I'm just going to drop this and leave. I must turn off the TV and the internet or I'm just going to eat my face with my bare hands.
This is my country?
"Unfortunately, the left is using this tragedy to score political points. Rep. Giffords was on Gov. Palin’s target list for defeat this past November. The left claims Gov. Palin has blood on her hands. So does the tea party movement."
Eric Ericson says the left is somehow using a tragedy to score politcal points when at this hour we don't even know who has died.
?
What follows below is a diary that I posted in 2008. I don't have the patience right now to dig through the news archives and count the number of shootings we've had since I wrote it. It was after Virgina Tech, but before Ft Hood and Binghamton.
I said earlier that small acts of violence are going to require the law enforcement to do something; then the RW/Tea Party "Patriots" are all going to scream that whatever the cops did is defacto proof of the police state they all think Obama is planning, and then it's all over.
I'm not sure if we're there yet or not.
Old diary beneath the fold.
What number did you pick in the pool?
UPDATE: Whatever your count is, in the nine hours since I wrote this it's gone up by 2.
I thought I would check my mail and the headlines on Google News before I went to sleep this morning (I'm a late owl) and saw that another "gunman" has killed five people in a fit of rage at a city council meeting in Missouri.
We still haven't seen the headlines trail into indifference from the last sniper of the day who saw fit to assasinate five women at a clothing store in just the last week.
And I can't rinse the taste out of my mouth left by the NRA heroes who came out of the woodwork at RedState, LGF, and Freep after the Virginia Tech massacre to bemoan that the real tragedy there was that there were not more people with guns so the real heroes could have shot the shooter before he became more famous than they are.
I'm not real comfortable with America right now. Go ahead, call me whatever you want. But after you get through trashing me, you'll find that the country has not magically healed itself because everyone found another scapegoat in me for saying so.
Although we have since learned that the Lane Bryant shooting it was a robbery gone wrong, I'm wondering who wants to start a seperate thread that says violence is somehow different because it was incidental to some less-lethal motive? It's not really violence amongst ourselves if it's second-degree, but only legitimate if premeditated first-degree?
Isn't it just fascinating that this country has in large part found enemies under every rock, and yet if you stand on the Moon and examine us from an objective point of view, we do far more damage to each other than Al Queda has ever accomplished. Think about this: a fully loaded 747 crashing into Mount Rushmore would be the equivalent of what we lose to car crashes every day, and the libertarians bitch that they have to wear a seatbelt and the conservatives bitch that cars would be cheaper if NHTSA hadn't convinced DOT to make airbags mandatory.
All those silly rules to protect us from ourselves. Greenhouse gases my hat, right? It's all a conspiracy by Al Gore to destroy America by oppressive government regulations because Democrats love beaurocracy more than freedom? I mean come on, we all know that cars ran so much better on leaded gas, and no cop could write you a ticket for not wearing a seat-belt your car didn't have. (Anyone out there with a pre-'63 era car gets a free pass!) Who needs all those pesky regulations by those wacko enviromental greenies and Nader nuts. We can't be regulated to save ourselves from ourselves, right? Real enemies all wear black. Turbans these days, but they still wear black.
In short, I'm amazed how energetic this country can be worked up into a lather to go attack "enemies" all around the world, and how we need 500 billion more in defense spending in 2009 (not counting the supplemental war costs) but we can't convince most Republicans anything at home needs our attention beyond a Constitutional Amendment to ban flag burning and another to officially deny marriage for homosexuals.
I'm taking time off. Not a GCBW, but I think if I post too many like this one, someone will ask me to leave, and I need to just turn everything off for a while and perhaps study Zen. My mother taught me to be aware of my society and I became a conscientious news-watching, paper-reading, be-aware kind of guy, but I find now that it's got me wrapped so tight that I'm a real miserable guy to be around. I see most people as hypocritical, self-deluded, undeservedly pious and utterly shameless louts, and it really does boggle the mind that it was the Germans who coined the word Schadenfreude. It's become an American state of being now that reality TV has it's own channel.
But I wanted to see what the mood is....So, how many more people will snap and shoot their fellow American before the end of 2008? Pick a number.
Then add that number to whatever total is this years' collection of car crash fatalities, smoking and drinking related deaths, careless accidents, gross negligence, and just plain galactic stupidity, and realize that in one year that number is about 20 times what we lost on 9/11...and that we've done it almost seven times over since that day.
And we'll do it again this year, too.
But the Iraq war is the first thing on the minds of an embarassing number of people, because they believe that all enemies are not foreign and domestic, they have to be foreign. Somehow many still rationalize the sacrifice of almost 5000 of the most patriotic, the best and the brightest our country had to offer the world and a crippling of a further 20,000 in the deluded quest to kill "them" "over there" so "they" can't kill us "over here" is an acceptable policy.
Wow. And what about the "we" who kills us here? Through violence, gross stupidity, and just plain nonchalance and indifference we slaughter and sacrifice ourselves with much greater efficiency. But although that kind of death fills almost all of the local news and some of the national, there aren't any armies sent to defend ourselves from it.
Doestoyevsky made the argument in "Notes from Underground" that those who were intelligent and aware were always the most unhappy of the bunch; somewhere later in common discourse we shortened it to "ignorance is bliss". I'm too cognizant of the world of shit we are in to be happy any more, and my resolve is to refuse to sit here and keep my mouth shut while most of this country continues to believe we shoudl shed more blood and burn more money looking for evil everywhere before they look in the mirror.
Wake up, America. Al Queda is not the only thing wrong with the world.
Sorry folks. I rant here because I can't afford therapy, and when I could it only made the problem worse. But that's for another diary.
Thanks for being today's session.