Remember a while back when Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was gunned down for speaking in public and there was a calm, rational discussion about right-wing hate speech possibly being connected to actual violence? And remember how Rush and Glenn and Bill and their buds all told us how ridiculous this was? Perhaps you even remember them explaining how preposterous it was to allow the actions of a few unstable radicals to represent an entire group?
Anyhoo, the list below kind of disagrees. It even kind of suggests maybe some of us wacko lefties may have been on to something when we surmised that the violent talk (even if only metaphorical) that the right had publicly inundated us with since President Obama first proved a viable presidential candidate, might actually coincide with real violence.
Once again, I said "coincide" not directly cause, but again, the growing list of violence on our own soil shows more than a casual correlation with right wing beliefs.
To be clear, this is not the kind of thing that keeps me up at night. It hit me over the head as I read Charles Pierce's recent article about fragmentation - both the kind that ends up as shrapnel and the kind that sends people running to their own little corner of the internet to find those fragments of society who agree with them when no one else will... and when no one else should. Pierce also suggests that we are ALL political, but rather than facing up to the challenges, responsibilities, and privileges that entails, we'd rather just stick our heads in our own ostrich holes and claim we're not political. "Awww Spongebob... I hate politics. Can't we just talk about something else?" But whether you only enjoy the most local level of politics i.e. the gossip at the local barber shop, or you truly enjoy reading crap like this, if you are human, rest assured, you are a political animal. You have no choice.
So, having cleared that up, back to the point, which is that since well before 9/11, there has in fact been a string of domestic terrorism in this country - Pierce notes that a school was bombed in Michigan in 1927 because, according the bomber, "his taxes were too high" - that by the perpetrator's own admission, is strictly right wing in impetus.
I know you think I'm just pulling this out of my rear, as I occasionally enjoy doing in less serious conversations, but look at the list... a list from another article by David Neiwert, a Spokane Washington based journalist and blogger who is clearly a left-wing nut job... because he collected this stuff into one place... which means, regardless of the police reports that verify all as fact, that he can't be trusted because he compiled the collection and dared to suggest it it might lead to a rather clear conclusion... but before we get into that, the list:
-- July 2008: A gunman named Jim David Adkisson, agitated at how "liberals" are "destroying America," walks into a Unitarian Church and opens fire, killing two churchgoers and wounding four others.
-- October 2008: Two neo-Nazis are arrested in Tennessee in a plot to murder dozens of African-Americans, culminating in the assassination of President Obama.
-- December 2008: A pair of "Patriot" movement radicals -- the father-son team of Bruce and Joshua Turnidge, who wanted "to attack the political infrastructure" -- threaten a bank in Woodburn, Oregon, with a bomb in the hopes of extorting money that would end their financial difficulties, for which they blamed the government. Instead, the bomb goes off and kills two police officers. The men eventually are convicted and sentenced to death for the crime.
-- December 2008: In Belfast, Maine, police discover the makings of a nuclear "dirty bomb" in the basement of a white supremacist shot dead by his wife. The man, who was independently wealthy, reportedly was agitated about the election of President Obama and was crafting a plan to set off the bomb during Obama's inauguration.
-- January 2009: A white supremacist named Keith Luke embarks on a killing rampage in Brockton, Mass., raping and wounding a black woman and killing her sister, then killing a homeless man before being captured by police as he is en route to a Jewish community center.
-- February 2009: A Marine named Kody Brittingham is arrested and charged with plotting to assassinate President Obama. Brittingham also collected white-supremacist material.
-- February 2009: A 60-year-old former Republican Party campaign volunteer opens fire on a gathering of Chilean exchange students in an apartment complex in Miramar Beach, Fla., after telling a neighbor he wanted to start a "revolution" against Latino immigrants.
-- April 2009: A white supremacist named Richard Poplawski opens fire on three Pittsburgh police officers who come to his house on a domestic-violence call and kills all three, because he believed President Obama intended to take away the guns of white citizens like himself. Poplawski is currently awaiting trial.
-- April 2009: Another gunman in Okaloosa County, Florida, similarly fearful of Obama's purported gun-grabbing plans, kills two deputies when they come to arrest him in a domestic-violence matter, then is killed himself in a shootout with police.
-- May 2009: A "sovereign citizen" named Scott Roeder walks into a church in Wichita, Kansas, and assassinates abortion provider Dr. George Tiller.
-- June 2009: A Holocaust denier and right-wing tax protester named James Von Brunn opens fire at the Holocaust Museum, killing a security guard.
-- February 2010: An angry tax protester named Joseph Ray Stack flies an airplane into the building housing IRS offices in Austin, Texas. (Media are reluctant to label this one "domestic terrorism" too.)
