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Edited on Tue Jan-18-11 12:34 PM by DirkGently
It was plain speech that translated simply to, "If Republicans and conservatives are not sufficiently pleased with the outcome of the mid-term elections, they may respond with weapons."
Not hyperbole, like Grayson's oft-cited "Republicans want you to die quickly" comments. Not metaphor, like, "targeting" districts. The Republican Senate candidate SAID that armed action was a possible alternative to defeating Harry Reid politically. She was not arrested. Her campaign was not shut down. She continued to say these things -- just limiting her comments to rightwing media outlets, which broadcast them.
Then we have the collection of "lone nuts" that adds up to a rather large, one-sided basket, all on the right. Organized groups advocating the murder of abortion providers, providing tracking of their whereabouts, and trumpeting the multiple successful assassinations of not one or two, but several doctors. Bombings, of clinics and gay-friendly business establishments. Shootings, at the Holocaust Museum,and on the streets of Oakland, likewise motivated by rightwing extremism. And at a Unitarian church, by an assassin frustrated he could not get to people on a mainstream rightwing pundit's list of the "worst liberals." A woman who took Glenn Beck at his word, armed herself, and set out to find the "FEMA deathcamps."
Then we have the "Tea Party," which takes its name from an event associated with the beginning of the Revolutinary War, and whose supporters delight in bringing firearms to political rallies, sporting signs about how if "Brown can't stop Healthcare, a Browning (pistol, with helpful illustration of same) can." Not one sign. Many. Figures of Congressional representatives hung and burned in effigy. Which is, by the way, an explicit threat. There is no other interpretation of hanging and burning people in effigy besides, "WE will kill you." The alleged basis for these threats: "Too much spending." "We disapprove of healthcare reform." "Tax cuts for billionaires must continue."
When the Tea Party engaged in explicit violence, kicking the skull of a prostrate young female protestor, the result was that its candidate Rand Paul still won his election. The outcry was pooh-poohed. "She should have expected that."
Threats made by telephone, bricks thrown through office windows and the like are so common that they hardly bear mentioning. Rightwingers celebrate and crow about this. If the left does it, it's apparently not enough that we even hear about it.
We don't even bother to raise alarm about armed militia groups practicing war on the United States government, ONLY when a Democrat is in office, anymore, because those activities pale beside the neck-bulging, gun waving antics of more visible rightwingers. It's just part of the landscape now that conservative people carry out paramilitary training under the assumption that they will be engaged in a shooting war with a Democratically controlled government "some day."
The rightwing in America doesn't just engage in "violent rhetoric." It engages in violence, and threats of violence, and explicit references to armed insurrection as a means to political victory, as a matter of course, over issues as pedestrian as tax policy.
It's become a game to see who can be more apocalyptic and more darkly threatening in their speech; who can more nakedly demonize their political opponents on the left as anti-American, or closet terrorists. Who more forcefully equate the President with Islamic radicals, or health insurance reform with a government conspiracy to murder the elderly.
They don't HAVE another strategy. This is the mainstay of the current conservative American political movement. "WE WILL SHOOT YOU."
In fact, if any one of many of the mainstay political positions, arguments, and slogans of the rightwing, including mainstream Republicans like Chuck, "Pulling the plug on Grandma Grassley," and Michele, "The census MIGHT be used to put people in 'internment camps' Bachmann were true, armed violence would not only be possible, but expected, and necessary.
The one-sidedness here not only exists, but has reached absurd proportions. Imagine for a moment if the two guys calling themselves, "The New Black Panthers," waving signs in a black voting district, over whom the Fox network pitched a non-stop two-week bleating fit, had TOUCHED a young white woman waving a conservative sign. "A concussion isn't that bad?" "She should have expected that, with the sign waving and everything?"
Really?
They can't have it both ways. They can't base their entire position on the proposition that every non-conservative approved position is the the result of anti-American "Marxist" forces scheming to destroy America, and then disclaim responsibility when a supposed "nut" simply takes them at their word and does what anyone would do, if they believed rightwingers were telling the truth .
editted for speling.
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