[Newsbot]

Filibuster Cartoons
Title: Gifford's Blood (click to view)
Date: January 8, 2011
As we all know by now, earlier this morning a Democratic Congresswoman from Arizona, Gabrielle Giffords, was shot in the head during a political rally in her home district. She has miraculously survived, but six other people attending the rally, including the chief justice of the state's federal court and a nine-year-old girl, were not so lucky. It's being estimated that around 16 people were shot in all.

Knowing nothing else about the incident, what would your first response be? If you're like many of the left-wing bloggers and twitterers I've been reading today, chances are you immediately jumped to the conclusion that the killer must have been some sort of far-right Tea Bagger whose tiny brain had snapped under the weight of all the hateful bigotry that had been crammed in there by Fox News and talk radio. Chances are you overzealously seized on the symbolism of Sarah Palin describing Congresswoman Giffords as one of her "targeted" incumbents in the 2010 midterms, and repeated endlessly Palin's famous line about having to "reload, not retreat," or however it went. Chances are you went around declaring how the shooting was "sad, but not surprising" considering all the hateful vitriol that you consider your side to be a victim of.

Back in the real world, alas, the facts are not lining up quite so nicely. Far from being a disgruntled right-winger, the arrested suspect in the killings, 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner, appears to be a mentally disturbed political eccentric, with views — if they can be called that — of the bizarre and incoherent style that properly befit a vainglorious lunatic. "The government is implying mind control and brainwash on the people by controlling grammar," he says in one of his creepy YouTube videos.

In the aftermath of President Obama's election, I'm sure some of your more liberal friends routinely made darkly cynical comments to the effect of, "well, now we just wait until the day someone inevitably shoots him." I know mine did. It's this dark culture of death wishing and excited victimhood on some parts of the left that I find to be every bit as disturbing as anything emerging from the far-right.

The thinly-disguised and insensitively premature hope from some leftists that the Giffords shooting would strengthen their side, and damage the forces of the right has actually achieved nothing of the sort. All they've proven is that the forces of hatred, ignorance, and paranoia can be found in the dankest recesses of any ideological community.

[Mr_Canada]

Pretty good, JJ.

[Gunnair]

Wow - that was a quick somewhat factless righty knee jerk reaction to a somewhat quick factless lefty knee jerk reaction.

Truth is, neither side can make claims here until more information gets out.

[BartSimpson]

Thank you JJ.

[Scape]

Gunnair wrote:

Wow - that was a quick somewhat factless righty knee jerk reaction to a somewhat quick factless lefty knee jerk reaction.

Truth is, neither side can make claims here until more information gets out.

Somewhat ironic but JJ's point is not altogether groundless. Still, I can't say the righties bringing the rhetoric to all new levels of idiocy have made it easy on anyone. The piper has to be paid. When the slogans are "Don’t Retreat, Reload" and If We Don't Get Our Way Politically, Let's Start Shooting People! your dam right the right has a stake written in blood over this.

[Gunnair]

Scape wrote:

Gunnair wrote:

Wow - that was a quick somewhat factless righty knee jerk reaction to a somewhat quick factless lefty knee jerk reaction.

Truth is, neither side can make claims here until more information gets out.

Somewhat ironic but JJ's point is not altogether groundless. Still, I can't say the righties bringing the rhetoric to all new levels of idiocy have made it easy on anyone. The piper has to be paid. When the slogans are "Don’t Retreat, Reload" and If We Don't Get Our Way Politically, Let's Start Shooting People! your dam right the right has a stake written in blood over this.

Oh I don't disagree that some lefties are drooling over this, but there really isn't much info either way. Both sides seem to be making some partisan leaps here based on nothing.

Left - conspiracry by the tea party!
Right - mentally disturbed political eccentric!

