It's interesting, isn't it, how certain people feel free to comment on what motivates terrorists -- even to the point of understanding their motivations -- when those terrorists are, say, white middle class Americans, as opposed to, say, someone of darker hue or more Muslim persuasion?
Observe newly-elected Senator Scott Brown's -- for want of a better term -- understanding response to today's incident in Austin:
Cavuto: Um, you know invariably people are going to look at this and say, well, that's where some of this populist rage gets you. Isn't that a bit extreme?
Brown: Well, yeah, of course it's extreme. You don't know anything about the individual. He could have had other issues, certainly. No one likes paying taxes, obviously. But the way we're trying to deal with things and have been in the past, at least until I got here is, there's such a logjam in Washington. And people want us to do better. They want us to help solve the problems that are affecting Americans in a very real way.
I remember, back in 1995, being struck by Gingrich's statement on Timothy McVeigh's appalling murder of 168 fellow Americans, and I'm kind of getting the same vibe from Scott Brown now. You know, that kind of "Well sure, it's awful, but you have to understand why people are angry" vibe.
Imagine expressing, immediately after 9-11, that the Muslim world was understandably angry at the United States government, and that we must understand their anger if we want to understand what caused the attacks.
Oh wait, somebody did. He was an obscure academic in Colorado who became a boogeyman for the right by suggesting that 9-11 was the result of justifiable Muslim anger at U.S. policies. You've probably heard of Ward Churchill, if only because he now rivals Bill Ayers as the preeminent whipping boy for rightwingers in their endless search for liberals nobody has heard of who said or did something outrageous years ago.
I guess I'm just struck by how different the reaction is when mainstream Republican politicians (as opposed to nobodies) say essentially the same kinds of things when terrorism is committed by white Americans that happen to have a beef with the American government. During times when it just so happens that Democrats run the government.
I suppose it's possible that I'm reading too much into this.
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