How annoyed should I be to see
Glen Beck adopt a sort of morally relativistic “environment affects criminal behavior” item of sympathy on behalf of the neo-nazi
Holocaust Museum shooter? This from a man who’s plugged himself into the anti-Progressive Era Gospel, about when the Criminal Justice System adopted concern over the environmental causes of crimes, and from a man I assume wouldn’t countenance such an explanation regarding, say,
American Imperialism on the Muslim World. But somehow Beck relates the “general trends are making people nervous” to Von Bronn. (Liberal commentators are saying that, for instance, Glen Beck’s commentary is doing the same thing.)
Just so Glen Beck knows — this is who’s echoing
with this particular “people are outraged” item.
How annoyed should I be to see various conservative pundits and publications chaffe at the term “right wing extremist” and insist that, if anything, he better fits the lines of “left-wing”, as in suggesting his words better fit the profile of an Interational ANSWER protester. It’s a conceptualization that guarantees any number of mental gymnastics: he’s singing the multi-cultuarlism gospel. Seriously?
Notice to everyone:Â This is not a game of tit for tat.
How annoyed should I be by the reaction from various Fox News, most brazenly Greta Von Sustern
, talk radio commentators and Sarah Palin over David Letterman’s joke? I won’t say I care about defending or criticizing the joke — but what annoys me here is
this rather weird suggestion that Letterman is acting as a “surrogate” to Obama, allowing Obama to “stay above it” while Letterman smears Palin. This is an absurdity, and sheds more light on their never-ending politicized worldview than it does on Letterman. (Letterman is Jay Leno’s Better, but has coasted for the past decade.  Maybe he’s Conan’s equal now. It’s probably a knock of Leno that it’s hard for me to imagine him getting into this sort of controversy.)
How annoyed should I be by the high level of awareness I have on what it is Rush Limbaugh has said. It exceeds the level of awarenesss that existed during the Bush Administration. Would an elected Republican official please step into this leadership void currently being filled by Limbaugh so that I don’t have to hear so many dots of i’s and slashes of t’s of Limbaugh’s commentary? So, I hear that Rush Limbaugh made a joke off of a bad reference from someone that Obama was acting “above it all” on the International stage “like a god” (bleh on that commentator) with the comment “one thing that God shares with Obama — “What do Obama and God have in common? Neither has a birth certificate.” And bah de boom — Limbaugh makes a joke which, at worst, is a winky-dinky “aren’t I naughty?” fueling the conspiratorialists. And how much should I be annoyed that I have been placed in the position of defending Rush freaking Limbaugh from bloggers’ posts aligning Limbaugh’s quote with a birther quote from the Holocaust Museum shooter?
By the way, we’ve been in this spot before. See two items in the comments section, to the way-back machine back to 1995.
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June 13th, 2009 at 11:34 am
RIGHT WING SHOULD SQUIRM ROB ZALESK ICapital Times (Madison, WI)
Maybe it’s the sadist in me. Or maybe it’s just that, like millions of others, I’m tired of seeing those bulldog jowls every time I turn around or hearing the grating, self-righteous tone of his voice.
But I have to admit, as grim as the Oklahoma City bombing was, I’ve derived a certain perverse pleasure in recent weeks watching Rush Limbaugh and his various clones squirming as they frantically try to convince us that their hateful rhetoric didn’t incite any wackos to light the fuse.
The very suggestion, Limbaugh insisted in a Newsweek commentary last week, “is irresponsible and vacuous; such insinuations can only have a chilling effect on legitimate discussion. That’s what some on the left apparently intend as they attempt to exploit this tragedy for pure political gain.”
Then, in classic Limbaugh fashion — that is, to deflect the criticism from himself and make it seem as though he speaks for most Americans — he advises, “Do not be confused by all the talk about right-wing extremists. To liberals, anybody who’s not a liberal is a right-wing extremist. There’s no mainstream conservatism as far as they’re concerned. And it’s not just those of us who host talk-radio programs who are seen as right-wing extremists. It’s all who listen or watch such programs.”
Well, nice try, big fella.
But most people I know who listen to Limbaugh do so for laughs. Yes, occasionally he strikes a chord or makes a valid point — just as Archie Bunker once did.
But his arguments are always muddied by distortion. And verbosity. And most normal people realize that.
No one that I’m aware of — not even Limbaugh’s favorite target, Bill Clinton — has suggested that all those devoted followers are right-wing extremists.
What’s more, as divisive as Limbaugh and his ilk can be, I think most Americans would agree that it’s ludicrous to blame him or any other talk show host for the Oklahoma City bombing.
