President Obama's Weekly Address - March 30, 2013

President Obama Offers Easter and Passover Greetings

Weekly Address - March 23, 2013

Helping Protect Our Kids by Reducing Gun Violence

President Obama's Weekly Address - January 19, 2013

Now Is The Time to Take Action Against Gun Violence

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President Obama's Weekly Address - December 15, 2012

Nation Grieves for Those Killed in Tragic Shooting in Newtown, CT

Aurora Shooting: I Wish I Were Surprised

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
~George Santayana

I awoke yesterday morning to an AP alert on my phone about the shooting in Aurora, Colorado. By the time I read the two sentence alert to my wife, I was over the shock. I shrugged my shoulders, shook my head and we went about our morning. I mean, really, how can we continue to be surprised at the constant repetition of tragedies like this, when the collective "we" don't or won't do a goddamn thing about it?

Later on I channel surfed a bit knowing all news would stop this day, as it had for the previous mass shooting. And the one before that. And the one before that. And the one before that.... The President made his requisite comments. The candidate followed with much the same. They would suspend their campaigns and pull all ads from Colorado; word of that news was immediately followed by an RNC anti-Obama ad in New York. On MSNBC of all places. (Who are the RNC trying to convince?)

My cynical side started asking questions. What pundit would be the first idiot to politicize this event? How soon before someone blamed Hollywood violence? What right winger would be the first to either blame Obama or spew some backwards conspiracy that it's another attempt to take away your guns? What politician would make a complete ass of him/herself? (The answer to that last question is Rep. Louis Gohmert, by the way, who has vaulted into first place in the Dumbest Congressional Fuckwad Race. Michelle Bachmann has some competition.)

Here's a list of mass shootings since, and including, Columbine (via Newsmax):

April 1999 - two teenage schoolboys shot and killed 12 schoolmates and a teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, before killing themselves. 

July 1999 - a stock exchange trader in Atlanta, Georgia, killed 12 people including his wife and two children before taking his own life. 

September 1999 - a gunman opened fire at a prayer service in Fort Worth, Texas, killing six people before committing suicide. 

October 2002 - a series of sniper-style shootings occurred in Washington DC, leaving 10 dead. 

August 2003 - in Chicago, a laid-off worker shot and killed six of his former workmates. 

November 2004 - in Birchwood, Wisconsin, a hunter killed six other hunters and wounded two others after an argument with them. 

March 2005 - a man opened fire at a church service in Brookfield, Wisconsin, killing seven people. 

October 2006 - a truck driver killed five schoolgirls and seriously wounded six others in a school in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania before taking his own life. 

April 2007 - student Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 32 people and wounded 15 others at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, before shooting himself, making it the deadliest mass shooting in the United States after 2000. 

August 2007 - Three Delaware State University students were shot and killed in “execution style” by a 28-year-old and two 15-year-old boys. A fourth student was shot and stabbed. 

December 2007 - a 20-year-old man killed nine people and injured five others in a shopping center in Omaha, Nebraska. 

December 2007 - a woman and her boyfriend shot dead six members of her family on Christmas Eve in Carnation, Washington. 

February 2008 - a shooter who is still at large tied up and shot six women at a suburban clothing store in Chicago, leaving five of them dead and the remaining one injured. 

February 2008 - a man opened fire in a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois, killing five students and wounding 16 others before laying down his weapon and surrendering. 

September 2008 - a mentally ill man who was released from jail one month earlier shot eight people in Alger, Washington, leaving six of them dead and the rest two wounded. 

December 2008 - a man dressed in a Santa Claus suit opened fire at a family Christmas party in Covina, California, then set fire on the house and killed himself. Police later found nine people dead in the debris of the house. 

March 2009 - a 28-year-old laid-off worker opened fire while driving a car through several towns in Alabama, killing 10 people. 

March 2009 - a heavily armed gunman shot dead eight people, many of them elderly and sick people, in a private-owned nursing home in North Carolina. 

March 2009 - six people were shot dead in a high-grade apartment building in Santa Clara, California. 

April 2009 - a man shot dead 13 people at a civic center in Binghamton, New York. 

July 2009 - Six people, including one student, were shot in a drive-by shooting at a community rally on the campus of Texas Southern University, Houston. 

November 2009 - U.S. army psychologist Major Nidal Hasan opened fire at a military base in Fort Hood, Texas, leaving 13 dead and 42 others wounded. 

February 2010 – A professor opened fire 50 minutes into at a Biological Sciences Department faculty meeting at the University of Alabama, killing three colleagues and wounding three others. 

January 2011 - a gunman opened fire at a public gathering outside a grocery in Tucson, Arizona, killing six people including a 9-year-old girl and wounding at least 12 others. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was severely injured with a gunshot to the head.

Slaughter after slaughter and yet, what is the response? We can't possibly be callous enough to talk about something political like gun control laws so soon after the tragedy. We really shouldn't legislate something in a desperate attempt to prevent another heinous act while she should still be in mourning.  Besides, deer hunters really need access to semi-automatic rifles. And armor-piercing bullets. And pistols with 30 round clips.

