Charles P. Pierce noted today that the conservative media wing nuts are freaking out over anything or anyone that suggests what happened in Boston at the Marathon just might, might have anything to do with, um, you know, conservatives, right-wingers, etc.
You know - the audience that gets constant messaging from Limbaugh, Hannity, Ingrahm, FOX, etc. etc. that Obama is coming to take their guns away, liberals are destroying America, the gays are coming for their kids, the new Black Panthers are coming for their stuff, and so on. The audience that gets a constant stream of talking points intended to gin up fear and anger. The audience that believes George Soros is funding the black helicopters of the U.N. that are coming to seize their guns and their golf courses. The audience that's been told expanding access to health care like the civilized world has is a plot to enslave Americans and make them dependent on government.
Oh, and government is the source of everything that's wrong in their lives.
Now at this point all we know for sure is that there were two bombs set off in Boston. Who, why is still an open question. Fear and loathing is not exclusive to a particular brand of politics/religion/ideology; we don't lack for suspects. But if certain people don't like what they see in the mirror, if certain people are suddenly wondering if the term "blowback" might have relevance to what they do, if certain people are reflexively attacking anything that has the merest hint that certain words might have consequences, well....
Why would anyone think right wing conspiracy theories and obsessions are anything to worry about? Something like this, for example? Is it possible we don't have to look overseas or at people sneaking across our borders to find possible threats?
If the right wing media machine feels it is being unjustly accused (and there is no evidence at this time that points to any particular ideology, or cause, organization, or individual), all I can say is that tired old line:
If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about.
Meanwhile, let me excerpt from Pierce:
It is in no way "politicizing" the events by mentioning that history teaches us that, on events like this, the universe of suspects is wider than many people would like to believe. All indications are that, one way or another, the bombing was a political act. It may have been the political act of madmen, but it was a political act, and it does us no good to pretend — as Chris Matthews attempted to do last night — that it was not. Somehow, somewhere, this act came from a dark vein of violence in somebody's politics. Those politics may be fashioned from mania, or even sociopathy, but they are fashioned out of politics nonetheless, and of the collapse of the faith that we can govern ourselves as we govern our passions, and that collapse is not the province of the mad or the angry. That collapse is caused by something deeply endemic in our systems and in ourselves. We have tolerated unreasoning hatred for far too long. We have abandoned the rational for the comfortable, and we have abandoned the empirical for the comfortably insane. We have given too much oxygen to the flame. We have given too much.
emphasis added
UPDATE: If the above was not enough, Pierce has followed up with a masterful statement, riffing off remarks by Bernie Sanders - who as Pierce notes, drew flack for what is an incredibly important counter to the mess that is our political system these days.
After the shame of what happened in the Senate over gun safety, where the will of 90% - NINETY FREAKING PERCENT - of the American people was kicked to the curb and stomped into the mud, the words of Sanders and Pierce should become our battle cry.
Here's a small excerpt. Read the whole thing.
There is a wildness in our politics these days, and that wildness is centered primarily, and to varying degrees, around the notion that government is an alien thing. It is a wildness that has become a faith held by zealots, who feel alienated by faceless forces beyond their control, and exploited in our politics by the people who control many of those same forces, and by the politicians in their formal and informal employ. There is an entire media culture — across all platforms, to use that most odious of New Media concepts — dedicated to creating a world in which it can turn an unholy buck by letting that wildness run free. And, I am sorry to say, the wildness is most manifest on the political right. If this makes respectable conservatives — or those that fashion themselves to be respectable conservatives — uncomfortable, then they should do a better job at recognizing the effective limits of their problems so they don't always have to become our problems.
Read more: We Are The Commonwealth Of Massachsetts - We Are The Commonwealth Of Massachusetts - Esquire
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