south but not to republicans (to a dixiecrat who would became one, Strom…so we own him). But you won Adlai Stevenson right/ Great liberal intellectual. Took the South. Why do you think that is? Ike was t his right, no?

Jfk took the south. Thats why he killed civil rights bills as a senator (using procedural tactics for plausible deniablity). So how inthe world can you maintian that republicans benifitted from Jim Crow?

Mike:

FDR, Truman, Stevenson, and JFK were all to the left of the republicans they ran against. Do you disagree? Not once did a republican win the south against them. Except for truman, they all ran with segregationists on the ticket.

Virtually none of those segregtiojists…senators, congressmen, govenors became republican after the fall of jim crow in 64, as surely would’ve happenned if they were conservatives. They all endoresed carter and clinton and wer loyal to the dems til thier dying day. No switch.

It might hav felt like a switch vbecase the south was monolithicaly demcratic. In the past, weatlthier southerns voted dem b/c they wer racsit but as time went on they switched to the banker part. Yes, ther was a southern strategy but the dems wer practicing it even more btutally: by continung to run segregationists. They controlled the south on the stat, local, and congressional level all the way until 94.

the switch was primarily a loss of an unnatural monoplolly. even paul krugman has conceeded this point. I’ll refer you over to larry Bartels of Princton if you werious about learning what really happenned inthe south. But I must warn you that the liberal happy narrative is racsit white-washing.

as you should know, all my sources are left of center.

” Republicans could not win in the south untul Jim Crow fell.”

Not so much. Eastern Tennessee has been voting for the GOP for a long time. One of the congressional districts there hasn’t voted for a Democratic representative since prior to the civil war.

White men denied black people the vote and without the ability to make their voices heard they suffered through a kind of de facto slavery in which they were kept illiterate, fearful, and unable to inform themselves as to what rights they actually had.

Right. The KKK did this for example. They were aligned with the progressive movement thru prohibition and were endorsed by Woodrow Wilson, a great progressive. Harry Truman once belonged (lib-dem). Hugo Black too (lib dem). As did you-know-who, who became senate majority leader even before he renounced segregation. Put into the fucking line of succession as an unrepentant segregationist by people like you. Liberal dems.

Conservative white men like you did everything possible to suppress and intimidate these people.

If you’re trying to demonstrate how non-racist libs are, probably not a good idea to assume a person who disagrees with you cannot be non-white.

The New Deal, you dipshit, came at least a half a century later and was due in part to abuses like lying shitholes like you.

The New Deal came a half century after what? The New Deal was put thru by FDR agreeing to overlook segregation and lynching. For example, in 1936 there were 2 gruesome lynchings that were so gruesome the mere newspaper descriptions resulted in a huge majority of the American public backing federal intervention to stop the phenomena…even in the south. The NAACP used the gruesomeness to the hilt and had an anti-lynching bill on the verge of passing. it wasn’t even supposed to be close, a huge majority of congressmen supported it verbally and it sailed thu the house until it got to the senate and their infamous filibuster. Even the segregationists were on record as supporting (but behind the scenes they were working to stop it, which is interesting to note since this is how racism worked. They were ashamed of their position). FDR did not need a single republican or dixiecrat vote to pass the new deal (although he got the latter since they were otherwise liberals). Yet sadly FDR let the legislation die in the senate, being that he was in active collusion with the Jim Crow regime.

Why did he want it dead? Well, he won the South in all the presidential elections. Are conservatives responsible for that too? Was FDR actually to the right of anti-new dealers?  Where’s the switch?

Manju, I really don’t understand what your point is. You are actually right that the New Deal exaserbated racism for a variety of factors, and the republicans did benefit from ending Jim Crowe, although not because black people could finally vote but becase republicans were finally forgiven for being the party of Lincoln. You are also right that the Republican takeover of ‘94 was basically caused by the dixiecrat districts finally becoming republican. THe CRA was the catalyst fr the slow movement of racists to the Republican party that wasn’t complete until the 90s.