Nor can you blame the people who made the movie “Blown Away,” which bombing suspect Timothy McVeigh apparently rented more than a dozen times in recent months.
At the same time, I think most would also agree that talk show host G. Gordon Liddy crossed a line when he suggested that Americans would be justified in shooting federal agents who show up at that their door (“Head shots! Head shots — kill the sons of bitches!”), or when he jokes about using pictures of the Clintons for target practice.
When you start talking the language of the lunatic fringe, the wackos begin to think they’re part of the mainstream — and that violent acts are acceptable. And then you have to live with the consequences.
Did G. Gordon Liddy order Timothy McVeigh — or someone else — to light the fuse in Oklahoma City? No, of course not. But did his hatemongering influence the bomber in any way?
It’s certainly something to ponder.
In fact, for those of us who have attempted to stake out a middle ground, there are some rather bizarre and eerie similarities between the mood in this country now and in the late ’60s.
Liberals may cringe, but the truth is the lunatic fringe of the far left back then was every bit as vindictive, mean-spirited and narrow-minded as the far right of today.
Any authority figure was despised. Parents, teachers, store owners, it didn’t matter. Cops were pigs. Virtually anyone who wore a tie was suspect. And to suggest at a party that Richard Nixon had at least one or two redeeming qualities was to risk bodily harm.
In time, violent acts not only were accepted, but encouraged. Anarchy reigned.
Then four revolutionaries crossed the line — just as Timothy McVeigh allegedly did. They bombed Sterling Hall at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, killing a math researcher.
And suddenly all those on the far left who had preached the need for violence were insisting they weren’t at fault, that as outraged as they were at the U.S. government, they certainly didn’t condone blowing up a public building.
One could argue, of course, that the angry young rebels of the ’60s were protesting an unjust war.
Nonetheless, hate is hate. And for those of us who didn’t buy into that revolution garbage, those were scary times.
Every bit as scary as what we’re going through now.
What’s hard to fathom is that, just 25 years later, the pendulum has swung completely to the other side. So far, in fact, that we’ve now got a serious presidential candidate, Bob Dole, pandering to the far right and actually supporting the repeal of a law that bans assault weapons.
It’s utterly astounding. There’s no other way to describe it.
One can only hope that some good will come of the Oklahoma City tragedy. That perhaps it will cause many on the far right to realize that when you goad people and preach hate, some on the fringes take such talk seriously.
And sometimes they overreact.
It’s my guess, for instance, that when Timothy McVeigh hears Rush Limbaugh refer to him as a “criminal” and a “barbarian,” he feels betrayed.
In his mind, as he has told police, he’s a “prisoner of war.”
In nutcake terminology, that means “hero.”
………………….
Exploiting Oklahoma.(liberal exploitation of Oklahoma City bombing)
National Review
IN THE weeks since the Oklahoma bombing, a myth has been sedulously cultivated by both Democratic politicians and the liberal media (insofar as any distinction divides the two). It is that this mass murder was the consequence of recent conservative politics: that the main suspect, Timothy McVeigh, was an active member of a far-right violent militia, linked to other militias in a nationwide conspiracy, inspired by the anti-government rhetoric of Republican politicians like Newt Gingrich, conservative leaders like William Bennett, and talk-radio performers like Rush Limbaugh. Thus, Michael Lind in the Washington Post theorized that conservative leaders such as Mr. Bennett, William F. Buckley Jr., and Dan Quayle “had helped to legitimate the world-view of the Oklahoma bombers” by, among other things, “promulgating the inflammatory myth of an anti-religious, anti-family, tax-devouring government, guilty of mass murder on a scale that dwarfs that of Hitler and Stalin,” and “feebly condemning anti-abortion zealots,” including those guilty of murder. Curiously, Mr. Lind was an affable member of the conservative movement for most of this period. Did he simply not notice that his friends and colleagues were legitimating mass murder? Or did he think it good clean fun at the time? For the record, NATIONAL REVIEW has called for the murderers of abortionists to receive the death penalty.