So we wait just long enough until the event seeps out of the public consciousness, which these days is about 12 seconds - who's on Dancing with the Stars this season? - and the N.R. Fucking A. has enough time to circle the wagons and threaten some bullshit scoring on a bill which has nothing to do with actual gun legislation. And we forget about the shooting du jour until the next time when the whole cycle starts all over again.

Until we stop sucking NRA cock, nothing will happen. And I won't be surprised the next time either.

(Cross-posted at ABLC)

Reloading, Surveyor's Symbols and Gun Rights

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was one of the House members targeted in Sarah Palin's infamous "Take Back the 20" SarahPAC map. I'm not going to blame Palin for the shooting, but I will blame her for the lack of foresight in not understanding what the affect can be in the incendiary rhetoric she's been peddling since she came on the scene.

And she's not the only one who has gone a little too far with the metaphors. With phrases like "pallin' around with terrorists," "don't retreat, reload," Sharron Angle's "Second Amendment remedies" and Michele Bachmann's "armed and dangerous," it was only a matter of time before someone mentally unstable person took the matter into their own hands. There have been other violent attacks. The Richard Poplawski incident in Pittsburgh immediately comes to mind. But this is the first time there has been an attack on a political official. And I can't believe that the angry Republican anti-government rhetoric has nothing to do with it.

While a definitive motive hasn't been established for Jared Loughner's attack on the ironically named Safeway, anti-government sentiment has been an issue in his online writings. Is he disturbed and unstable? Looks that way, which is why prominent politicians and pundits have to realize that their message doesn't just go out to rational people who understand that bullseyes, targets and vitriol isn't literal.

And while we are all familiar with her lack of foresight, Ms. Mama Grizzly Reality TV Caribou Hunter isn't doing herself any favors by surrounding herself with people who aren't the sharpest tools in the shed either, the latest example being a radio interview by a Palin spokesperson trying to explain away the crosshairs in the SarahPac map.

...this exchange between Palin aide Rebecca Mansour and Palin-supporting radio host Tammy Bruce is completely absurd. Bruce begins by describing the map of SarahPAC's 20 midterm election targets -- members of Congress in districts that went for McCain/Palin in 2008 who voted for health care reform -- and referring to the targets on the map as "surveyor's symbols." Mansour points out that "targeted districts" are part of political parlance -- obviously true -- and says this. (It starts at around 11:40 in the clip.)

MANSOUR: I just want to clarify again, and maybe it wasn't done on the record enough by us when this came out, the graphic, is just, it's basically -- we never, ever, ever intended it to be gunsights. It was simply crosshairs like you see on maps.

BRUCE: Well, it's a surveyor's symbol. It's a surveyor's symbol.

MANSOUR: It's a surveyor's symbol. I just want to say this, Tammy, if I can. This graphic was done, not even done in house -- we had a political graphics professional who did this for us.

Right wingers are now pointing to an old Daily Kos diary by Markos Moulitsas in an attempt to equate and diffuse in which Moulitsas uses the terms, "target" and "bullseye." But their attempt at their tried and true revisionist history falls short this time. While some can justifiably point to vitriol on both sides that needs to be toned down, in my opinion this comparison is apples and oranges, if only for the visual aids of targets on the districts the SarahPAC map wanted to "take back." That coupled with Palin's usual rhetoric, gun metaphors and especially the audience that she's trying to reach, in my opinion makes all the difference.  No one said a word about the Kos article when it came out. But there was a definite reaction to Palin's map with crosshairs, one of those being Gifford's. For Palin supporters to go back two years to search for something remotely similar on the liberal side is disingenuous.

My final point in all of the chaos of this past weekend was my realization of the lack of dialogue regarding guns and gun rights. I don't personally own a gun. But I don't begrudge anyone else owning one. You have a right to own one. But does that right preclude stricter gun laws for the sake of safety? Is there any legitimate reason to be against gun control? I say again, any legitimate reason. I have no problem with someone wanting to purchase a gun, but shouldn't there be certain procedures in place to prevent mentally unstable people from gun ownership?  It has come to light that Loughner attempted to join the military and was rejected. If the reason was due to mental instability, shouldn't there be information pipelines in place so that the FBI (whose background check Loughner supposedly passed before his gun purchase) received that info? Yet, I haven't heard a word from the mainstream media in regards to this issue. No one has even broached the subject. Maybe politicians will think twice about gun control laws now that it's hit so close to home, but I'm not holding my breath.

ADDING... I hope we as a collective group take more seriously the next instance of someone bringing a gun or an assault rifle to a political rally in which the President is present, or more closely scrutinize a gun toter looking to "water the tree of liberty."

TOO FAR!

POSTED BY JHW22

Per an article in November regarding the violent rhetoric and what Congresswoman Giffords' opponent did to stoke the flames.

