None of us want to silence Michelle Malkin or any of her fellow nutjobs, if only out of respect for their Constitutional rights.

I do, I do!  With an ax!

So all liberals are responsible for what every other liberal says, even if they’re obscure professors like Ward Churchill, but Malkin is not responsible for what she herself writes?

Ah, the rules.  So simple.

Jesse, did you suggest that malkin “think”?

Oh shit, I’ve pissed myself again.

Damn you and your impudent sense of humor Jesse Taylor.

Trying to read political motivations into an assassination is a fool’s game. In any event, liberals don’t have a monopoly on them, no matter what some paranoid types think.

The last president to stop a bullet was Republican Ronald Reagan. Before him, Gerald Ford, another Republican, was nearly killed twice. The prominent politician who sustained the most serious non-fatal injury was George Wallace, the face of Southern racism, who was left in a wheelchair by an assassin’s bullet.

Assassinations are random events because their perpetrators are crazy people, who are, by their very nature, unpredictable. They have little or nothing to do with the victim’s political views.

As for Malkin, pooh. She reminds me of a ballplayer who spikes guys, throws behind their heads, etc., then cries and moans when someone steps on his foot.

Assassinations are random events because their perpetrators are crazy people, who are, by their very nature, unpredictable. They have little or nothing to do with the victim’s political views.

I have to say that this is just crazy talk. McKinley and Lincoln, just to randomly name a couple of clear refutations to this statement, were both felled by the bullets of people with clear, and fairly well articulated political movtivations. And almost no one believes that MLK or JFK were killed by legitmate lone gunman, though conspiracy theories aside, it would be foolish to think that their assasinations had no possible connection to the extremely tense politics of the times in which they lived.

Yes, it’s true there are crazies who kill famous people because they become fixated on them. Hinkley thought Jody Foster would love him. But Squeaky Frome worshippped Charles Manson and thought killing Ford would hasten his release or at least get revenge for his incarceration. She might have been crazy but that doesn’t mean her objective wasn’t fully thought out or articulated.

To claim that all such violence is simply insanity, without connection to politics, is misguided. In reality, there’s a terrifyingly huge number of verifiable instances in which people kill politicians, overthrow legitimate governments, assasinate popular figures, blow up buildings, and yes, fly airplanes into skyscrapers, because they have actual, tangible, fairly well articulated goals they are trying to accomplish.

The Unitarian church shooter hated liberals. Hated them. Blamed us for everything wrong with America. And his personal library was filled to the brim with books by Authors who routinely call us traitors, scum, and all but call for our elimination. If the violence in Arkansas is also shown to have been perpetrated by a similarly politically inclined person, we’re looking at an aminous trend, not to disconnected coincidences.

the MSN article I read said something about how, twenty min. or so before the dude was shot, someone across town pulled a gun and threatned some guy at a baptist church, and when the guy asked him what was up with the gun, the gunman said it was “because he’d lost his job”- it’s unclear if the two incidents are related, but it really closely parallels the Knoxville case, if so.

I’m 50, paranoid, and just got fired. Obviously, liberals must be responsible.

Y’know, I identify as a lefty… but if I had a dollar for every one of my upstanding MA-dwelling lefter friends who said something about shooting Scalia in the wake of the recent Second Amendment decision, I’d have enough to buy myself a pretty spiffy assault rifle.

The point is this: Don’t pretend we don’t do it too. When you do that you contribute to the dehumanization that is the problem with modern American discourse. Grow the fuck up and knock it off.

Thing is, Jac, we may do it, too. But those of us that do don’t usually do it on blogs that get thousands of readers a day, while also experiencing the influence that a book deal and a regular spot on TV/radio provides. We’ve got the occasional “Bush sucks, let’s get a rifle” comment on liberal blogs, but the people actually running the blogs rarely write them (hell, Malkin wrote a whole book about how liberal blogs are “unhinged” because they host such comments, which just goes to show that it’s easy to dig the speck out of someone else’s eye while avoiding the log cabin in yours).

None of us want to silence Michelle Malkin or any of her fellow nutjobs.

I do.

I have to say that this is just crazy talk. McKinley and Lincoln, just to randomly name a couple of clear refutations to this statement, were both felled by the bullets of people with clear, and fairly well articulated political movtivations. And almost no one believes that MLK or JFK were killed by legitmate lone gunman, though conspiracy theories aside, it would be foolish to think that their assasinations had no possible connection to the extremely tense politics of the times in which they lived.

And let’s not forget James A. Garfield’s assassin, who famously said, “I am a Stalwart of the Stalwarts! I did it and I want to be arrested! Arthur is President now!”

Jesse - maybe you can “connect the dots” between something Malkin said and some violence against liberals.  Tie together a causal chain - it would be spiffy practice for Law School, no?

Lest we forget, this is the blog that encouraged readers to burn/break something, followed by satirical accounts of how readers satirically defaced and destroyed the satirical property of people who showed their right-leaning politics outwardly, satirically.

The point is this: Don’t pretend we don’t do it too. When you do that you contribute to the dehumanization that is the problem with modern American discourse. Grow the fuck up and knock it off.

Great!  Now point at the books that these friends of yours have written.  And show us the news clips where they’re accepted as prominent voices by the mainstream media.

Straw. Man.  You aren’t going to be able to find a mainstream “lefty” who’s advocating anything nearly as radical as some of the stuff that Malkin or Coulter or Limbaugh advocate.  You’ll find marginal folks and people making anonymous comments on blogs or occasionally not so anonymous comments to their friends in a bar.  Because the more violent faces of what makes up the “Left” in the US were marginalized years ago (during Vietnam and the post-Vietnam era, for the most part).

You should watch it bitch. We got this mother fucker, we can get you too.

and before you call the fucking FBI. I\‘m posting via proxy.

