So many of us on the left have said that we will see the crazies come back out now that we got a Democratic President. I’m talking the real whack jobs, the ones that make you think of Timothy McVeigh, or Richard Poplawski:
A gunman wearing a bulletproof vest and "lying in wait" opened fire on officers responding to a domestic disturbance call Saturday, killing three of them and turning a quiet Pittsburgh street into a battlefield, police said.
Police Chief Nate Harper said the motive for the shooting isn't clear, but friends said the gunman recently had been upset about losing his job and feared the Obama administration was poised to ban guns.
I’m sure everyone has already read about it, and seen the very interesting connections being made between people like Beck and Bachmann with this guy. If not, then I suggest you stop right here and go on over to Crooks and Liars, where Dave Neiwert has an excellent piece up. Interesting enough, Dave has a book getting ready to be released which is on this very subject.
Of course this has put the right into full defense. Here’s Malkin:
You killed all the innocent people at the Binghamton immigration center.
You killed these police officers.
It’s all your fault.
And it doesn’t stop with her. “Jammie Wearing Fool” has really put the “fool” in their name:
At Balloon Juice, John Cole offers this subtle analysis, calling it Glenn Beck's America. I suppose when those four cops were murdered in Oakland we should have called it what, Jesse Jackson's America? Barack Obama's America? Ron Dellums' America?
What a way to inject some racism into this tragedy.
This is the exact point I want to touch on. Remember last year when that loon went into a Tennessee church and started shooting up people? Turns out the church was rather liberal, and the guy was a big reader of O’Reilly and Hannity.
Or how about the guy who was sending those fake anthrax letters to big name liberals, like Keith Olbermann and the New York Times? He was a “huge” fan of people like Coulter and Malkin. He admitted it! But that put the right into this same defense mode.
What gets me is how the wingnuts feel they can’t take any blame for this. In an ideal world, that would be true, but this world is far from ideal. And let’s take a second and think of how many times we hear of our words having “bad effects”. For example – when we held debates on the Iraq war and people on the left called for an end to the war, somehow our words were used as "recruiting tools for the terrorists”. Isn’t that interesting how some blog or politician saying something here, can influence people to do bad things half a world away, yet, people saying things here on our airwaves and in our media have no effect on people here at home.
There’s are far more examples of this. Kind of like the old wingnut notion that “if we teach sex education to our children, then they will be out doing it like rabbits”, even if the kids are only a couple of years from being able to serve in the military.
My whole point is that words do have effects, especially when you have people like Poplawski out there. And you got people like Glenn Beck, whose main goal is to instill fear into these people. I posted perfect proof of that just a few days ago, when Beck was saying that Obama was leading us to fascism (a liberal fascist?), while playing Nazi footage in the background. His little head sticking up in front of the big screen, leaving you with an awesome sense of an Orwellian time.
People love to be scared. That’s no secret. Think of roller coasters, horror movies and extreme sports. So the right has become vampires feeding on that fear, or the adrenaline rush associated with it. They do it all in the name of the sacred rating, even if that rating means votes.
“BARACK OBAMA’S COMING TO TAKE YOUR GUNS”
