You are aware a political stance can have both left and right elements in it?
Populism and nationalism are a rightward element. This is where you get the demonization of “the other”. Be it by political party, another nation, or culture. This results in the entire “we are correct, we should come first, and they don’t count”. This is currently owned mostly by the right in American politics and you see it through American exceptionalism, “they took yer jobs”, and other such issues. The left can play into it as well, see attacks on free trade and playing to the entire “the rich are screwing you over, we will help you get yours from them” but the left doesn’t get nationalistic over it, it’s mostly class based warfare.
On the other hand massive social programs, demonizing those who have wealth, advocating a strong national government, calls for restrictions on speech, calls for curtailing of rights, are all straight inline with the current left, and directly opposed to the mantra of the American right.
If you’re going to put the German Socialist Party into proper perspective you should grasp that it had both rightward and leftward parts. Which is why people on both ends of the political spectrum here love to call people Nazi’s, since you can point out parts of either platform that are inline with them.
i’m not even sure why you’re quoting me, but whatever.
hitler was a fascist, which isn’t really left or right in the american sense of the term which is what i was saying. but more to the point, if you’re reading and agreeing with hiter’s ideologies in 2011 you’re not “left-wing” in any modern sense considering he pretty much hated everything the new left represents.
i think that after all the violent imagery and rhetoric flying around lately, particularly in AZ this shouldn’t be surprising to anyone.
and honestly i know Palin had the ad with the crosshairs which everyone is talking about but that’s like the smallest of examples. how about sharon angle, AZ senate candidate suggesting to her constituents in a speech that should they fail electorally they should seek second amendment remedies, or michele bachman telling her constituents to grab their weapons and be armed and dangerous on healthcare reform debate, or people let glenn beck saying that democrats are ripping apart the flesh of the constitution to take it over into a socialist country. or all the people running around with the quote “the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of tyrants” no one of these incidents is responsible, it’s the cumulative effect of them all, with nobody being the adult in the room and saying “this isn’t ok, tone it down a notch”.
oh, also the person who ran against giffords held a campaign event at a gun range and his ad’s to get the word out was “take aim at gabrielle gifford”… unless those with giant microphones take their responsibility seriously incidents like these and the vandalism of rep’s offices will continue, ms. giffords office was actually vandilised during the HCR debate.
There is no way to be 100% certain. People who are waiting for that sort of confirmation are going to be waiting for a long time. But when there is one side that overwhelmingly has the evidence in its corner in terms of quantity and quality, that position can be adopted for practical purposes.
Example: when purchasing apples, you don’t need deep scientific inquiry into their qualities. You just make a few observations about which ones are ripest, healthiest, and freest from rot, and that’s pretty much the long and short of the data-gathering process. You know from previous shopping trips–past trials–what makes for a good apple and what does not. I’m sure arguments can be made for deep inquiry into apples, but that might be descending into the realm of sophistry.
Palin is a strawman here, the DLC and DCCC had similar ads, where is the blame on them? Hunting/sports/military jokes are extremely common in the US. Having hunted and been in the military I don’t see a target sign and immediately think “well shit I should shoot a bastard”. You’re selectively picking a target here.
You left out our President calling for people to take guns to a knife fight and similar cries from the left. I know that doesn’t fit into the “every violent reference ever in the US was uttered by a conservative period” narrative that some like to pretend is remotely real, but placing the blame on one side here is rather silly.
You seem really jumping at the chance to blame everything that’s come out of the right and ignore (or maybe you’d like to admit it and then try to hand wave it away because it’s OK if you are a liberal) the items that have come flying out from the left.
We don’t know why he did this. What we do know is the dude read a mix of Rand, Mein Kampf, the Communist Manefesto, smoked pot like a fiend, was obviously insane, burned flags, et all. Points to being a whack job lunatic. Trying to pin point his politics and influence for this is like figuring out where to place a large squid on a chess board.
Also his beef with Giffords started in 2007 when the crazy first started. That’s well before anything you brought up started.
I think Palin is an opportunistic attention whore with barely a brain cell between her skull and , but even I think it’s wrong to blame her for this shooting.
I don’t think she should be held responsible for how one nutcase interprets her words or ads. In fact, do we even know if this was part of his motivation for doing what he did? From what I’ve heard and read, the guy was all over the place mentally, politically, emotionally, etc.
