I have been listening to Morning Joe and Mika B is going off on "the Left Wing Hate No One is Talking About." Apparently this fellow Norm is completely nuts and regularly threatens the Left and the Right. Wonkette has the whole story about how insane this man is, and how he has posted hundreds of You Tube Videos attacking Obama and many others. But Mika and her rivals/colleagues at Fox will spin this as left wing violence- even though this man is clearly nuts. And then we get the insanity of Pat Buchanan rambling on about how Ted Kaczynski the Unibomber represented the Left Wing! Seriously, Ted Kaczynski is now one of us! Well I for one disavow Ted and his politics. He was living in a cabin in a Republican state carving bombs out of wood and bombing technology into the stone age or middle age he wanted to return to. We may advocate starting a garden here and consuming less, but Dr. Kaczynski was mentally ill, and turned in by his far more liberal and idealistic brother.
Then the whole crew (Joe is apparently resting today, leaving Mika to defend Republican interests on her own) get to reflect on Eugene Robinson's column on antigovernment extremism from the right wing. Pat Buchanan was unable to come up with a really good example of left wing advocating armed take-over of the government and had to resort to the 1992 LA riots over Rodney King's police beating as an example. Like rioting over right wing repression and police brutality was the black people being radical leftists somehow and was encouraged by them.
Then Buchanan went on about the Vietnam war protesters from his days in the Nixon White House and rambled on about how they were rolling "logs in the street." Seriously. He kept talking about logs in the street like we all cared about something that happened 40 years ago. Trying to be balanced is just leading to insanity- they are leaving Pat Buchanan on for TWO HOURS.
Hilariously Bob Shrum is pointing out now that what would have happened in LA after the Riots if Jesse Jackson had said he wanted people to be armed and dangerous like Michelle Bachman did. Shrum is pointing out that Democratic members of Congress were not advocating rioting and asked if Pat Buchanan was still against the Civil Rights act- hilarious. Buchanan insists there is not reason to understand rioting, "They ought not to be doing it." What a geezer.
Bob Shrum is astonishingly good- He is the only one with the gravitas to shut this idiot up. And in response, Buchanan is waxing nostalgic over his "Buchanan Brigade" and his own talk in 1992 of locking and loading and how this referred to the Founding Fathers somehow. Buchanan is insisting "where is the video" of the spitting? Shrum is pointing out Candy Crowley personally heard the slurs about John Lewis, and certainly John Lewis wasn't lying. Buchanan said he did a good job in 1992 running for office despite his gun analogies, and Shrum points out that Buchanan helped make Bush unelectable and led to the election of Bill Clinton.
This whole show was astonishingly surreal. Comedy Gold if I could bring myself to laugh at it. I am off to work with new resolve to stop watching these people. It will be unlikely that Mika and the gang will actually discuss this with their frequent guest, Eugene Robinson.
It is dishonest for right-wing commentators to insist on an equivalence that does not exist. The danger of political violence in this country comes overwhelmingly from one direction -- the right, not the left. The vitriolic, anti-government hate speech that is spewed on talk radio every day -- and, quite regularly, at Tea Party rallies -- is calibrated not to inform but to incite.
Demagogues scream at people that their government is illegitimate, that their country has been "taken away," that their elected officials are "traitors" and that their freedom is at risk. They have a right to free speech, which I will always defend. But they shouldn't be surprised if some listeners take them literally.
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I know this is a rant but honestly, I have to froth a bit here. I have seen the deification of Ronald Reagan. Reagan went from a co-conspirator or at best a hapless idiot on Iran contra after breaking American laws to becoming the hero of the right, with the criminals from his administration like Ollie North made into heroes of the right wing crazy talk.
I could stay for Eugene Robinson himself, coming up at 8:00, and now crazy Mika is saying she "set him up" like this is a rational discussion. I am off to work- important meetings all day. But I needed to vent a bit.