But in the mean time you had Reagan conjuring up images of the welfare queen, Jesse Helms’ white hands ad, Lee Atwater’s career and so on. When minorities’ votes are targetted for suppression, it is the republicans who now benefit. And the year is now 2011. 1994 was almost two decades ago. We are voting for candidates and supporting policies right now.

Everyone here realizes taht everyone in history was a racist fuck. And people should know that the dixiecrat phenomena didnt end overnight—especially for state and local elections. We really aren’t all that impressed by your little historical quibbles taht have nothing to do with this thread or with what is happening now. The national media ignores terrorism committed by white dudes regardless of whether JFK did something racist in the 50s.

Ben @85: right, i meant the south in general. Repubs were plucking off some of the outer areas, like Florida, even before the fall of Jim Crow. Hoover made the real first attempt at getting the racist vote but was outmaneuverd by lib-dem al smith and of course FDR, who i am told was to the right of hoover or something.

God damnit manju, you spewed more stupid all over before i got my comment up.

Look guys—its true that the south was fine with progressivism for whites and supported the New Deal so long as it didn’t help black people. FDR either ignored racism or gave the funds to local governments who distributed them racistly in order to save political face. This help exaserbate the welath gap between whites and blacks that still exists today.

So there are some kernels of truth in manju’s pile of word feces. However its not like the conservatives of the 30s opposed the new deal because it wasn’t being used to help black people; it is just that, sadly, thinking black people were actual people was liberal beyond most peoples comprehension back then.

Manju isn’t necesarily wrong, he is just irrelevant. The fact taht Wilson was a huge fucking racist does not mean that tea partiers are not racist or that liberals today are more racist than republicans. And it has jack shit to do with the fact that white people acts of terrorism are not viewed the same way as brown people committed acts.

alysia

My first point is whitewasing history is racist. We don’t let the Texas School Board get away with it so I don’t see why progressives should get away with turds like this:

“Strom Thurmond was one of many examples.  All the Dixiecrats/southern Democrats jumped to the Republican party either in 1964 when the Civil Rights Act was passed, or in 1972 when George McGovern was the Democratic candidate for president.  During those 8 years congressional representation in the south went from 100% Democratic to mostly Republican.”

You seem to know this is false. I called this out on my first comment on this blog and was met with howls of protests. MikeEss called me a troll for example and he couldn’t believe his ears. In the course of explaining, I mentioned LBJ’s days as a segregationist and the history behind the 1957cra. Our host swooped in to say “So, we have a wingnut trying to argue that the guy who signed the Civil Rights Act into law was a segregationist? Man, there is no shame in them.  None.”  And then, “y’all, free to email me if this historical revisionist starts really getting out of control and I’m not around.  It’s usually a matter of time before the racism starts to show with these guys, and don’t feel like you have to put up with it.”

This is not much better than Hailey Barbour’s narrative of the “anti-Klan” citizen’s council. I would’nt ask anyone what their point is if they correct Barbour so I’m not sure why I need a justification.

But if you need further justification, the need to punt American racism to “conservatives” finds its way into the theme of this post: RW rhetoric creating an atmosphere where political violence is allowed. Over and over again there is this constrained attempt to fashion these individuals, some of whom are anti-bush and hate capitalism, as “Right Wing.” This is the same mindset that holds men like William Fullbright, Al Gore Sr,  Robert Byrd, or Orville Faubus as conservatives. I submit this is why the Jim Crow Regime lasted as long as it did.

So when Ginmar connects this violence to George Wallace, a lifelong dem and new dealer who renounced segregation after being born-again, I don’t see how I’m being irrelevant by responding with some histry which you don’t dispute, other than to say its irelvant or that I failed to mention the southern strategy. You are right that this doesn’t exonerate the teabaggers but I never said it did. Now you see how difficult it is for any group to own their failures. If even progressives can’t acknowledge what their icons obviously benefited from, how do we expect teabaggers to.