I’m more sickened by the people who are trying to use this to further their own political agenda
Straight from Rush’s mouth, he’s saying he’s to blame now. In his own sarcastic way of course he mentioned it. Take from that what you will. A local progressive talk radio host said ever since a black man took office have we seen a ramping up of violent rhetoric. I have to admit I don’t remember things being as venomous back in the Clinton or Bush years. If “Second amendment remedies” doesn’t sound prickly, I’m not sure what will.
What I’m getting from all of this up this point is Sarah Palin and Beck are the victims. This is exactly why I hate politics: you can take anything and twist it to suite your needs and reassure your base that you’re the victim and have done nothing wrong. And not that anyone has directly said go out and kill but the sensationalism injected into speeches and radio show broadcasts will strike a dangerous nerve with someone not quite right in the head. We know this, they know this but it will continue because sensationalism equals dollars.
perhaps i wasn’t very clear, i was saying i didn’t buy that reasoning. as much as i dislike palin i don’t think that ad is to blame by any stretch of the word, it is a rather cruel irony but yeah, not to blame. Hell i would say if you wanted to nitpick palin then get angry about her saying don’t retreat, reload… she did love her shooting metaphors.
admittedly i had not known of those statements by the president, i don’t particularily like the rhetoric when he is saying it either. however i feel like drawing an equivolence between the 2 parties on violent rhetoric is false, because while both do use it along with war/sports/hunting metaphors, the right seems to have institutionalized it over the past few years. and coinciding with that has been a HUGE increase in death threats and vandolism against elected representatives. example: George W Bush had the most death threats of any sitting president in US history… when obama took office the volume of death threats jumped up by 400%, Vandalism against offices of representatives also saw a huge jump, then you had during the HCR debate rep’s getting spit on… you can’t argue that there are equal levels of vitriol between the partys right now because there simply is no facts to back such an argument up.
as for the person being a lunatic OF COURSE!!! you don’t commit something like this without being insane. and that’s been my whole point all along about this kind of rhetoric, you never know how insane that 1 person watching might be, and when you have a microphone that reaches millions, the chances that you will meet that 1 person crazy enough to follow through with something like this are higher than we would like. As such there is a responsibility to knock this rhetoric off. I would have thought the assasination of Dr. Tiller would have been enough of a wake-up call but it didn’t even seem to phase anyone.
and i wasn’t saying his beef didn’t start in 07, however it’s highly plausable that you take someone who allready has a vendetta against the woman and throw in a ton of violent rhetoric (some of which directly was calling for armed revolution against the gov’t) and imo this is what you get. it should be no surprise that beck, palin et al feel guilty about this otherwise they wouldn’t be tripping over themselves to deflect blame so quickly.
edit: also, you wouldn’t have CEO of fox news Roger Ailes going out and telling his anchors to tone it down if they felt no responsibility for this.
For real? Back when Bush was in office, death threats and “venomous rhetoric” were daily discourse. Hell, in the first page of this thread there was a casual mention as to why Bush hasn’t been assassinated.
if you read my post, yes death threats reached a record high under G.W. Bush, however death threats to obama are occuring 4 times more often… so take from that what you will.
i think trying to whittle it down to any one thing is silly, it’s the combination of rough economic times, intense and repeated violent rhetoric and imagery and racism. kind of a perfect storm sort of deal.
i do strongly believe however that violent rhetoric and imagery will effect the unbalanced far more than it would say… a normal person, and that’s why we have to be apprehensious about it. (i think i just butchered that word)
What’s your definition of lunatic. I’ve asked, because every time I hear somebody recalling this dudes opinions I feel like I have a lot more in common with him than I do with other people in any kind of political discussion.
I’m pretty sure every president in our history has received death threats. They get them on a weekly basis through the mail. The worst I’ve heard about Bush on air or by public officials was that he was an idiot and should have been tried as a war criminal. If you have worse to offer, by all means post up. I would have to agree with the idiot part. At one point he held a dinner party with a slide show along with joking commentary for laughs. One pic was him searching behind a couch and he replied, “Those WMDs gotta be around here somewhere!”. When I heard that, I couldn’t believe he actually said that and that people actually laughed.
I disagree with Bush on the stance of the war in that we should never dispatch our military and place them in harms way unless it is absolutely necessary. The fact that he had the audacity to joke about something which by his command sent men and women to die trying to find these WMDs but did not still boggles my mind til’ this day.