He seems to be embracing his fellow tea partier's idea. Kelly's campaign event website has a stern-looking photo of the former Marine in military garb holding his weapon. It includes the headline: "Get on Target for Victory in November. Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly."

Arizona Rep. Giffords Shot

NY Times: A congresswoman from Arizona was shot on Saturday along with several others during at public event at a grocery store in Tucson, according to her spokesman, C.J. Karamargin. The Tucson Citizen reported that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, a Democrat, had been shot at close range in the head.

This is horrific. And be honest: what was your first reaction upon hearing the news that a Democratic member of Congress was shot in the head during what amounts to a town hall meeting in Arizona?

UPDATE: Although shot in the head, Giffords is expected to pull through. According to a sheriff's official, there were 18 other injured parties, including a Federal Judge who at this point was mentioned as having died.

The shooter's name is Jared Loughner, a 22 year old male.  And after reading some comments on Sarah Palin's Facebook page, I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm relieved the perpetrator is not of hispanic origin, since there are some who were already blaming border security and assuming the shooter was an illegal alien. Those same people were aghast that anyone would mention that Giffords was a "target" on Sarah Palin's SarahPAC "Don't Retreat, Reload" map.

American Brownshirts

posted by Armadillo Joe

America is finally degenerating into the violent, balkanized quasi-fascist cesspool -- lorded over by rapacious corporations and their well-heeled beneficiaries with the help of a militarized police force and a violence-prone segment of the general populace -- that sci-fi writers have been predicting for decades.

The information campaign waged during the August recess to inform the public regarding the Democratic position on the health-care debate? Shouted down by American Brownshirts. We used to call them Nazis because it made us feel better, but these days I'm not so sure we have been exaggerating. These people are mixed-up, screwed-up cognitively dissonant malcontents who are capable of just the kind of ruffian street violence a political party needs to intimidate the opposition into cowed silence. Democracy is about the non-violent resolution of social conflicts. Their side seethes with the threat of imminent violence from Dixiecratic racist goobers, which operatives like Atwater and Rove and others of their ilk have been exploiting since the 1950's.

Funnier still is the fact that these people are financed by health-care companies -- a private brownshirt brigade sent to shout down and shut down the civil discourse needed for a well-functioning democracy. In the wake of the awful shooting at the fitness club in Pittsburgh, one wonders how long til one of these townhells ends in a bloodbath? In five, four, three, two...

And speaking of privately-funded violence aimed at political ends, Eric Prince and Blackwater Xe are truly little more than a private army whose leadership is sympathetic to the political aims of one party and diametrically opposed to those of the other. The Nazi SS Divisions, despite the way many historians talk about them, were not part of Germany's national army, the Wehrmacht, they were a separate and distinct organization: the militarized wing of the National Socialist Party. They were Hitler's private army. Only the most fanatical Nazis were invited to join the Schutzstaffel and in many cases these men had never even been in the regular army, being drug-addicts or degenerates or just plain ol' bug-fuck nuts, they were frequently judged to be utterly unfit for duty in Germany's very disciplined and highly professional Wehrmacht.

Anyone see parallels to Blackwater Xe? How long til a corporation hires these goons to close down by any means necessary some large-scale political function (like a mass rally or a March on Washington) they deem a threat?

Who would really stop them if they did? Our mass media would cluck their tongues at how all those foul-mouthed, dirty fucking hippies made those goons hit or shoot them and then they'd talk about how sad it is that we all can't just get along by not provoking the racist vigilantes into acting out, the socio-political equivalent of shhhh - don't make daddy mad - you know how he gets! The police themselves? The post-Reagan's-War-on-Drugs militarized police force with their Taser guns on a hair-trigger and general political proclivities completely unsympathetic to things like the First or Fourth Amendments? We're more likely to see them loan their billy clubs to the goons from Blackwater Xe.

Just remember who's really in charge in this country. We may have the inter-webs as our conduit for organizing and the tremendous amount of energy and willpower we collectively expended during the Long Nightmare of the Bush Dystopia may have gotten our guy into the White House, but the last time we had someone who gave people this kind of hope and this level of optimism in power his motorcade left Dealy Plaza in Dallas with his brains all over the trunk lid and we ended up with Nixon's breeding ground for everything nefarious and sleazy to slime and slither its way through American politics for the next 40 years, including that greasy meat-puppet from California: Saint Ronnie of the Ray-Gun.

In short, folks, I'm just afraid that even if we win this health-care fight -- and right now I'm fairly certain we won't -- the potential for violence from that armed, resentful, persecution-complexed segment of the population, goaded as they are by the monied interests (with an assist from their brain-dead cronies and other assorted functionaries in the Congress and the media) into doing their bidding against all those noisome DFH's, makes me afraid for what could happen to our un-white president and those of us who put him there.

Read this link and then discuss.

