JABbering Stooge

It didn’t have to be this way…

‘Cause, I mean, even with all this stuff we preach about the sanctity of life, we don’t practice it. We don’t practice it. Look at what we’d kill: Mosquitos and flies. ‘Cause they’re pests. Lions and tigers. ‘Cause it’s fun! Chickens and pigs. ‘Cause we’re hungry. Pheasants and quails. ‘Cause it’s fun. And we’re hungry. And people “libruls”. We kill people “libruls”… ‘Cause they’re pests. And it’s fun!

George Carlin — Back In Town

I didn’t want to do this. I didn’t want to comment on a tragedy still fresh on the minds of those who experienced it firsthand. But events have forced my hand. I can no longer stay silent while I and anyone who believes like me is smeared for this outrage.

When the right-wing wasn’t deliberately ignoring Jim David Adkisson’s murderous rampage, they were jumping on the early reports to claim that he was an evil unemployed atheist loser. Unfortunately for the simple-minded, Adkisson’s motivations were a bit more complex than that: a bit from Anti-Christian Column A, a bit from Jilted Ex-Lover Column B, and quite a bit from Anti-Liberal Column C. But that just smacks of a liberally-biased reality, and we can’t have that, now can we?

So out comes Bob Owens* who, true to form, screeches “Why, he can’t be a conservative — he attacked a CHURCH, fercrissake! Only evil atheist libruls do that!” Then in the very next post, he hypocritically accuses the liberal blogosphere of politicizing a tragedy and having double standards.

While Owens is busy hysterically celebrating his tarted-up “Gotcha!” moment, Robert Stacy McCain was also jumping on the “blame the atheist libruls” bandwagon. Or, at least he was until he realized that that talking point wouldn’t fly, seeing as how Adkisson left a four-page manifesto declaring his eternal hatred of liberals and gays (in which he also bitched about the Dems “tying the troops’ hands” in Iraq as far as rules of engagement were concerned — something that his hero the Savage Weiner constantly harped on during the Battle of Fallujah), was a fan of Michael Savage, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, and declared himself to be a “Confederate” and “believer in the old South” (does that sound liberal to you?). At that point, he decided to turn around and dive into the muck with Mr. Owens and politicize the tragedy:

Generally speaking, mass murders cause liberals to call for banning something. I guess now they’ll try to ban AM radios.

Umm, yeah. Except for the fact that the right has been the first and loudest to exploit tragedy (particularly the kind involving gun violence) for political gain in the last decade. After all, it was not the left who blamed the Columbine massacre on the separation of church and state. I’m pretty sure that the Columbine victim’s father who blamed that trio of school shootings in late 2006 on the teaching of evolution and the legality of abortion wasn’t a liberal.

Tell me, Mr. McCain, was this produced by a liberal or a conservative group?

Who was it that was brazenly declaring that the Virginia Tech massacre wouldn’t have happened if everyone on campus had put more bullets in the air in 10 seconds than Master Chief in his entire career?

The only thing standing between VATech students and certain annihilation, in the eyes of conservatives.

It sure as hell wasn’t the liberals.

And let’s not forget the ultimate in exploiting national tragedy for political gain — the one from which all of this administration’s brazen lawbreaking, outright treason and ill-advised wars sprung. Two words (three if you’re President Bush): September 11th.

So why would conservatives seek to exploit (with an almost unprecedented degree of confirmation bias) a massacre and then blame the politicization of said tragedy on their ideological opponents? Roy Edroso seems to have a plausible theory:

You may wonder: why would anyone spin a crazed-gunman story to make it look more like his own propaganda? You have to remember that all these people have left anymore are their folk-tales and myths. A world in which hippies don’t spit on soldiers, Obama isn’t a Muslim, and all hate crimes don’t proceed from P.Z. Myers‘ atheism lab would not be a world they recognized or could live in.

Am I getting through to you, Mrs. Malkin, Mr. McCain, Mr. Owens?**

But if conservatives really want to go down the road of who is more inherently eliminationist, I’d be more than happy to oblige them. Aside from the activities of a certain subset of the 60s radicals and several isolated incidents, including conservatives’ favorite hobby horse — that putz who tried to run over Katherine Harris, liberals haven’t exactly exhibited a particularly strong eliminationist streak.

To be fair, the violent strain of conservatism is also a recent phenomenon, but from its beginning in the militia movements that formed in the aftermath of Ruby Ridge and Waco, has rapidly outstripped liberal eliminationism in both ugliness of rhetoric and frequency of eruption. Here’s just a small sample of the hate that the right has spread:

• In his early days as a talk radio bloviator, Rush Limbaugh, who as of this writing has just inked a $400 million deal over the next ten years to keep doing what he always does — demonize liberals, called then-13-year-old Chelsea Clinton “the White House dog” on his failed TV show and told Margaret Carlson that he cautions his listeners, “don’t kill all the liberals, leave enough around so we can have two on every campus; living fossils, so we will never forget what these people stood for.” He would later return to this theme when he, in Monty Pythonesque fashion, “dreamed” of riots in Denver during the Democratic convention later this month.

• In the wake of the unfortunate incident in Waco, Watergate felon G. Gordon “Head Shots” Liddy instructed his listeners in the fine art of offing BATF agents.

• For much of the 90s, there was a website exhorting abortion foes to assassinate doctors who dare provide abortions.

• When Sen. Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash barely a month before facing a tough re-election bid in 2002, commenters as Lucianne Goldberg’s web forum celebrated his death, and wished the same fate befall Senators Clinton and Kennedy.