This current president has not engaged in any wars. Has he made mistakes? Of course. Should we draw parallels to Stalin and Mao and say this is what will happen to us in less than two years once his term is over as we know it? So we have some children who were coached into singing a song about him by some group he had no connections to. He never said “I want the children of this country to sing my name in praise”. The immediate parallel drawn was “Kids were coached to sing about Hitler as well, what does that tell you?”.
I just think it’s ridiculous. Perhaps I’ve been hanging out too much over at the conservative group hug that is the politics section on a car forum I frequent. They post up shit like that all the time and say, “Coincidence?” and then there’s a bunch of posts declaring take up arms, stock up on ammo, and discussion of gun calibers ensue. It’s just baffling. We’re demonizing someone about our supposed freedoms being raped on public forums. We’re calling him a communist and bashing him on the airwaves. What freedoms have we lost? What liberties are we losing because if history has proven anything it’s these supposed people we make Obama out to be like who end up making opponents disappear along with their families. I just get tired of the venom and the sensationalism. But if it meant me making millions a year, I’d probably blast his ass too on the airwaves.
I’m not a proponent of Obama nor am I an opponent. He is a politician, they all are it’s just business as usual. I was the same way with Clinton. I was the same with Bush until he began the Iraq war, then my perception of him changed.
We have an individual in office which had virtually all of his and his party’s proposals filibustered to hell and back. So much so that the filibuster use itself is being reviewed. We even have the republicans reading the constitution on the floor along with articles describing legitimacy to hold the oval office. We also have a woman yelling to Jesus to save us from Obama during these readings because he is supposedly not a natural born citizen. I know the knee jerk reaction is to say “What does that tell you about the guy!”. It’s not a one way street and people need to start looking in the other direction as well. When Mitch openly states the primary objective is to make Obama a one term president, that tells me it’s business as usual in politics and that the people are not their concern as they promised during the road to the “blood bath” as Hannity described the congressional elections.
oh, just thought of something to add here, they found a written note as to why he did it, so the insanity defense in court is out of there.
and the other thing i will mention is that in early 09 homeland security released a report warning of right-wing terrorism and violence, it recieved a TON of backlash from the right as unfair, and how dare they look into the tea parties when they never looked into the people on the left (they did btw) and homeland security backed down, then sure enough there was an upswing in death threats, vandalism and attempted murders by that very group that we were warned about.
Comparing the amount of death threats various presidents get strikes me as unproductive. Considering the amount of death threats tends to go up with time, and many are based off the state of the economy or our foreign policy even though that’s not always the presidents fault. You also get more random lone wolf acts of violence under Democrats, yet the past two assassination attempts were on Republican presidents (Reagen and Ford). These “statistics” ultimately worthless because they are all over the place when looked at in total yet you can cherry pick any one of them to support any bullshit claim you want. In the end it’s just a sad fact that things are getting crazier with time.
I don’t have a problem with that either, it’s just more stupid jargon. If I was to point a figure at what I think is the problem it would be the non stop rhetoric that anybody with different beliefs then you is somehow the enemy, out to kill people, a traitor/bigot/evil, and that that the country is going to shit. However this sort of nonsense flies from both sides of the isle depending on the issue of the day, and the majority of it comes from political activists, party bases, and is mostly the frothing of the deranged (though I guess deranged and activist are redundant here).
There are different levels of insane though. There are those who are by nature violent (which doesn’t make you insane) who go out and commit atrocities while being fully grounded in reality due to hate or a lack of empathy (read sociopathy which many people have some degree of) while being mentally coherent and having a consistent world view. Then there are the pants-on-head crazies with no stable world view at all, living in some alternate reality worrying about mind control who go out commit atrocities. This dude is the second type, the first type aren’t nutters.
That was done by a man who was nowhere near this bonkers and had direct links to the churches and groups advocating killing doctors and was known to believe in them. There is no evidence *yet that this dude was following or believed in any of the current people spouting idiocy. Nor has their idiocy gone anywhere near the levels of advocating direct violence as those who were advocating for the death of abortion doctors. It’s not really a comparable situation.
I don’t think they feel guilty, it seems like a dodge to avoid getting beat over the head with this for political points, which is what is happening.
The dude claimed that the government was using grammar for mind control. He also claimed that dreams were another reality he could control and he could invade other peoples dreams. That’s just the start of the nonsense he was spouting.
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That’s a Democrat.
You also have Webb going off about gun rights (not to mention having them illegally smuggled into the Capitol by an aide) and talking about beating up a president.