By All Means, Let's Keep Letting the Crazy People Have Guns

Posted by Fraulein

There are few issues that enrage me more than the whole question of why we find it acceptable, as a society, that our country is so awash in guns that any random nutjob can cause an unspeakable tragedy like this:

On Tuesday night, the gunman walked into the fitness center wearing workout gear and a headband, entered a "Latin impact" dance aerobics class and placed a duffel bag on the ground. He rooted around in the bag for a moment, turned off the lights, took out at least two guns and started shooting.

Three women were killed and nine people were injured. Police say he may have fired as many as 52 shots before turning the gun on himself and committing suicide.

Why is this OK? You want to have your stupid rifle to go hunting with? Knock yourself out. But why in the name of Jeebus do we think it is OK for anyone--ANYONE, even the catastrophically mentally ill like this guy, to have such laughably easy access to handguns? Why have the goddamned Democrats been ducking responsibility for this issue for so many years? Why can't somebody--how about President Obama, for example?--go on TV and just say honestly: "The ghoulish psychotics of the gun lobby have had this country by the short hairs for long enough. The time to act to rein in the epidemic of gun violence in this country is now. And where we're going to start is by is putting up as many roadblocks as possible to gun ownership for the mentally ill."

Why is that so fucking hard to do? Will we see it happen in our lifetimes? Discuss.

FRIDAY UPDATE: The Pennsylvania fitness center gunman bought handgun "accessories," whatever those are, from the same gun dealer that armed one of the previous mentally ill mass killers, the Virginia Tech shooter. Not surprising in the least.

The Stakes

posted by Armadillo Joe

Right on cue, just as I'm continuing to plow my way through Pearlstein's book on Goldwater and writing vague & incoherent rants about an ongoing right-wing conspiracy dating back to the 1940's and early 50's and running right on up to today -- right now this very moment, even -- to undermine the America we all know and love, I go and read a blog post that sums the whole situation up better than I ever have or could.

He somewhat cheekily refers to his website as "Der Stiftung Leo Strauss" ("the Leo Strauss Foundation") as in Leo Strauss the "Jewish Nazi" -- a villain in American history you should know about, if you don't already. He also seems to be some kind of Washington insider, I think, because he refers to conversations he's had with members of Congress in their offices. His vision of America is rather dark, which naturally grabbed my attention, and he has little use for the majority of politicians and pundits who still treat this whole process we call "politics" as a mere parlor game with not the slightest clue as to the actual stakes. He persuasively argues that this thing called the GOP "Base" or sometimes "movement conservatism" is in fact an entity apart from the "conservative base" which is itself a separate entity from the GOP. His imagery is spot-on:

The Movement is the controlling parasite astride its enfeebled Republican host.

Our Ruling Class, though, whether pundits or politicians, either don't get the stakes or they do and don't care, because...

Seemingly bright ‘mainstream media’ still do not understand the dichotomy. Or its implications. They still treat ‘Republicans’ and Democrats as equivalent political actors playing the same game by the same rules for the same prizes. As long as relative neophytes view politics in this prism, the Movement wins.

One side thinks we're all playing a gentlemanly round of paintball on a paintball court while the other shells the whole damned town with live artillery. Or, if you will, one side keeps bringing a knife to a gun fight. Whether Emmitt Till or JFK or Dr. George Tiller of Wichita, Kansas, how many people have to get shot down before we realize the other side isn't fucking around, that they actually want us dead?

the Movement within the conservative base always plays a different game for a different prize. The Movement may speak in normal political talking points from ‘Republican’ institutions. Yet is is not committed to Dahl-esque pluralistic politics. It has has never sought compromise or ‘moderation’. That’s because for the Movement, politics is existential warfare. Compromise is defeat.

I have tried at this blog and elsewhere to paint the Big Picture by arguing against the D.C. Establishment's cherished notion of bi-partisan centrism -- a notion that seems to soothe the tortured souls of our nation's punditocracy, worshipping as they do the blessed and elusive "middle" where one finds both moderates and roadkill. Choosing sides between the different parties is manifestly not like selecting a red car or a blue car, as though each is essentially the same in purpose and function and the selection is one of mere aesthetics and personal taste -- country music versus jazz, Dallas & Atlanta versus New York & San Francisco, BBQ versus granola and yogurt, Dunkin' Donuts versus Starbucks, beer versus wine. It's a little bit of regionalism, it's a little bit of ethnicity, it's a little bit of class and socio-economic status, but in the end we're all Americans and we all want the same things even if we disagree about process, right?

Wrong:

For the Movement ... politics is existential. And when survival is on the line, pluralistic compromise is for chumps. Democrats still are playing for political advantage within the confines of traditional two party politics. ... When the other side’s world view is existential, then the stakes are higher than something so trite as the Constitution.