Dipshit, you seem to think that what a person calls themselves should influence what they’re defined as. Their actions define them. The Republicans as racist, sexist, homophobic scumbags.  You can whinge and moan about how Wallace fifty years ago was a Dem, but that’s just a label.  What he was was a racist scumbag, which means he was a conservative white guy who proudly wanted to keep black people in chains. Like today’s Repubs. And by the way? You still haven’t answered my questions, but a guy who takes his cue from Jonah Goldberg probably has not shame about going the distance and declaring Hitler a liberal. Just ilke the Baggers comparing Obama to Hitler. Think, stupid.  What was Hitler known for? Or are you going to go that extra mile and declare that what he gave the Jews was his famous Health Care?

What you keep missing is that you have to go back to previous centuries to try and find desperate excuses, when we’re talking the here and now.  You keep thinking that the labels will fool people.  But oppressing minorities, women, etc, etc, is not a liberal trait.  The sad thing is that as clever as you’re capable of getting.

Now by all means do claim to be aperson of color or something, after claiming that the bombing of a black church by four racist white men was somehow unconnected to conservatives and their yearning for the Good Ole Days,  which they constantly define as back when white men ruled.

What he was was a racist scumbag, which means he was a conservative white guy who proudly wanted to keep black people in chains.

Specious argument-by-definition. By this logic Bush was a liberal, since fiscal-conservatism is defined by a balanced budget and he busted the budget mostly thru his completely unfunded medicare pt d, a liberal entitlement program.  Some conservatives and libertarians have defaulted on this reasoning in order to disown Bush and punt him over to the Liberal side. But what good does it do to inform us now that bush is really a liberal, when during crunch time they voted for him.

If you blame modern Conservatives for Wallace, by that reasoning moderm Liberals own Bush’s economic record.

And by the way? You still haven’t answered my questions, but a guy who takes his cue from Jonah Goldberg probably has not shame about going the distance and declaring Hitler a liberal

I’m not sure what questions you mean. I’ve never read Jonah Goldberg. When taking about civil rights, I’ve cited Robert Caro, David Southern, and Philip A. Klinkner, and linked to a website by veterans of the civil rights movement, an original source.

Hitler was no liberal. Fascism as an ideology was a 3rd way between socialism and capitalism. Call it right-wing collectivism that played on group identity, racism, and a cult of personality. I understand Goldberg has taken an old argument, summed up by Susan Sontag’s “Communism is Fascism with a human face” and over simplified it. But I haven’t read the book so I can’t comment.

What you keep missing is that you have to go back to previous centuries to try and find desperate excuses, when we’re talking the here and now.

You bought up Wallace and I don’t have to go back to a previous century. Clinton Vs Obama in 2008. Southern Strategy.

You keep thinking that the labels will fool people.

I’m not interested in the label conservative or liberal. Others keep saying the dems oflore were conservatives so I have to engage. But I don’t think JimCrow was an ideological battle. I’m interested in the actual historical alignment. FDR bears responsibility since he was in active collusion with the regime. He won the south during Jim Crow. That he was a liberal who didn’t belive in Jim Crow doesn’t exonerate him. Actions trump ideology.

But oppressing minorities, women, etc, etc, is not a liberal trait.

Thomas Jefferson and the founders were liberals. They created the world first democracy of note, the bill or rights,  and wrote the very words that King used to topple the “peculiar institution.” They oppressed women and minorities.

Now by all means do claim to be aperson of color or something, after claiming that the bombing of a black church by four racist white men was somehow unconnected to conservatives and their yearning for the Good Ole Days, which they constantly define as back when white men ruled.

I see your stuck on the literal defintion of conservative. Yes they were conservative in the sense that they wanted to conserve Jim Crow. Whne the USSR fell, the commuinst pary wer conservatives who wanted to conserve communism. But thats quite different from ideological conservatism.

