Joan Walsh at Salon has a piece up, “Can right-wing hate talk lead to murder?”, that features her appearance on Hardball where she discussed the climate of hate featured as entertainment by the likes of Limbaugh, O’Reilly and the rest of that motley crew who are now scurrying like rats in the wake of the murder of George Tiller and the white supremacist shooting at the Holocaust Museum yesterday that resulted in the murder of a security guard.
I tried to choose my words carefully. Unless it’s shown that either man had accomplices, we have to be clear that the men responsible for those murders are the ones who pulled the trigger. Still, it’s hard not to think about the extreme right-wing rhetoric, especially about Barack Obama, and whether it could conceivably lead to more right-wing violence. You can see whether I succeeded here (more text follows the video):
The range of crazy ideas about Obama is broad and wide: He’s a secret Muslim, he’s going to take our guns, he’s even the anti-Christ! James von Brunn just happened to be a “birther,” one of the nuts who believe that Obama wasn’t born here, his birth certificate is fake, and he thus isn’t eligible to be president. I thought it was strange and maybe a little ominous last summer when suddenly Obama was labeled a “socialist” and a “Marxist”; Hillary Clinton and John Kerry are arguably more liberal than Obama; why did he get tagged with that sinister, subversive, alien ideology? It seemed linked to the fact that he’s just so … different from other politicians, so easy to marginalize and, frankly, demonize.
Then came Rush Limbaugh with his sexual fears about having to “bend over and grab the ankles” for a black president. Soon Limbaugh was saying he hoped Obama fails; last week he said Obama was more dangerous to our country than al-Qaida, our terrorist enemy who has killed thousands of Americans. Could that conceivably inflame someone marginal and isolated to act against a president who’s more dangerous than terrorists?
Joan goes on to mention Bill O’Reilly’s constant on-air vilification of the recently assassinated abortion provider as “Tiller the Baby Killer” and comparison of the doctor to Nazis and the amoral stoking of the “Angry, Disenfranchised White Man” by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Lindsey Graham and the GOP’s Michael Steele by suggesting that the Sotomayor nomination means a white man can’t get a break in today’s society.
Are statements like this directly responsible for the murder of Holocaust Museum security guard Stephen Tyrone Johns? No. What the mainstream GOP has to take responsibility for is the fact that its continued reliance on the politics of division that gives extremist views safe harbor. Race, gender, class, sexual orientation/gender identity, and religion have constantly been used to win votes. The appeals to the lowest common denominator—ignorance and fears of the “other” displacing white male supremacy, God and family in no uncertain terms attracts a demographic we saw on display at the McCain/Palin rallies—bold, hateful, openly racist people who proudly stood before the cameras emitting bigotry as a badge of honor. And they were standing outside a rally for the Republican, not the Democratic candidate.
Below the fold, look at the video evidence that the party has capitalized on the worst instincts in people.