The idea that one group may laugh at Larry The Cable Guy jokes and the other at Woody Allen movies, yet both love America and want it to succeed for all Americans, is silly and laughably naive. Such pablum may make for pat and comforting answers to gullible people who think we're all in this together as Americans and we just have different ideas about how to get there, but it's useless when steeling yourself for attacks from the other side, attacks not merely intended to wound, but to mortally wound. Digby calls this vague sense of "our side/their side" American Tribalism and I think the embrace of those outward trappings is an important component of the divided American soul, but more as external signifiers to fellow tribe members than any instrinsic affinity for the actual things embraced.

They are more like prescursors to learning the secret handshake, to getting invited into the club:

This I share out of personal experience talking with the Movement crowd over the years. Many of the conversations are carefully masked and there is almost a secret handshake and a ‘feeling out’ to see if one is receptive to test, and then small conversational overtures. If the Stiftung has seen and heard this stuff from Capitol Hill to refined salons in the Imperial City so has everyone else. From fatuous Tweety to Howard — to all of them.

To think that our problems in America are only about cowboy boots versus Gucci loafers is to manifestly not get to the heart of the matter where epic struggles over race and gender and class have been fought -- often to the death -- and will be fought again. One group of Americans wants the rest of their fellow Americans eliminated, in fact refuses to even acknowledge that they are fellow countrymen, and that spiteful, bitter group of people has the means, motive and opportunity, whether with guns or ropes or control over health-insurance policies, to make good on their secret wishes. That the talking heads on the Tee-Vee and in print don't, can't or won't incorporate this uglier, more existential threat to the health of American political discourse into their horse-race/game-day style analysis of the scene in D.C. reveals that they are morally vacant, willfully blind or just plain stupid.

The Krugman and Joan Walsh fantasy that some ‘Republicans’ are going to put a stop to the Movement is a joke. At one time there was a functioning Republican apparat apart from the Movement, capable of independent action. The Movement long ago slipped the leash.

[...]

Because Krugman et al. fail to grasp the fundamental difference between the Movement, the former Republican Party and the Democratic Party, talking heads refer to the Movement as the ‘Republican base’. As if somehow the Movement and its Manichean zero-sum nihilism is the same as the Democratic base.

[...]

It wasn’t always like this, of course. The Republican Party as an independent actor and entity was able to keep the Movement within bounds. But after Reagan, and especially the Bush debacle in ‘92, the Movement learned to seize power on its own within and without the Republican Party.

As Pearlstein depicts in his book, the transformation of Barry Goldwater from a stalwart political actor to the head of a full-fledged political movement represented the coagulation of a movement whose constituent parts -- once disparate and scattered between the two parties or even beyond them -- had been churning under the placid surface of a "Leave It To Beaver" 1950's America still basking in the glow of her glorious victory over fascism with FDR's "Arsenal of Democracy" -- tools and weapons built by mighty American industry -- before wheeling around to stare down another form of monolithic totalitarianism in the USSR, it too doomed to defeat by superior American ingenuity and culture.

America thought itself to be invincible.

Such an America imagined itself at the end of internal conflict and strife, that no problem was beyond the reach of Yankee grit and determination, even the "Negro" problem, hence the subtitle of Pearlstein's book "The Unmaking of the American Consensus," because a growing chorus of Americans throughout the 1950's simply no longer wanted to get along in the post-New Deal, pluralistic, ecumenical, multi-ethnic country that America had long purported to be and was finally en route to becoming.

Frankly, they never really had been down with that program and still aren't, to this very day:

In the case of racism, overt comments allow all quickly to depict a discovered outburst as ‘isolated, unacceptable incident’, etc. The nativism swirling around the immigration debates are an easy example. ‘You look different than me’ or the White trash psychology of another era trying to pick on someone below them socially is an ugly but known practice. The same argument on more upscale level is to mask it behind NAFTA, globalization and now economic free fall. Beyond the socio-economic critique, alleged health dangers, welfare freeloaders. Pat Buchanan long swam in those waters now plied by Lou Dobbs.

[...]

As a famous ‘Republican’ once told me, he’d rather live an American version of Franco than have to deal with multiculturalism. *That’s* how existentialism trumps liberal democracy.

Pearlstein's book just details how, over a couple of decades, the screeching, poo-flinging monkey hordes were driven or herded or bribed or otherwise willfully gathered under a single political banner for the simple reason that a large enough swath of the American public was finally demanding that this country live up to the high-falutin' rhetoric of its founding, but rather than man-up, admit that America's failures had done wrong by whole segments of her population and then work to make amends, enormous voting blocs got Pied Piper'd by sociopaths like Nixon and Saint Ronnie into the Republican fold, where their basest, ugliest, most anti-social impulses would never be condemned or even questioned. Then, like a virus, they multiplied and spread until the original Party of Lincoln no longer resembled itself. The Movement had triumphed. Our friend at the Stiftung continues:

All of the above are premised on loyalty to the Movement’s higher existential values rather than ‘mere process’ like democracy ... When you understand this dynamic, then the relative silence about Dr. Tiller’s murder, or the right wing extremism that led to Officer John's heroic courage makes sense.

[...]