There was a less inflammatory version of the same theory from Jonathan Alter (ironically, Newsweek’s media watchdog): “From what we already know of the Oklahoma City crime, it’s clear that the bombers took mainstream conservative ideas — resistance to gun control, the United Nations, and a powerful federal government — and made them extreme-right views.” Well, it is possible that these claims will turn out to be well founded as the case progresses, but as yet we “know” nothing of the sort. What little evidence we have of McVeigh’s opinions comes from two letters (“anti-government,” according to Newsweek) to an upstate New York newspaper. One of these letters — a strong attack on cruel methods of factory farming and animal slaughter — might have been written by a member of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. It makes no mention of government. The other, a confused ramble through several ideologies, is best categorized as a populist outburst from the angry center, with laments for the economic loss of the American dream and the threat of Japanese imports that come direct from Bill Clinton (circa 1992) and Dick Gephardt (passim). As for the suggestion that McVeigh was acting for the wider militia movement, all we have is a report that he went to, but was turned away from, one meeting of one militia. You would hardly hang a dog on such evidence, let alone a battalion of weekend soldiers in Camp Fantasy. To be sure, some members and some militia groups seem genuinely sinister. McVeigh may have been acting with or for them; let the evidence, not partisan hunches, determine that. As Alan Bock points out in this issue, however, some militia groups are little more than recreational gun clubs with false hair on the chest. If they deserve anything, it is the cure of mockery.
That said, there is a common-sense case for law- enforcement agencies’ keeping tabs on movements that might become private armies. President Clinton, proclaiming this, urges quick passage of new anti-terrorism legislation which a strange-bedfellow alliance of the National Rifle Association and the ACLU worries will overstep traditional bounds. Nor are their criticisms entirely unreasonable. His original proposal would broaden the military’s ability to get involved in domestic law enforcement (breaching a fundamental American tradition), institute “roving” wiretaps that would be pegged to a person rather than a specific telephone number (expanding the latitude for the use of an intrusive surveillance technique), and allow the President to declare a group “terrorist” without the possibility of judicial review (a broad unchecked power for the Executive). Republicans have objected to some of these measures, and the Administration has already backed off a bit. The best feature of the debate so far is that Republicans have made it clear they wish to go slow, looking carefully at the justification for new federal powers rather than rushing to pass anything labeled “anti-terrorism.” There may well be steps that should be taken — a domestic counter-terrorism center, quick deportation of aliens suspected of terrorist connections, etc. — but they should be taken only after due consideration.
Where does the wider conservative world enter this picture? A handful of apparently wild quotes from Gordon Liddy, Rush Limbaugh, and other talk-radio hosts are cited to suggest a link between mainstream ideas and extreme action. One may be morally certain that no worse quotes exist, since the dozens of researchers prospecting for them would have struck at least gilt by now. Even some of the original quotes are more damp than inflammatory upon examination. Rush Limbaugh’s warning of a second violent American revolution if federal agencies continued to ride roughshod over people’s property rights was exactly that — a warning, not an exhortation. It has since been copied, admittedly in the language of liberal hysteria, by newspapers, news magazines, and television networks attacking the “county movement’s” hostility to federal land officials. So the attacks on Mr. Limbaugh are yet another example of the old conjugation: I am vigilant; thou art alarmist; he is an agitator.
But the general liberal argument that the Oklahoma bombing was an extension of conservative “anti-government” rhetoric is both slipshod reasoning and a sly attempt to divert attention from liberalism’s own brand of anti-government rhetoric. There is, of course, no link between Newt Gingrich’s proposal for a lower rate of increase in federal spending on school-lunch programs and McVeigh’s bombing of a federal building. The first is conservative governance, the second anarchic terrorism. Indeed, far from being anti-government across the board, conservatives tend to favor limited government, supporting agencies like the FBI, the armed forces, the police, and the CIA, while taking a skeptical view of secondary agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Education. It is liberal Democrats who since the Sixties have spread suspicion of the essential functions of government, notably the security and law-enforcement agencies, denouncing them for spying on other Americans, restricting their operations through hostile congressional oversight, and depicting them as murderous and oppressive in Hollywood movies like Oliver Stone’s JFK, Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor, and even Steven Spielberg’s E.T. Some conservatives have recently been critical — in our view, sometimes over-critical (see page 10) — of apparent abuses by the FBI and the BATF in the Waco affair. But when has Charles Murray ever alleged that the Social Security Administration deliberately murders people?
Any set of ideas, however pacific, might be cited as justification for murder in the disordered mind of a fanatic. The Taiping rebellion in nineteenth-century China, which led to thirty million deaths, was based upon a lunatic’s distorted idea of Methodism. McVeigh’s mind seems to have been similarly host to a jostling crowd of incompatible resentments. We will doubtless learn more of what led to his actions in due course. Until then, a little less liberal paranoia, please.
June 13th, 2009 at 7:33 pm
Go ahead and be hugely outraged. The media blame-game that following this attack was/is deplorable. I talked about it at http://leavingalexjonestown.blogspot.com/.
June 16th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
It occurs to me I’m defending the Birth Certificat-ers more than Limbaugh.