After all, if you vote dem in ‘12 you will vote to conserve the Obama presidency over republican change. But being conservative in a literal sense has little relevance to your actual beliefs. By that argument you could actually pull a goldberg and position Hitler as a progressive, sicne his was the party of action and change.

I don’t know why I bother, but I just can’t leave Manju’s naive or idealistic or cynically manipulative (I can’t really tell what his - I assume “he” from past experience - motivations are) droolings just sit there unchallenged.

Conservatives (in the real political sense of the word) want to keep things as they have always been.  Liberals (in the real political sense) want to improve things.  This is critical to understanding political movements over the centuries (I don’t know why I should need to emphasize this, but…).

Classic Conservatives would be like the British Tories, who love the monarchy, love class divisions, believe education (at least anything past “Reading/writing/arithmetic”) is wasted on many/most people, love tax-free inheritance of immense wealth, etc., all things which tend to keep the existing political, social, and economic conditions firmly in place.  Inevitably, this leads to a situation where there are a few fabulously wealthy and powerful people at the top of the social hierarchy who basically own everything, control everything, and want to keep it that way.  There really isn’t much of a middle class, and there are a lot of poor people.  Again, from the British, read Dickens (a liberal/progressive) for a glimpse into what that’s like to live in.

“After all, if you vote dem in ‘12 you will vote to conserve the Obama presidency over republican change.”

Bzzzzz!  Wrong!  Voting for Obama, as poor a liberal/progressive as he is, is a vote to keep pursuing the change he sort of represents.  Change in this case being change from the more-and-more Republican-dominated society we’ve been suffering under since Richard Nixon’s election in ‘68.

So a vote for Obama isn’t a “conservative” vote.  It’s an attempt to vote for progress, improvement, changes to the rigid and entrenched hierarchies currently in place. 

“But being conservative in a literal sense has little relevance to your actual beliefs.

True.  That’s because (amazingly) the word “conservative” can have different meanings based on the context where it’s used.  People who are “personally” conservative in their everyday life (people like me) can be socially and politically very liberal (like me).  It’s not necessarily a contradiction.

“By that argument you could actually pull a goldberg and position Hitler as a progressive, sicne his was the party of action and change.”

This is where you’re going off the rails.  While some (naive) people might have been tricked into believing the NSDAP was progressive, to believe so required you to overlook their firm belief that everything was better in the old days: Monarchy/dictatorship, rigid social roles (Kinder, Küche, Kirche), rigid economic roles (see the Krupp family — they’re what Dick Cheney wants to be), and a rigid social hierarchy (if you’re a poor laborer, your children will most likely be poor laborers too).

The Nazis represented “action and change” only to the extent they were committed to destroying the Weimar Republic (the first democratic German government, as poor and weak as it was) and bringing back into power the equivalent of Kaiser Wilhelm II.  The Nazis didn’t want progress, they wanted what little progress had already been made to be rolled back and disposed of.

American Conservatives want things to be the way they used to be:  No income taxes, weak and ineffectual government, rigid political, social, and economic hierarchies, slavery, child labor, no OSHA, no EPA, no HUD, no education past the 6-8th grade for most, etc.  Keep women in the home raising the children while Dad goes to work.  Little effective (or legal) birth control, no legal abortion.  Knock up the girlfriend and you gotta marry her or else.  Etc., etc., etc.  Movements like the Teabaggers just want to employ more radical methods to get what they want (“2nd Amendment Remedies”?).

If you don’t, or can’t, understand the real difference between Conservative political thought and Liberal/Progressive political thought, then you really can’t participate very well in our discussions at Pandagon…

Good summary in the 2nd to last para @ 93, Mike.

MikeEss: I think you’re mistaken a little bit. soi-disant american conservatives want to take thing back to the way they imagine they used to be. I’m not sure even the robber-baron era (forget the 50s, what with the unions and the taxes) really qualifies as the utopia they were looking for. Too much social mobility.

