“Sarah Palin started shouting “blood libel”, and it was all so unpleasant that many in the mainstream media decided it was better to let important questions lie than to provoke her into worse assaults on decency and good taste.”

...which I don’t understand.  Her

Aggh!  Keyboard fail!

What I was trying to say is Palin’s negatives are already about as high as they can get, and her fans will only love her more, the nastier she gets.  She’s an entertainer in this sickening age.  The more she runs her mouth, the more entertaining it is (well, nausea is sort of a kind of entertainment, isn’t it?)...

Bullying works. It scares people into submission, especially when those people work for organizations where the folks who sign their checks agree with the bullies. Someone very close to me works in the media and is now on his third media organization where all of the top dogs are republicans. For example, someone once wrote a snarky headline about Nancy Pelosi. Editor (republican) let it pass. Recently, someone wrote a snarky headline about John Boehner and the same editor lectured them about having more respect for public officials. Can the clear headed folks who work in the media quit? Sure. But then there will be no one left who is remotely interested in getting the truth out.

And please note that if you’re a republican asshole in the media you’ve serious job security. Keith Olbermann may be a loud mouth pain in the ass, but I don’t think it’s coincidence that he’s out of a job but Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, etc. are still out there spewing garbage.

How cute, Libertarian has signed up to obediently rant against the enemy-of-the-day at the direction of his masters. I bet he has been recently discovered how much he hates teachers for making so much money, too. Good boy, Libertarian. Your employers and neighbors will think you’re “cool,” now.

That’s right, only the Tea Party can talk about taking back their country while wearing assault rifles at campaign events and quoting Jefferson’s call for “the blood of patriots.”

And yet, when a bomb goes off in a Moscow airport, Homeland Security preens: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/world/europe/25moscow.html

Olvzl at Echidne reminded us of James Cummings yesterday (no permalink):
http://echidneofthesnakes.blogspot.com/ because wealthy white supremacists making dirty nukes in their basements is isolated, and always will be.

Still, if you need an ongoing list of rightwing violence, sign up for the RSS of the Southern Poverty Law Center: http://www.splcenter.org/blog/

They have new stuff every day.

Good job at blind adherence to authority, “Libertarian”.  Proof that the title never means much beyond “not really so good at thinking for myself”.

It’s utterly fine with authoritarians to agree and hold morally good social structures that cost people their homes, lively hood, and lives themselves so long as they are the people on the bottom.

Toadies who share philosophies like Libertarian are even motivated to take up arms and exterminate the designated enemies of those they suck up too and wish to believe they were, and oh everyone at the top says it’s so wrong to do that as they wink and nudge when they aren’t blatantly calling for more of their dupes to kill and oppress more and more people.

Kill women, kill people of color, kill lgbt persons, kill the mentally ill/disabled, and physically disabled, kill people who simply disagree but don’t ever dare lay a finger on the oppressors or *gasp* even their property because it’s somehow truly “wrong” if the “wrong people” fight back. Hell, it’s wrong just for the oppressed to complain about how they’re treated. It’s all so uncivil and uncivil people should be punished, imprisoned en mass, and some of them killed just to show how rude they all are.

Actually, studies have been done to show that authoritarians are also in support of killing authoritarians, as long as an authority tells them to.

This book, in I think the second or third chapter.

Comment #10: Toitle

Thanks for the reminder. I downloaded the book but haven’t read it yet.

So, uh, what does the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life t-shirt have to do with anti-choice assholery?  Don’t you think it’s dishonest to link them together?

Not all things that are “for life” are anti-choice.

Maggie, that shirt was found in the backpack with the bomb on MLK day.

This is one of those deals where until people’s personal experience is so variant from the Official Corporate Line that they just start ignoring the newspapers, nothing will particularly change.

It is just incomprehensible to the average American that the Right enjoys its success due to political violence.  Once that dam breaks, a lot of things change, but we’re still well below the point where people are willing to accept the possibility.

Fox News, of course, wants to do a judo flip and make all of the violence the fault of the Left, but only the truly deranged are capable of buying that kind of stupidity.