Extreme Rightist Violence Upsurge

[Lorizael]

MrFun and Drake, this thread will no longer be used to discuss personal issues and issue insults. Talk about something else or get out of the thread.

[MrFun]

fine

[DanS]

What the **** is wrong with you people? This guy wasn't an extreme rightist or an extreme leftist. He was just extremely crazy.

Negative, cowboy. As Lefty said, he is a lefty.

[DaShi]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/12/opinion/12krugman.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

June 12, 2009
Op-Ed ColumnistThe Big Hate By PAUL KRUGMAN
Back in April, there was a huge fuss over an internal report by the Department of Homeland Security warning that current conditions resemble those in the early 1990s — a time marked by an upsurge of right-wing extremism that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing.

Conservatives were outraged. The chairman of the Republican National Committee denounced the report as an attempt to “segment out conservatives in this country who have a different philosophy or view from this administration” and label them as terrorists.

But with the murder of Dr. George Tiller by an anti-abortion fanatic, closely followed by a shooting by a white supremacist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the analysis looks prescient.

There is, however, one important thing that the D.H.S. report didn’t say: Today, as in the early years of the Clinton administration but to an even greater extent, right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment.

Now, for the most part, the likes of Fox News and the R.N.C. haven’t directly incited violence, despite Bill O’Reilly’s declarations that “some” called Dr. Tiller “Tiller the Baby Killer,” that he had “blood on his hands,” and that he was a “guy operating a death mill.” But they have gone out of their way to provide a platform for conspiracy theories and apocalyptic rhetoric, just as they did the last time a Democrat held the White House.

And at this point, whatever dividing line there was between mainstream conservatism and the black-helicopter crowd seems to have been virtually erased.

Exhibit A for the mainstreaming of right-wing extremism is Fox News’s new star, Glenn Beck. Here we have a network where, like it or not, millions of Americans get their news — and it gives daily airtime to a commentator who, among other things, warned viewers that the Federal Emergency Management Agency might be building concentration camps as part of the Obama administration’s “totalitarian” agenda (although he eventually conceded that nothing of the kind was happening).

But let’s not neglect the print news media. In the Bush years, The Washington Times became an important media player because it was widely regarded as the Bush administration’s house organ. Earlier this week, the newspaper saw fit to run an opinion piece declaring that President Obama “not only identifies with Muslims, but actually may still be one himself,” and that in any case he has “aligned himself” with the radical Muslim Brotherhood.

And then there’s Rush Limbaugh. His rants today aren’t very different from his rants in 1993. But he occupies a different position in the scheme of things. Remember, during the Bush years Mr. Limbaugh became very much a political insider. Indeed, according to a recent Gallup survey, 10 percent of Republicans now consider him the “main person who speaks for the Republican Party today,” putting him in a three-way tie with Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich. So when Mr. Limbaugh peddles conspiracy theories — suggesting, for example, that fears over swine flu were being hyped “to get people to respond to government orders” — that’s a case of the conservative media establishment joining hands with the lunatic fringe.

It’s not surprising, then, that politicians are doing the same thing. The R.N.C. says that “the Democratic Party is dedicated to restructuring American society along socialist ideals.” And when Jon Voight, the actor, told the audience at a Republican fund-raiser this week that the president is a “false prophet” and that “we and we alone are the right frame of mind to free this nation from this Obama oppression,” Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, thanked him, saying that he “really enjoyed” the remarks.

Credit where credit is due. Some figures in the conservative media have refused to go along with the big hate — people like Fox’s Shepard Smith and Catherine Herridge, who debunked the attacks on that Homeland Security report two months ago. But this doesn’t change the broad picture, which is that supposedly respectable news organizations and political figures are giving aid and comfort to dangerous extremism.

What will the consequences be? Nobody knows, of course, although the analysts at Homeland Security fretted that things may turn out even worse than in the 1990s — that thanks, in part, to the election of an African-American president, “the threat posed by lone wolves and small terrorist cells is more pronounced than in past years.”

And that’s a threat to take seriously. Yes, the worst terrorist attack in our history was perpetrated by a foreign conspiracy. But the second worst, the Oklahoma City bombing, was perpetrated by an all-American lunatic. Politicians and media organizations wind up such people at their, and our, peril.

Can we now just admit that conservatives promote terrorism?

[Jon Miller]

Conservatives have gotten very unreasonable the last 15 years.

I disagreed with their positions before, but they were reasonable.

Now, many conservatives are not.

JM

[Dinner]

MrFun, Drake, and Oerdin: Quit it with the slur ****.

I bet you're gay.

[Lorizael]

You have gotten seriously less creative of late.

[Dinner]

If you watched more Monty Python you would have know the correct answer to that post.

[MrFun]

It's interesting how many so-called moderate right-of-centers like DD are being so defensive of EXTREME right-wing nutjobs.

[Lorizael]

If you watched more Monty Python you would have know the correct answer to that post.

Er, that scene makes no sense in this context. There are funnier parts in Grail.

[chequita guevara]

What the **** is wrong with you people? This guy wasn't an extreme rightist or an extreme leftist. He was just extremely crazy.

He was a member of the white supremacist movement. That qualifies as right-wing extremist.

[chequita guevara]

Randal Terry pushing for more terrorism.

In response to a follow up question from The Washington Independent's Dave Weigel about the correlation between violent right wing extremism and Democratic administrations, Terry recalled a quote, which he believed to have originated with either Robert or John F. Kennedy: "When you make peaceful protest impossible, you make violent protest inevitable," adding, "I can promise you this--there is visceral contempt for this administration," in the pro-life community.

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/06/a-christianist-terror-threat.html

So let's stop pretending that these are isolated incidents.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Counter revolutionaries have always been your boogieman Che.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Boo!

[Kitschum]

way to complicate the question.

You don't think it's complicated already? I think you could make the case that one bomb would send the same 'message' as two, or that they could have waited longer before the second one.