Ass liberal Whore.

Oooh, snap!

Guy posting under a virtually anonymous name from a proxy server issues vague threats.

I guess we should “watch it”, eh?

Lincoln…[was] felled by the bullets of [an assassin] with clear, and fairly well articulated political movtivations.

A motivation, political or otherwise, can be clear and well articulated, and still be utterly crazy.  If a tour around the Intertubes doesn’t convince you of that, read the Unibomber’s manifesto.

Let’s take Mr. Booth. What could he possibly hope to gain by shooting Lincoln? The war had been lost and Lincoln had already declared a conciliatory policy toward the South. Shooting Lincoln was absolutely against the interests of the South. The act, in short, of a crazy person.

I stand by my point. Assassinations are completely random events, as unpredictable as madness itself.

This was a poem in the local alt-weekly in response to the TVUUC shooting:

How much of him was crazy,
and how much was hate? Was it an accident,
or an incident? A crime scene, or a battlefield?
Was it the beginning of a war, or the end?

An Uncertain Ritual

I understand the caveat that we don’t know everything about the situation yet.  But I’m having a hard time avoiding the thought that some of those questions are now being answered.  It’s looking more and more like a war…  Two incidents, of course, don’t tell a whole story.  But it’s harder and harder to dismiss these shooters as lone gunmen.  They’re not acting together, but they may be acting under the same influences.  The culture wars are becoming no longer cultural.

I do think that liberals are going to have to be brave in the coming months to not let a growing tide of violence intimidate us.

The act, in short, of a crazy person.

Well, in Booth’s case, really the act of a conspiracy to assassinate the president.  I guess it’s possible that everyone involved could have been identically crazy, but it seems a little unlikely.  I think it’s probably more logical to assume that they had their reasons, which made sense at the time. 

I’d agree, however, that the act of following through with something like this is ultimately crazy.  It pretty much never makes sense, in a self-interested way, to kill someone.

“Break something. Set something on fire. Tonight you can find a way to resist. That asshole with a Bush bumper sticker? It can be removed.”

Compliments of the blogmistress, herself.

Compliments of the blogmistress, herself.

Which is, of course, exactly the same as selling this t-shirt.

But it seems you suffer from the frequent right-wing delusion that damaging property is worse than killing people.

I think Opoponax has it right.  For the TVUUC shooter (I refuse to name him), he had his reasons.  Obviously, I don’t think much of them, but to him they made sense.  Terming these actions as ‘assassinations’ performed by ‘lone gunmen’ does a disservice to the truth.  Mental illness is a very real and determining factor here, but the targets of the violence weren’t entirely random.  Sean Hannity and Michael Savage didn’t drive the shooter to mad acts—but they did suggest who might be appropriate to direct those acts towards.

“Which is, of course, exactly the same as selling this t-shirt.

But it seems you suffer from the frequent right-wing delusion that damaging property is worse than killing people.”

Are we conceding that breaking and burning property was encouraged?  Also, I don’t know many people who resemble stylized blue and red donkeys - perhaps there are some - but it takes a rather vivid suspension of disbelief to begin at “let’s imagine to shoot at an inanimate symbol of the opposition” to “I killed me a chance a Dem’crats, an’ I’m sellin’ the hides for to make fishun lures.”

“Sean Hannity and Michael Savage didn’t drive the shooter to mad acts—but they did suggest who might be appropriate to direct those acts towards.”

But, wouldn’t you have to cite some language that one could reasonably construe to mean “go kill X” where the individual perpetrator in question wasn’t someone predisposed to kill X?

Teh Simbulls.  I jus’ dun’ unnerstaynd dem.

What’s the appropriate punishment for treason?

What have been our responses to evil, terrorism and despotism?

One can’t make an entire career out of portraying one’s opposition as subhuman slime and a clear and present danger to the nation, and then be surprised that someone has taken one at one’s word. 

Do you want me to quote chapter and verse?  Very well, then.  From Hannity’s introduction:

“I decided to write this book because I believe it is our responsibility to recognize and confront evil in the world—and because I’m convinced that if we fail in that mission it will lead us to disaster.”

“But the president also warned that this would be a war like no other. It would be fought on a variety of levels, against a largely invisible and unconventional enemy. Sometimes our efforts would be conducted out in the open, for all to see; at other times, though, they would be as invisible to the public as the terrorists themselves…”

“Under such circumstances, some of the most dangerous attacks our nation faces can come from those on the home front.”

What’s a red-blooded American to do under such circumstances?  Don’t I love my country?  Shouldn’t I do what I can to save it?  Wait, I might be carried away.  Let me calm down by reading Michael Savage’s _The Enemy Within_:

“In their haste to push failed socialist ideals, the libs have placed us on a crash course of total destruction. 

But some people can’t see that, can they? They’re sitting in the backseat with the headphones on, or watching TV, or hooked on the Internet.  I say it’s time to sit up, wake up, and take notice while there’s still time to apply the brakes.

America is headed for a fatal social crash.”

If I’m a patriot, if I love my country, how am I supposed to act?

Freedom of speech does mean freedom from responsibility.  The right wing composed of the Rush-Malkin breed are just nasty people who you would throw out of a dinner party.  You either demonstrate Values or you don’t. Talking about them while doing the complete opposite is exactly just talk and meant to be divisive. 

These kinds of people have over the last 20 years risen to prominence because they are no longer filtered out by adults and the professionals.  The media loves them because of the institutionalized “There is no such thing as bad press”.  Their use to be such a thing as embarrassment and community shame.  These people lack the gene for shame and embarrassment.  The are rough, crude unpolished people who if they didn’t instigate trouble would be unemployed.

Sorry I couln’t get back to this topic sooner, I was watching some Bush Assasination porn.