What this means as a social, cultural and political actor, the Movement is unable to accept loss of power or control through liberal democratic means. The Movement’s eschatology is to higher truths than liberal democratic government: race, security, nationalism, order, security. The Movement’s psychology compels the rage as its Counter-Enlightenment agenda is revealed, in power and then snatched away again.

I fear we may simply be in one of the inter-glacial thaws between periods of Rethugli-goon mis-rule. It seems to only take a few years for the voting public, helped along by a prostrate and compliant corporate media complex, to forget just how bad things tend to get during Republican regimes and to view past GOP administrations through a gauzy lens.

Take, for instance, the Republican beatification of a third-rate Hollywood meat-puppet as The Greatest President in the History of Human Civilization™. Saint Ronnie of the Ray-Gun is the only other Republican president -- going all the way back to Lincoln -- not to die in office, bolt the party in disgust, lose a bid for re-election, leave office amid widespread corruption or be hounded from office by scandal. Except of course for Eisenhower, but he was barely a Republican anyway. Many in his own party accused him of being a Communist sympathizer.

Thus, considering the weakness of the competitve field, Saint Ronnie being the Greatest Republican President since Lincoln is a pretty low bar to hurdle. Upon his death a few years ago, one would have thought Pericles himself had returned to earth just die all over again, to hear the corporate media tripping over each other to issue ever more thoroughly unquestioning paens to his great and glorious era of prosperity, strength and greatness. It made me sick to my stomach to hear all that "Morning in America" bull-pucky again, as though he had led us from the Dark Ages.

I can't wait to hear how Jimmy Carter will be spoken of upon his passing. I suspect the tone will be somewhat different.

The resurrection of Richard Milhouse Nixon's career as an elder statesman in the 1980's is the clearest indicator of The Movement's not-so-latent authoritarianism. For them, the problem was never that he did something wrong, just that he got caught. His re-emergence paved the way for all those unreconstructed Nixonites to weasle their way back into government throughout the 1980's and early 90's and eventually into the Bush43 White House.

Therefore, when I hear people on our side talk about how this or that move makes Republicans look dumb and boy howdy, they're just gonna keep acting all dumb and losing elections, I can only join in the schadenfreude to a point. These people aren't engaged in a merely political program. Politics is but one facet of their agenda and since violence and a willingness to kill is one of their primary and most effective tools, they have the power to de facto enact huge swaths of that agenda, even if they fail de jure.

From race-relations & immigration to the health-care showdown, these are the stakes.

Selling Shit To The Shitheads

posted by Armadillo Joe

Following up on Broadway Carl's post about the violence in Washington D.C. today, I want to highlight a quote from digby's rundown of the same situation:

It's pretty clear that the right wing has lost whatever restraint it had and that the ongoing paroxysms of violent, extreme rhetoric are having their effect. The crocodile tears of the anti-abortion forces after the Tiller assassination notwithstanding, it's also pretty clear that they know this violence is effective. If you want to paralyze a society and force people to capitulate out of fear of random violence, nothing beats terrorism.

And once the right gets everybody looking over their shoulders, they'll misdirect the citizenry and run to the rescue with calls for "law and order." (Recall that the violence of the 60s didn't originate with the left --- it originated with racist cops unleashing hell on non-violent protesters.)

This situation is nothing new in American history. Whenever the right loses political power, they start shooting people. Something ugly and thuggish and authoritarian in the wingnut mindset drives them to it every single time. They are stupid enough and mean enough to be as predictable as a trained seal.

Naturally, the same things would happen with the right-wings in other countries as well -- and they do so frequently in poorer countries, though such collections of thugs are called "armies" and are usually commanded by dictators who are propped up by some American intelligence service or other -- but we have a peculiar confluence of factors here in these fifty states that afflicts us with considerably more right-wing violence than any other civilized nation on earth. Those causes include, but are not limited to, first and foremost: guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns, guns.

We also have a political culture which elevates the outward expression of supposedly simple and "homespun" values to the level of litmus test, which usually amounts in practice to elaborate kabuki ruses intended to get the votes of the racist yahoos and toothless goobers in the hinterlands, which in truth means validating their racist, jingoistic, nativist, xenophobic, bigoted impulses and soothing their deepest, most rancid and repulsively sociopathic urges.

All of which remains necessary even in the dawning of the 21st Century because of the Electoral College.

Thus, myriad apparatchiks, on behalf of the wealthy Ruling Elites who sign their paychecks, can mutter their paraphrased reiterations and reinterpretations and reinventions of the age-old "will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest" laments, all from the safety of their radio microphones and newspaper columns and wingnut-welfare magazines and TV "news" desks and then can pretend to be completely and totally surprised when someone goes ahead and, well, does it because no one could have predicted that calling for the (violent, if necessary) elimination of whole groups and classes of people might encourage some people to actually start killing with whatever is at hand.

Which in These'n Here Yew-Nawted Staytes means a fucking G-U-N.