[Mr_Canada]

I would like to comment that throughout this entire incident I didn't claim a damn thing,

But listen, it's not like this is an isolated reaction. This goes on quite a lot, and you're right to say it's a trap. I don't think it's particularly extremists alone, as much as cynical political people. Some people might have immediately though "Muslim?". Make it right? No. Have I done it? No shit

The case has become highly politicized (a federal judge and a congresswoman are dead, come on man) and it's no help that the suspect is some sort of a deluded political junkie. He has some gripes with the Federal Reserve, but that's all I got.

This is very likely what it all seems to be. A lunatic got a gun and shot some people.

[Gunnair]

Mr_Canada wrote:

I would like to comment that throughout this entire incident I didn't claim a damn thing,

But listen, it's not like this is an isolated reaction. This goes on quite a lot, and you're right to say it's a trap. I don't think it's particularly extremists alone, as much as cynical political people. Some people might have immediately though "Muslim?". Make it right? No.

The case has become highly politicized (a federal judge and a congresswoman are dead, come on man) and it's no help that the suspect is some sort of a deluded political junkie.

This is very likely what it all seems to be. A lunatic got a gun and shot some people.

Maybe we could change tack and comment on yet another atrocious mass killing by an idiot with a gun in the US...

[Scape]

Gunnair wrote:

Left - conspiracry by the tea party!
Right - mentally disturbed political eccentric!

I see bloggers in one camp and former and current political office holders and runners for office with people very nearly a heartbeat away from the most powerful office in the world in the other camp.

That's huge. If it was just the Drudge report and Huffington post having a piss contest then whatever, but when we are talking dead congress women as a direct result of some fool taking the rhetoric of Sharon Angle and her rants seriously then we have a whole different problem here.

[raydan]

As soon as something happens, we want to know who and why immediately. If we don't get the information, we look for the most plausible explanation (or the one that fits our own agenda), without waiting for all the facts.

If a Jew is attacked, look for an Arab.
If an important right-winger is attacked, look to the opposite end of the spectrum.
If a white is attacked, look for a black.
If Gunnair is attacked, look for ASL.

...and vice-versa.

[Ted223]

Gunnair wrote:

Oh I don't disagree that some lefties are drooling over this, but there really isn't much info either way. Both sides seem to be making some partisan leaps here based on nothing.

Left - conspiracry by the tea party!
Right - mentally disturbed political eccentric!

In defense of the Right, this is looking to be the most plausible idea.

Granted, my first assumption was that it wasn't anything partisan, and was generally a backlash against the medicaid cuts in Arizona.

article wrote:

Police say the shooter was in custody, and was identified by people familiar with the investigation as Jared Loughner, 22. Officials said he used a semiautomatic 9-mm pistol with an extended clip to carry out the attack. U.S. officials who provided his name to the AP spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release it publicly.

The suspect's exact motivation was not clear, but a former classmate described Loughner as a pot-smoking loner who had rambling beliefs about the world. The Army said he tried to enlist in December 2008 but was rejected for reasons the military did not provide.

Federal law enforcement officials were poring over versions of a MySpace page that belonged to Jared Loughner and over a YouTube video published weeks ago under an account "Classitup10" and linked to him. The MySpace page, which was removed within minutes of the gunman being identified by officials, included a mysterious "Goodbye friends" message published hours before the shooting and exhorted his friends to "Please don't be mad at me."

[Gunnair]

raydan wrote:

As soon as something happens, we want to know who and why immediately. If we don't get the information, we look for the most plausible explanation (or the one that fits our own agenda), without waiting for all the facts.

If a Jew is attacked, look for an Arab.
If an important right-winger is attacked, look to the opposite end of the spectrum.
If a white is attacked, look for a black.
If Gunnair is attacked, look for ASL.

...and vice-versa.

I love all God`s creatures... even the one`s that start neg rep wars.

[Scape]

Ted223 wrote:

In defense of the Right, this is looking to be the most plausible idea.

Granted, my first assumption was that it wasn't anything partisan, and was generally a backlash against the medicaid cuts in Arizona.