-- March 2010: Seven militiamen from the Hutaree Militia in Michigan and Ohio are arrested and charged with plotting to assassinate local police officers with the intent of sparking a new civil war... to protest the current liberal government.
-- March 2010: An anti-government extremist named John Patrick Bedell walks into the Pentagon and opens fire, wounding two officers before he is himself shot dead.
-- May 2010: A "sovereign citizen" from Georgia is arrested in Tennessee and charged with plotting the violent takeover of a local county courthouse. (note the frequency with which these Sovereign Citizens appear on this list! (they sure as hell ain't a liberal group)
-- May 2010: A still-unidentified white man walks into a Jacksonville, Fla., mosque and sets it afire, simultaneously setting off a pipe bomb.
-- May 2010: Two "sovereign citizens" named Jerry and Joe Kane gun down two police officers who pull them over for a traffic violation, and then wound two more officers in a shootout in which both of them are eventually killed. (because Obama was coming to take their guns.. their words, not mine)
-- July 2010: An agitated right-winger and convict named Byron Williams loads up on weapons and drives to the Bay Area intent on attacking the offices of the Tides Foundation and the ACLU, but is intercepted by state patrolmen and engages them in a shootout and armed standoff in which two officers and Williams are wounded.
-- September 2010: A Concord, N.C., man is arrested and charged with plotting to blow up a North Carolina abortion clinic. The man, 26-year--old Justin Carl Moose, referred to himself as the "Christian counterpart to (Osama) bin Laden” in a taped undercover meeting with a federal informant.
-- January 2011: A 22-year-old gunman named Jared Lee Loughner with a long grudge against Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and a paranoid hatred of the government walks into a public Giffords event and shoots her in the head, then keeps firing, killing six people and wounding 14 more. Gifford miraculously survives.
-- January 2011: A backpack bomb with the potential of killing or injuring dozens of people is found along the route of a Martin Luther King Day “unity march” in downtown Spokane.***prevented from detonating and injuring hundreds by overpaid, inefficient PUBLIC EMPLOYEES
-- January 31, 2011: An Army veteran from California with a previous arrest record for making threats against President Bush is arrested for making terrorist outside a mosque in Michigan inside a car whose trunk was filled with Class C explosives. (be it anti-Bush or anti-Obama, anti-government is a RIGHT wing tenet)
-- March 2011: Five people in the Fairbanks area are arrested on charges of plotting to kidnap or kill state troopers and a Fairbanks judge. All five are self-proclaimed "sovereign citizens," including local militia leader Schaeffer Cox.
-- March 2011: A man from Madera, CA, named Donny Eugene Mower is arrested for the firebombing of a Planned Parenthood clinic and the vandalization of a local Islamic religious center. The crimes were committed in the name of Mower's one-man hate group, the American Nationalist Brotherhood. His 'manifesto' asked: 'Isn't it time that someone hit back?'
The list is straight from Niewert's blog "Crooks and Liars." It even has a groovy, interactive map with little "pins" located where each of these incidents took place. You can click on the pins and they'll take you to more details (and sometimes fun commentary) about the incidents. Here's a link to the map:
So, what does it mean when someone says "Left wing conspiracy theory?" Does it suggest that the left is dreaming up a conspiracy where none exists? Or does it mean that the left is conspiring against the government, the right, someone else? It's one of those labels that's kind of hard to pin down... hard to know what the person saying it really means.
While I'm asking questions, do you remember hearing about any of these stories? Or did they simply get fragmented away as isolated incidents with no possible connecting thread? Let's face it, when it's possibly a Muslim activity, our press is getting very good and keeping it in the news for weeks on end. When a story has to do with an arbitrary concept like a debt ceiling and how Congressional Republicans will spare us from disaster, our press will float it as though the Earth's viability rests on it, but what did our press do with these stories? Seems like they kind of just died quickly and were forgotten as isolated incidents. How is that even possible, unless, of course, the press bends over backwards to appeal to the right... and the Whitehouse bends over backwards to appeal to the right, and this whole myth about a "liberal media" is truly that: myth. WTF? And don't even get me started on Obama's willingness to kiss the Right's ass lately...that's another whole post!
One thing is pretty clear though, the side of the division where the above list began is right. I am open to evidence to the contrary, but there doesn't seem to be a list of leftist inspired violence since 2008 that even comes close to this. And I'm not saying anyone is formally in charge of "the right" and is orchestrating each of these hits. No, I'm not saying that at all. It's clearly a lot more like Al Quaeda... with independent cells, purposely cut off from each other, and from those higher up the chain, to prevent the lower agents from knowing too much about the upper ones. Just like Al Quaeda, occasional videos are released with generic orders and motivational propaganda like a pep rally for the minions. Only instead of occasionally showing up in Al Jazeera's mailbox, we get to see the videos on Fox... or hear them on AM radio, but the motivational speech and the de facto connectivity of these cells is as unmistakable as the network Al Quaeda has built and uses to terrorize infidels.