Meanwhile, if you want crazy, just look at effing osama bin laden. Rich guy obsessed with messianic religious nuttery and some thing about infidels, willing to live in a damn cave to move his fantasies forward. His “messages” are almost completely incoherent.  Crazy is just not a discriminating factor when trying to decide whether someone is a terrorist you should be worried about.

Can we please get rid of Manju? This level of toxic stupid is just burny and painful.

American Conservatives want things to be the way they used to be:  No income taxes, weak and ineffectual government, rigid political, social, and economic hierarchies, slavery, child labor, no OSHA, no EPA, no HUD, no education past the 6-8th grade for most, etc.

Ok Mike…You’ve defined American Conservatism. Putting aside the issues regarding race for a moment, how do you then justify calling Wallace, Fullbright, Byrd, Gore, Faubus, Pepper, etc “conservatives.” After all, they were part of the new deal coalition and generally opposed those things on your list not related to institutional racism.

“Putting aside the issues regarding race for a moment, how do you then justify calling Wallace, Fullbright, Byrd, Gore, Faubus, Pepper, etc “conservatives.” After all, they were part of the new deal coalition and generally opposed those things on your list not related to institutional racism.”

First off, FDR himself was no paragon of liberality, regardless of how he is seen by our current “conservatives”.  He really wasn’t that far from the gentlemen you mention.

More importantly, when things are going to hell it’s better to work with people you might not otherwise agree with than it is to remain pure and just let it all go to hell and take everyone down with it.

Great example from history:  The Soviet Union was one of our allies in WWII.  Did that mean we loved Communism?  Did that mean we thought it was peachy keen that Stalin killed so many of his own citizens?  Did we think the NKVD was not like the German Gestapo?  Did we think there was freedom and democracy reigning supreme in the USSR?

No, we didn’t believe any of those things.  In the West, we (for the most part) hated and feared the Soviets, especially under Stalin.  But we also hated and feared (for the most part) the Nazis, and they had inserted themselves into countries we cared about (France) and threatened other countries we cared about (Britain).  We hooked up with the Soviets for the same reason they hooked up with us: pure, naked, expediency.  We both had a common enemy, and pooling our resources was more efficient and (as it turned out) was more likely to get us the result we all wanted — an end to Hitler’s Third Reich.

And it worked too.  We may not have really liked the Soviets, but one hell of a lot of Soviet lives and staggering amounts of materiel were expended on their part to defeat Hitler.  Without that sacrifice Hitler might have stayed in power for decades.

As soon as Hitler was gone, there were those like Patton who thought we should go right on through and take out the Russians while were there.  The Soviets were certainly no friends of the Western democracies, and never would be.  It was no longer expedient for either side to continue to cooperate.

So FDR worked with assholes to get his agenda passed.  Guess what, if you aren’t willing to work with assholes you’re not going to get the legislation you want.  That’s the rotten reality of politics.  Those fine gentlemen, conservatives under any reasonable definition, were some of the people — flawed and often despicable people — that had to dealt with.

We made it though the Great Depression with such compromises.  It’s not all all clear that we would have been able to get through without them.  Those are the facts…

Mike: I appreciate the defense of FDR. You’re arguing from history without whitewashing any reality in order to fit an ideological narrative. The analogy to the Soviets is good tho I would quibble that FDR had a huge majority in ‘36, and did not need a single dixiecrat or republican vote to pass the new deal.

Also, it was WWII that got us our of the Depression (according to Paul Krugman) so I’m not sure if the alternative to working with segregationists was disaster. And of course, none of this realpolick applies to Adllai Stevenson or JFK, both of whom were also in bed with evil and did not have the excuses available that FDR did.

However, my question was not about FDR. It was about the dixiecrats. They were conservatives, you’ve told me. You’ve also conservatives want “No income taxes”,  ““economic hierarchies”, “child labor, no OSHA, no EPA, no HUD, no education past the 6-8th grade for most, etc.”

But these men did not stand for theses things. I gather from your answer that you’re implying the only reason for this is that they made a deal with FDR who said: support new deal and I support jim crow.