I think if it wasn't her it would have been someone else that he would have been shooting. It wasn't that this kid was a card carrying member of the GOP, NRA or had his family cut off of health coverage. I think he was just MAD at the situation and was looking to lash out and got mad at the system itself. I doubt highly that he even knows who Sharon Angle even is or even saw Palins poster targeting this congress woman with cross hairs. I do know that the insanity of the rhetoric had reached record levels though and even if your not at the rally's and fund raisers your very much basting in a toxic political environment that is becoming very disassociated with the needs of main street. So it wasn't a surprise someone went McVeigh.

[Thanos]

For any of those who are interested, or who aren't as obtuse as JJ and his insipid cartoon and column, here's a lenghty timeline of anti-government/racist/supremacist/insurrectionist violence that's occurred in the United States since about the middle of 2008.

Nothing occurs in a vacuum, despite JJ's pathetic apologetics that are attempting to convince you otherwise.

Quote:

"In that third year of the Kennedy Presidency a kind of fever lay over Dallas County. Mad things happened. Huge billboards screamed “Impeach Earl Warren.” Jewish stores were smeared with crude swastikas. Fanatical young matrons swayed in public to the chant, “(Adlai) Stevenson’s going to die–his heart will stop, stop, stop and he will burn, burn burn!” Radical Right polemics were distributed in public schools; Kennedy’s name was booed in classrooms; junior executives were required to attend radical seminars. Dallas had become the mecca for medicine-show evangelists of the National Indignation Convention, the Christian Crusaders, the Minutemen, the John Birch and Patrick Henry societies . . .

In Dallas a retired major general flew the American flag upside down in front of his house, and when, on Labor Day of 1963, the Stars and Stripes were hoisted right side up outside his own home by County Treasurer Warren G. Harding–named by Democratic parents for a Republican President in an era when all Texas children were taught to respect the Presidency, regardless of party–Harding was accosted by a physician’s son, who remarked bitterly, “That’s the Democrat flag. Why not just run up the hammer and sickle while you’re at it?"

- William Manchester, Death of a President.

Quote:

Frank McGee (Narrator): “Have we had time to become, or do we care to become something other than a collection of irresponsible individuals, having in common little more than a toleration, if not an endorsement of violence?”

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. “We are today the most frightening people on this planet. The ghastly things we do to our own people, the ghastly things we do to other people, these must at least compel us to look searchingly at ourselves and our society before hatred and violence rushes on to more evil, and finally tear our nation apart. . . . we cannot blame the epidemic of murder at home on deranged and solitary individuals, separate from the rest of us. For these individuals are plainly weak and suggestible men stamped by our society with a birth rite of hatred and a compulsion toward violence. We must recognize, I believe that the evil is in us, that it springs from some dark intolerable tension in our history and our institutions. It is almost as though some primal curse had been fixed on our nation. We are a violent people with a violent history, and the instinct for violence has seeped into the bloodstream of our national life.”

- Second Sunday radio series, NBC News, March 3, 1969

Quote:

Pima County Sheriff Clarence W. Dupnik offered an emotional, angry assessment of the state of America in the wake of the shootings in Arizona, saying that two of his close friends -- Ms. Giffords and Judge John Roll - were among the victims.

Mr. Dupnik called the shooting a "very sad day for Tucson" and a "horrendous, horrendous, senseless, unbelievable crime." And then he blamed the crime on the rhetoric -- presumably political rhetoric -- in the country.

"When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government," he said. "The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on this country is getting to be outrageous and unfortunately Arizona has become sort of the capital. We have become the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry."

Mr. Dupnik said it is time for the country to "do a little soul searching."

He added: "The vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out from people in the radio business and some people in the TV business ... This has not become the nice United States that most of us grew up in."

Later, he said: "It's not unusual for all public officials to get threats constantly, myself included. That's the sad thing about what's going on in America: pretty soon we're not going to be able to find reasonable decent people willing to subject themselves to serve in public office."

-New York Times, January 8, 2011

How this is so fucking difficult for some people to understand remains a mystery to me. But there are none so blind as those who choose not to see.

[PublicAnimalNo9]

Just another high profile shooting spree in a nation that can't seem to go 2 months without one.