Pierce goes on to point out in his article that we are a nation of folks who would rather ignore the monster we've created, retreat to our fragmented safe places, and hear the praise of those who think like us, than ask the questions to which we're afraid of the answers, or, worse yet, to face up to what we've built out of these fragments.
I guess I kind of agree with Pierce's analysis but only on an individual level. On a national level, I believe that a middle still exists... that moderates still hold the middle of the bell curve that is our national thinking. In fact, I still believe Obama could represent that middle of the bell better than any of our modern presidents if only we'd all enter the discussion as responsible, rational adults as opposed to used car salesmen and low-balling buyers who represent the looong tail of the bell... the 1% that rightfully should get ignored, but instead have taken over the media forcing the rational moderates among us off to our little fragments.
Those of us who used to reside comfortably on the sides or even smack at the top of that bell curve need to come out from our fragments and demand that the conversation stay somewhere near the middle... where the adults used to converse and compromise. It's great to acknowledge, and occasionally even borrow from some of those wackos on the looong tails of the bell once in a while, but it's time to stop letting them dominate the conversations, the headlines, and stop pretending that everything they say is a valid idea.
If Obama has failed at anything, it's keeping those long tails in check. Granted, he's not solely to blame. The Fox and AM radio crowd have set up the tilted table for this failure since way before anyone even heard of Obama. Truth be told, I kind of admired Obama for his reluctance to stoop the their level, but I am becoming of the opinion that he's allowed way too much leeway for the radical right's agenda to be portrayed as legitimate. As such, he's given away his bargaining power UNLESS he comes at them with equally ridiculous and radical low-ball-like counter-proposals. If he does this, he BECOMES the wacko AM radio and the people on that list up above falsely claim that he is. But if he doesn't, he's assuming that the facts and logic will prevail, and look where that got Jimmy Carter. (How ridiculous was Carter for assuming Americans dealing with an oil embargo might see the logic in alternative energy sources??)
The hate speech and oversimplified ILlogic spewed by AM radio somehow convinced us that our press was biased toward the left... so much so that any connection of the long list of right-inspired domestic terrorism above can't possibly exist... so much so that our press actually started believing it until they bent over backwards to avoid the falsely applied label... so much so that they refused to even hint at a connection among the items on that list... or Oklahoma City... or the 1927 Michigan school bombing. So much so that even as T. Boone Pickens begins to recognize the profitability of alternative energy, that he is magically transformed into a treehugger for pointing out that he does it for the money! So much so that NO ONE mentioned how many times it was simply the routine of Congress to lift the debt ceiling in the past... well, no one but Jon Stewart, until very recently... months into the "debate."
Still don't believe we've swung way too far to the right? Then how else do we explain how every viable Republican candidate who dares venture into the race gets clipped for having a rational, moderate belief until they're all rendered so bland and generic that they drop out or they adapt to the ultra-right, and leave us actually considering people like Michele Bachmann or Sara Palin or Emanuel Cleaver as viable candidates? Seriously... HTF do these people even get mentioned in the same arena as John Kerry or Bob Dole or Clinton or Reagan???
It's time we all forget the fragments and force the conversation back to the middle. Our compass has been thrown WAY TF off, but not by a "liberal media."
This argument HAS to move back to the middle. All of our nation's arguments HAVE to move back to the middle. Congress gets paid to compromise, not stand off. That's what politicians do, and make no mistake, we're ALL politicians. How about this: instead of allowing "re-elect NO ONE" to be the theme of the next elections (after all, it didn't exactly work out last time) let's go with a theme of electing only those candidates who admit that they are in fact politicians. Cuz the surest way to know they're lying is when they speak and claim they're not. Perhaps then we can pull off the blinders, recognize the obvious connections among the listed violence above, and stand together, in the middle, against it. Fear mongers need the kind of fear these events inspire in order to force the conversation away from the middle. Let's leave the fear mongering to Al Quaeda. Then let's get back to work proving that this majestic empire is NOT ready to fall just yet. If that's gonna happen, it's gonna happen somewhere in the middle.
You can call folks in the middle fence riders. You can spout cliches about how traffic doesn't move in the middle, and you can pretend what we've done in the past 10 years or so has been great for all involved, but if you're honest, you know it hasn't been working. Let's meet somewhere a little closer to where the middle used to be and start fixing it.
Luth
Out
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