• Beginning a month or so after 9/11, “liberal hunting permits” have been for sale at various online conservative swag stores — a move much celebrated over at Free Republic.

• Ann Coulter, the Emily Howard of right-wing punditry, has been a perpetual fountain of hate ever since she came on the scene during the Clinton impeachment witch hunt (Choice quote from that time: “In this recurring nightmare of a presidency, we have a national debate about whether he ‘did it,’ even though all sentient people know he did. Otherwise there would be debates only about whether to impeach or assassinate.“). Since then, her lowlights have included wishing that Timothy McVeigh had hit the New York Times building instead of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, suggesting that the only “best” way to talk to liberals is to hit them in the head with a baseball bat, posting the contact information of a critic for harassment purposes, and calling for one of her fans to poison Justice Stevens’ creme bruleé.

• And then there’s Stalkin’ Malkin herself. While most of Malkin’s Two-Minutes Hate ragegasms are aimed at Muslims and Mexicans illegal immigrants, she ranks pretty high up there in liberal-bashing rhetoric. Her most famous contributions to lowering the state of political discourse in America are the time she posted the UC Santa Cruz SAW members’ contact information for harassment purposes, and did the same with former UC-SC Chancellor Denise Denton for good measure. The former received death threats, while the latter was driven to suicide. Naturally, Malkin did the oh-so-responsible thing by denying that her actions contributed to the death threats and to Denton’s suicide while claiming sole ownership of the crown of victimhood.

  Last September, when it was reported that someone had vandalized the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., Malkin produced a post so biased and hate-filled that it drove her commenters to threaten violence against anti-war protesters who were gathering in the nation’s capitol that week.

  And as if that weren’t enough, she took it upon herself to stalk and harass the Frost family during the debate over S-CHIP. What had the Frosts done to deserve such abuse? Make conservatives look like the short-sighted skinflints that they are. Quelle horreur!

Or as driftglass so succinctly put it:

Yes, the world is full of violent madmen.

But not every madman comes with a billion-dollar army of media backup singers that all sound exactly like the voices in his head.

Indeed. Dave Neiwert, using the genocide in Rwanda as an analogy, explains how hate speech can manifest in ugly ways as violent action:

And [the power of the media] can easily be abused. You can use your megaphone to lie shamelessly. You can use it to smear the good name of public officials. You can use it to rewrite history. And you can use it to intimidate the “little people” who don’t possess the same kind of power.

Because these potential abuses exist, a sense of ethics is obligatory for anyone who possesses this power. It’s why the Society of Professional Journalists has a Code of Ethics that abjures such behavior.

Violating the Code won’t get you fired per se, but it certainly brings into question your professionalism and honor. It also brands you, forever, as deeply irresponsible.

Particularly when it comes to using that power to attack ordinary citizens and subject them not just to ridicule but actual threats and potential violence.

…

Because without that restraint, mass media can become an instrument of humankind’s worst impulses — including mass violence and genocide.

And what has 15 years of violent and hateful rhetoric from the right wrought? Here’s a small sample of that, as well:

• Anti-abortion violence has surged in the last 20 years. ReligiousTolerance.org has compiled statistics of anti-abortion violence from 1989 through part of 2004, and the results aren’t pretty. In that span, there were 24 murders or attempted murders, 179 attempted or completed acts of arson or bombings, 3,349 incidents of vandalism, tresspassing, assault and battery, or threats, and 11,448 incidents of phone harassment, hate mail, or bomb threats.

• The most notorious perpetrators of anti-abortion violence are Eric Rudolph, Paul Hill, James Kopp and Clayton Waagner.

• In 2004, ex-Army Ranger Stephen John Jordi plead guilty to plotting to blow up abortion clinics and gay bars across the nation.

• In April of 2007, another attempted abortion clinic bombing was thwarted here in Austin, TX.

• During the 2004 presidential election, Dave Neiwert tracked the incidences of eliminationist violence going both ways, and he discovered that it wasn’t even close: conservatives engaged in acts of violence against liberals more than four times as often as liberals did to conservatives.

• One such instance even occurred at the Republican convention in New York City that year. When demonstrators crashed the convention, a National Taxpayers’ Union intern threw a female protester to the ground and kicked her.

• Then there was the case of the Freepers literally harassing vote integrity activist Andy Stephenson to death. The denizens of Free Republic, having decided that they don’t like elections that aren’t rigged in their favor, heard that Stephneson had terminal pancreatic cancer, and decided to make his remaining time on earth as miserable as possible.

• During the anti-war protest last year, which took place under the shadow of the defacement of the Vietnam War Memorial, members of the Gathering of Eagles beat the tar out of anti-war protester Carlos Arredondo.

• And who can forget Chad Castagana, Michelle Malkin’s #1 fan who spread a wave of anthrax hoax terror among prominent liberals like Jon Stewart, Keith Olbermann, David Letterman, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. After a prolonged silence, Malkin would later issue a classic combination of abdicating responsibility for Castagana’s actions and “but libruls do it more” obfuscation that has become known as the Double Reverse Malkin.

I could go on and on, but I think you get the idea by now.

I have learned silence from the talkative, tolerance from the intolerant and kindness from the unkind.

— Khalil Gibran***

* Owens is known, appropriately enough, as Treason-In-Defense-Of-Slavery Yankee by the fine folks at Lawyers, Guns and Money.

** Cf.

*** <wingnut>How dare I approvingly quote a [racial/ethnic slur for Arab]?!</wingnut>