Thats one possibility and i think its safe t say thier support would’ve cooled if FDR allowed the anti-lynching bill to pass. But we know from history that they stayed within the fold well after the new deal and well after the fall of Jim Crow. At least you know it now, after meeting me. Before, not so much.

What I’m sayig is actual history does not align with your liberal vs conservative framework. After all, our Regime is by your own definition a Liberal one that fought the classic conservatism of the British Monarchy and Class System to create a new paradigm. Yet the liberal nation still had slavery while conservative europe abolished it. And slavery is a conservative characteristic you say.

To make matters worse, the Founders most responsible for our liberal characteristics, ie the Bill of Rights,  were also the ones most responsible for slavery. The anti-federalists wanted to restrict the power of the government in favor of individual rights. This irony continued as the modern day left vs right paradigm took fold and resulted in the segregtionsts being housed within the more progressive party.

When the actual events don’t fit the framework the framework needs to change. You can;t change the events by say pretending the disiecrts bvecme republican when thats not the zeitgeist.

In this thread, we have a theory that white christian conservatives are committing acts of politcal violence. When it turns out the culprit was a muslim-convert who targeted bush, the response is not to revisit the theory but to put forth a made-up counter-narrative that just happens to allow the theory to still hold. His only said he was muslim in order to blame muslims for his own violence. (”...tried to kill a bunch of people so he could blame it on Muslims.”)

Only thats pure speculation. Thats not seeing the world as it is. Not unlike the dixiecrat story, its sheer ideology.

“The analogy to the Soviets is good tho I would quibble that FDR had a huge majority in ‘36, and did not need a single dixiecrat or republican vote to pass the new deal.”

FDR was first elected in ‘32 (there were no “Dixiecrats” in 1932).  The country was in shambles.  Unemployment was at 25%.  The Dust Bowl decimated farmers in the Midwest.  The stock market had crashed in ‘29.

Roosevelt needed a coalition in Congress to pass the legislation that represented the First New Deal (because no matter his personal popularity and winning margin, the president can’t create the legislation he signs, he must work with Congress).  So compromise was necessary.  The Democratic Party was a mess, with the Solid South being a one-party mass of Conservative Democrats, yet at the same time fostering progressive ideas that the Republicans championed at the nascence of their party.  So Roosevelt had to work with some nasty people.

Even back then, there were scurrilous attacks on any president who had the balls to try and change things.  From the Wikipedia article on FDR: While the First New Deal of 1933 had broad support from most sectors, the Second New Deal [1935] challenged the business community. Conservative Democrats, led by Al Smith, fought back with the American Liberty League, savagely attacking Roosevelt and equating him with Marx and Lenin.  So Roosevelt had to compromise with people in his own party.  Just like Truman, and Kennedy, and Johnson, and Carter, and Clinton, and now Obama had to do.

“Also, it was WWII that got us our of the Depression (according to Paul Krugman) so I’m not sure if the alternative to working with segregationists was disaster.”

It may have been war production (which is massive government spending creating debt) that finished off the Great Depression.  But in 1933, when Roosevelt took office, there was no way to see that coming.  And unlike today, the President of the United States of America didn’t have the power to just start a war for our benefit, or join one that didn’t start until 1939 all by himself.

We can’t run the experiment again and determine whether it was necessary for Roosevelt to work with Conservative Democratic segregationists. 

(Since the US military, all branches, was segregated until 1948, it seems funny to talk about how terrible is was for Roosevelt to work with segregationist Democrats before the war.  This is what Truman was up against when he desegregated the US Military by Executive Order - again from Wikipedia:  In 1948, President Harry S Truman’s Executive Order 9981 ordered the integration of the armed forces shortly after World War II, a major advance in civil rights. Using the Executive Order (E.O.) meant that Truman could bypass Congress. Representatives of the Solid South, all white Democrats, would likely have stonewalled related legislation.
For instance, in May 1948, Richard B. Russell, Democratic Senator from Georgia, attached an amendment to the Selective Services bill then being debated in Congress. The Russell amendment would have granted draftees and new inductees an opportunity to choose whether or not they wanted to serve in segregated military units. Russell’s amendment was defeated in committee. Truman signed Executive Order 9981 on July 26, 1948. In June 1950 when the Selective Services Law came up for renewal, Russell tried again to attach his segregation amendment, and again Congress defeated it.  Gives a taste of the kind of thing Roosevelt faced just a few years before.)
...

