I got blasted today by someone at work when he asked if I thought the incendiary rhetoric had gone too far and I said yes - and that it was about time the right got called on it. That set him off.
He denounced me for thinking I knew it all, for jumping every time he pushed my buttons - probably considers me an Obama-bot who thinks Democrats and Liberals can do no wrong. He accused me of hypocrisy - wanted to know where all the anti-war protesters were now that Obama is in charge. He asked me why no one listens to me. He's one angry dude - but he's also pretty lost. Well, there is at least one person listening to me - him. And it looks like I hit a nerve.
The violent push-back we're seeing from the right is (I think) is a realization by some of them at some level that they've crossed a line and don't know how to get back. They can't keep lying to themselves when something like this happens. They're still obsessing over Bill Ayres and George Soros. Something about choking on gnats, and camels going through needle eyes occurs to me.
He really ripped into Tucson Sheriff Dupnik for his statements. I pointed out he hadn't named any names - but the guilty couldn't keep their mouths shut. (They would have been a lot smarter to have publicly agreed with him and blamed it on the Democrats as sore losers over November. Their own knee-jerk responses betrayed them.) I also pointed out that Dupnik has been living with this for years. It wasn't something he did just to take a cheap political shot. As a sheriff, he's constantly hearing about threats and having to deal with violence. (And he's not exactly a far-left liberal I find.)
Against my co-worker's citing of a long list of not nice speech from Democrats, I brought the up long list of dead and wounded left from physical attacks coming from the right in just the past two years. (Hat tip to Digby - scroll down to see the tally.) I also tried to to make the point that you'd have to go back years to get enough of that kind of speech from Democrats to be more than a drop in the bucket compared to what comes out every day from Hannity, Limbaugh, Beck, Savage, etc.
Did I mention he also threw in the observation that my mind was closed to anything that didn't fit in my world view?
Let's get something straight about this. There's a clear pattern here. It doesn't matter if the Tucson shooter was specifically a tea party member or a Beck fan. We have a trail of bodies of people who are dead because other people believed they were evil, were a threat to them - and they were acting out what can be heard every day coming from the right wing.
On the News Hour Monday night there was some discussion of what constitutes heated rhetoric. This is what Mark Shields had to say.
MARK SHIELDS: I think all things are being used.
And I think the Sarah Palin thing is a reach far beyond a bridge too far. I really do. I mean, the sights on the thing, just really targeting a district, and that this led to it, no.
But what I'm saying is this. David is a member of Congress, and so am I. This is what has happened to our language. And this is what's happening to our democracy. Instead of saying David on an issue on the other side is misinformed or mistaken, I say David doesn't love America. He's evil. He obviously doesn't believe in the same God we believe in. He doesn't believe in the same country that we believe in. He's owned by other people and other interests, probably foreign interests.
And when this happens, this not only debases our debate; what it does is, it forecloses democracy from working. It means that we won't be able to be allies in a future event or on a future issue, because I would then be trucking with somebody...
JIM LEHRER: Consorting with the enemy.
MARK SHIELDS: That's right, somebody who obviously doesn't love America.
I think this is it. Civility, John Kennedy said, is not a sign of weakness. It has become a sign of weakness.
This has been coming on for a long time. David Neiwert has been tracking this for years - decades really - and has been warning of what is happening to this country with the inclusion of eliminationist language into mainstream political discourse. Quoting from Reverend Chris Bruice, a survivor of a shooting in a church by a man out to kill liberals, Neiwert's 2009 book The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right asks the question we should all be asking.
"A man came in here, totally dehumanized us - members of our church were not human to him. Where did he get that? Where did he get the sense that we're not human?"
Back in last October, the same Sean Hannity now screaming in outrage that anyone dare accuse the right of hate speech was caught by Neiwert saying this:
Schoen: Well, I want to solve problems.
Hannity: Well, by defeating liberalism we solve our problems, Doug.
Schoen: If we all work together, we solve our problems.
Hannity: If we get rid of liberals, we solve our problems.
Schoen: Well, most of them are going to lose this time anyway.
As Neiwert quotes from his book,
Eliminationism is often voiced as crude "jokes," a sense of humor inevitably predicated on venomous hatred. And such rhetoric—we know as surely as we know that night follows day—eventually begets action, with inevitably tragic results.
Just last month, Neiwert found another example of what Shields was talking about, coming from Glenn Beck. He's got video clips and links to all kinds of Beck ravings:
After all, he's been theorizing that Obama's band of administration radicals are planning a "global redistribution of the wealth" for a long time -- often flavored with black-helicopter militia theories about a "New World Order". He's been predicting George Soros would try to kill him, and warning that the eeeevil Left is plotting to frame the Tea Partiers for an act of domestic terrorist violence, adding that if right-wing violence does break out, it will have been provoked by Obama and the liberals.
Anyone still trying to suggest 'both sides are guilty of this" is living in a fantasy land. If the TV programs, radio shows, news articles, etc. coming from the Right Wing were being broadcast into America from some other country, the constant stream of attacks, lies, threats and worse against our government and elected officials would be taken as a cause for war. (Kos was right on target when he wrote American Taliban.)
I don't know if my co-worker is ever going to get his issues worked out. As nearly as I can tell, he's got the Tea Party mindset that politicians are all crooks and liberals are fools. The Tucson shootings, like Oklahoma City, have made it hard to gloss over how the Right Wing Fifth Column in our midst is producing the equivalent of a reign of terror. Sarah Robinson's musing on whether or not America has passed the point of no return on the descent into Fascism seem more prescient than ever, listening to the temporizing among the lamestream media and the pushback from the Right. She quotes Milton Mayer on what happened in Germany once upon a time:
And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic.
I've been writing quite a bit lately about Griftopia (here, here and here) and starting John Dean's Conservatives Without Conscience. Between the two and Neiwert's work, it's pretty easy to look across the Great Divide to see that authoritarian power mongers including but not limited to the greed-worshipping Masters of the Universe of the financial sector (United $tate$ Inc.) are well on the way to Robinson's nightmare. What happened in Tucson has dragged the fault lines in this country into clear view, for the moment at least. America made it to the Bicentennial; it remains to be seen if we'll make it through the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War...