And then the media whores get to pretend to be shocked! shocked! that someone out there in the world could be so callous and mean and could come up with such an idea all by themselves with no external input. They will all express their deep sadness at this completely isolated and totally unconnected to any external causes or larger narratives "event" at the hands of some lone nut, some completely random act by a disconnected freak who mysteriously lept, fully formed, into existence as a roiling cauldron of hate and violent retribution with no discernible precursors or legitimizing forces in the culture at large. Oooh look! Shiny blonde teenage girl gone missing!

And we'll all move on. Because the smiling news models on the Tee-Vee machine told us to do so. They told us that this particular form of very real, very personal violence has no predicates and thus is totally random and you may as well worry about meteors or lightning strikes because they all come from the same vast and unpredictable fog. 'Tis a pity we can't figure out where this stuff is coming from, now go buy a bigger television set.

But the seed of fear has been planted. One more thing to ensure a meek and pliant electorate of consumers whose survival instinct has been triggered so that they'll close up, turn inward and disengage from the public sphere out of worry and uncertainty and instead do as they are fucking told or else a uniformed cop will Taser'em like a 72 year-old grandma well before the evil, brown-skinned terr'st killers can come and murder all the little (white) children in their beds.

Because selling shit to the shitheads of the GOP has never, ever really been about getting votes. No sir. The Ruling Elites have never really been on-board with this whole "democracy" thing, anyway. Sure, they need votes to seize control of the machinery of governance (Rove's infamous "50%+1" strategy), but they really couldn't give two shits about any one person's actual vote, much less a whole group collected into a "party" like the Dems or the Rethugs.

No, selling shit to the shitheads isn't even about about opposing nigras and uppity wimmin-folk and spics and faggots and dirty fucking hippies, per se. It's about seeming to for long enough to attract the necessary fellow-travelers and mold them into a mongrel horde of poo-flinging monkeys frightful enough to dissuade do-gooders and mushy idealists from ever trying to CHANGE anything ever.

Because CHANGE costs them money.

Anyone who values things like progress and civic engagement and The Arts and beauty and the greater health of the public sphere just hasn't had a big-enough hole gnawed in their soul by Teh Fear to be a compliant consumer of hole-filling goodies like iPods and shoddily R&D'd pharmaceuticals and probably thinks that CHANGE is a good thing and might vote that way and, in fact, largely did in the last election. And CHANGE always means costing the plutocrats of the Ruling Elite more money.

And that means time to release the hounds, the flying monkeys, the goon squads, the un-recompensed adopters of the Faith of the Old Order who will bring down violence on the heads of all of Those Others.

On those people.

More violence is coming, folks, because these freaks are just the comets to circle 'round within sight of our unaided media eye. An entire Oort Cloud of Dirty Fucking Hippie haters stands ready and waiting and well-financed by an unholy alliance of industrial interests and Old Money pining for the days of monarchy to hurl as many of these dirty snowballs our way as necessary to get us to back the fuck off and shut the fuck up and do as we are fucking told.

They did it once before in recent memory, in the 1960's, and even though they started it, even though while the cameras rolled they beat the shit out of peaceful idealists who just wanted a better world (and brutally murdered them when those cameras were off), even though they gunned down our leaders like ducks in a shooting gallery throughout the decade, our collective memory is now that the "Turbulent 60's" were the fault of all those Dirty Fucking Hippies acting up and being disrespectful and shit. Then we got Nixon and then Reaganism and then Clintonian "third-way" capitulation and then President Cheney.

Scott Roeder and James Von Brunn are warning shots.

Editor's note (6/11 09 9:40am): I wanted to add this video I saw this morning on Bob Cesca's blog.

Motherfuckers

posted by Armadillo Joe

I've often argued at this site and in other forums that we lefties should be more afraid of the capacity for violence on the Right, a capacity I just don't think we share here on the Left, especially as the pendulum swings back and they lose power, money, influence and status.

Breaking news this morning:

George Tiller shot to death at Wichita church

BY STAN FINGER
The Wichita Eagle

WICHITA - George Tiller, the Wichita doctor who became a national lightning rod in the debate over abortion, was shot to death this morning as he walked into church services.

[...]

Tiller has long been a focal point of protest by abortion opponents because his clinic, Women's Health Care Services at 5701 E. Kellogg, is one of the few in the country where late-term abortions are performed.

Protesters blockaded Tiller's clinic during Operation Rescue's "Summer of Mercy" protests during the summer of 1991, and Tiller was shot by Rachelle Shannon at his clinic in 1993.

Tiller was wounded in both arms, and Shannon remains in prison for the shooting.

This is only the beginning.