“But these men did not stand for theses things.”

Why do you think that?  The South has always been the most economically and socially hierarchical part of the US.  I don’t think anything I attributed to Conservatives would be objectionable to those fine Southern gentlemen.

“I gather from your answer that you’re implying the only reason for this is that they made a deal with FDR who said: support new deal and I support jim crow.”

I don’t know that Roosevelt offered support for Jim Crow, but he certainly wasn’t going to let idealism get in the way of doing what he felt needed to be done to put the country back on track.  And Roosevelt may not have had strong feelings about it anyway.  (There is a huge difference between being against lynching and being in favor of equal civil rights, equal voting rights, and equal access to education.  One does not automatically indicate the presence of the others.)

“What I’m sayig is actual history does not align with your liberal vs conservative framework. After all, our Regime is by your own definition a Liberal one that fought the classic conservatism of the British Monarchy and Class System to create a new paradigm.”

...which men who came along after the Founding Fathers manipulated into a new de facto class system for their own benefit.  While they all wanted to get out from uder the British monarchy, there were some who argued that we should in effect create the same sort of thing here.  But with an American monarch/dictator/maximum-leader, etc.  We created our own conservatism in the US, similar in some ways to European conservatism, but very different in others.

Ask yourself this:  Who among the Founding Fathers was poor and downtrodden and came from the lowest rungs of society?  None of them.  They were wealthy (or at least affluent) men, with education, property, and loads of privilege.  They were the very kind of people conservatives worship and want to be.

Liberals praise the words and ideas that came from those men, and tend to ignore the privilege.  Conservatives praise the men themselves and tend to ignore the words and ideas, unless there is specific advantage in using their words and ideas to make things even more unequal.

“Yet the liberal nation still had slavery while conservative europe abolished it. And slavery is a conservative characteristic you say.”

I don’t buy that you can call the nascent USA a “liberal nation”.  And slavery was ingrained into the tissues of the South very early on, so there was nothing the framers of the Constitution could do that would eliminate it yet result in a document that would be accepted by southern states.

Now, you want to talk about new “liberal” nations?  Look at the French Revolution.  Now there was a revolution that was all about tearing down the hierarchies, tearing down conservative thinking, making all men equal.  But things got out of hand so quickly, and so badly, they got Napoleon as backlash.  And the rest of Europe got Napoleon too.

“When the actual events don’t fit the framework the framework needs to change. You can;t change the events by say pretending the disiecrts bvecme republican when thats not the zeitgeist.”

The Dixiecrats and the segregationists didn’t change.  That’s where you’re misunderstanding.  The Republican Party changed to accommodate the Dixiecrats and the segregationists who were pissed about Civil Rights legislation forcing them to accept African Americans as people on an even footing with whites.  And too many of those people are still upset about it to this day.

It wasn’t like the Democrats and the Republicans got together over drinks and hors d’oeuvres and said, “Hey!  Lets swap places!”.  It was more like “We can’t stand all you Negro-lovin’ liberals, so we’re leaving the Democratic Party ‘cause we don’t have a place there anymore.”  And the Republicans said, “Well, if you guys are finished with the Democratic Party, we’d like to welcome you to join us.”

This stuff basically comes right out of the mouths of the people who engineered it.  There are many of them still alive, and some, like Kevin Phillips, are ashamed of what they did, have confessed to what they did, and tried to atone for their sins over the last 20-30 years.

I didn’t make up this idea.  I’m just sharing actual history here.  You can pretend it didn’t happen, but it still happened…