The Good Fight

by Armadillo Joe

Matt Yglesias gamely tries to spelunk into the frightening recesses of the wingnut mind, attempting to describe their vision of how the world works, especially now that an unwhite-skinned islamofascistic pointy-headed Big City Lib'ruhl who speaks in complete sentences (and has a mooz-luhm name!) runs the show:

The people on the outs are “normal” and the people running the show are “abnormal.” And while I wouldn’t use that language to describe the difference in the coalition, the basic description is right—most Americans are white and most Americans are Christian, and the Republican Party is overwhelmingly the party of white Christian America while the Democratic Party draws its support from a diverse array of non-white and non-Christian ethnic and sectarian groups. But the authentic America is seen as the white & Christian American, an entity in whose defense one can claim to rebel against the actual United States of America.

Doug J at Balloon Juice quotes Yglesias and then follows-up with his own assessment of the wingnut militia movement:

in the minds of many wingnuts, a right-wing insurrection would be a restoration. This probably explains why the right is generally more interested in the idea of armed insurrection than the left

But, driftglass, with the usual aplomb, is having none of it. He gleefully goes for the jugular and gets to the heart of the problem with Reich-Wing politics faster and more thoroughly than ten Andrew Sullivan apologies for the recent political stumbles of otherwise transcendent and timeless conservative values. He attacks with a ferocity that washes over and clouds the vision like a mainline hit of unadulterated TRUTH straight into an artery:

Republicans don't give a shit about this country. They give a shit about their country: the The Caucasian Free State Of Jesusland. And to whatever extent the actual America and its actual constitution and history and pluralty and complexity frustrates and impedes the implementation of the New Confederacy of their dreams, that is the extent to which they will always despise the real America.

And then he uses that momentum to carry us forward into action, ACTION NOW! complete with pitchforks and torches because somebody has to stand and fight against these people before they bring down the rickety facade of the last, best hope on earth:

From Congress to our local PTAs, we have to stop playing nice. We have to stop pretending they'll go away, or sober up, or that they're kidding, or that someday all of that being bugfuck nuts 24/7 will get wearying and they'll take up another hobby.

Sorry, but these are the people who watched Worst President in History magically turn everything he touched to shit and decided "Four More Years!" These are the people who look into Michele Bachmann's helter skelter eyes and asked for seconds.

They have spent decades, vast sums of money and considerable effort going out of their way to earn our loud, rude, sustained and public contempt.

And I urge every Liberal in America to take it upon himself or herself sure Conservatives are paid what they've earned -- in full and with interest -- no matter how long it takes.

Ratcheting Up Teh Crazy

by Armadillo Joe

Following up on my last post "The Mighty Wurlitzer," I'd like to highlight something I read today from David Neiwert (who has made a career the last decade or more tracking right-wing militia insanity at Orcinus and other sites -- he also wrote a book titled 'The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right') over at C&L, a post entitled "As their power spirals downward, the Right's rhetoric gets nuttier and nastier":

[...]

Deja vu from 1994, when I was regularly attending militia meetings, all over again: The president-bashing. The gun fetishizing. The paranoia. The unstated old bigotry. And sometimes, all of them would come together at once.

[...]

This time, they're not just getting whipped into a paranoid frenzy by their fellow paranoids, which was generally the case in the 1990s, with a few exceptions -- namely Rush Limbaugh. In their latest immanation, the old Patriot movement is getting stoked by a whole slew of ostensibly mainstream conservatives broadcasting daily and constantly on mainstream news media.

He also quotes Eric Boehlert, as he dismantles the hapless but frighteningly popular Glenn Beck and other rabblerousers as they spew hatred and sow seeds of popular disorder on FOX News:

Beck's sure "[d]epression and revolution" are what await America under Obama, and fears moving "towards a totalitarian state." The country today sometimes reminds Beck of "the early days of Adolf Hitler." Beck thinks that Obama, who has "surrounded himself by Marxists his whole life," is now "addicting this country to heroin -- the heroin that is government slavery."

And it's not just Beck. Appearing on Fox News, Dick Morris recently made a wildly irresponsible comment that looks even worse in light of the Pittsburgh law-enforcement slayings: "Those crazies in Montana who say, 'We're going to kill ATF agents because the UN's going to take over' -- well, they're beginning to have a case."

And it's not just Fox News. Radio nut Michael Savage recently claimed that "we have a naked Marxist for president." And high-profile conservative blogger Erick Erickson contemplated the beating of politicians: "At what point do [people] get off the couch, march down to their state legislator's house, pull him outside, and beat him to a bloody pulp for being an idiot?"

Of course, the right-wingers at Free Republic are way ahead of Erickson as they fantasize about Obama's assassination: "And let's face it: all the speculation about Obama being the actual Antichrist will either be confirmed or denied if someone gets off a lucky shot at the SOB."

Again, all of this shit scares me mostly because these people have been steeped in violent eliminationist rhetoric for decades, they are armed and their ancestors are the original domestic terrorist group, the KKK, proving they have quite a record of doing as they say. Now that America is led by a black president with a mooz-luhm' sounding name, all their worst nightmares have come true and we not yet even begun to feel the Wrath of Teh Crazy.

The Mighty Wurlitzer

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