"Three dead, Several injured during a rampage in Graz," reads the headline in the Austrian newspaper Die Krone. The driver of an SUV drove wildly through a crowd on a busy street in Graz, the hometown of Former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger;
skidding wildly back and forth on street and sidewalks. When the driver finally stopped, he came at the police and bystanders with a knife. "The exact reason for the rampage is unknown" says the paper.
Is there ever an exact reason? Is reason a word with any application here at all? No place, no population is free of such incidents and they only differ in the kinds of things one uses when one runs amok. It might be a machete, a gun, an explosive vest, a vehicle, a bomb, a cooking implement or a canister of poison gas. We've seen all of the above and more. How we define, how we describe, how we react says more about our society and says more about us than about the mass killers we produce.
Missing from the Newspaper account is the call for grieving and mourning and outrage, demands for more laws of an unspecified nature and any demand that it be called "terrorism." No attempts to tie it to history and tradition and ethnicity or to make of it anything not immediately apparent. Neither the vehicle nor the knife were described as "military style"
How unlike America. Indeed the friend who posted this on Facebook asked Americans not to comment, to leave it to the Austrians and just let it be what it was. I know what he means.
I have certain misgivings about hate crime laws, but we're reminded this morning -- the eve of Pesach or
The Passover, and a week before Hitler's birthday, that people who
belong to hate-based organizations and creeds, who post virulent hate
messages and calls for extermination on-line, need their constitutional
right to keep and bear arms infringed.
I feel quite
protective of our guaranteed right to free speech and our right to think
what we think, but speech that incites to violence, that creates a
mortal danger to the public, is something else and that's been
established for a long time. Frazier Glenn Miller
is a founding member of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and
the White Patriot Party. That's not a crime, more's the pity, nor is
shouting "Heil Hitler" from the back of a police car, but perhaps we
ought to consider making it a felony to belong to groups who advocate
murder because as far as I know, it's illegal for felons to own
firearms.
I know -- penalties and restrictions don't
prevent criminals and especially psychopathic criminals from committing
crimes, but there's something wrong with Mr. Miller or Mr. Cross as he
often calls himself, to own weapons. There's something wrong if the
targets of hate groups need to arm themselves or to hire armed guards or
to go about in fear because we elevate and protect a right to be armed
above the right to remain alive. We shouldn't have to wait for people
like that to run amok before we do anything. Threatening violence
against groups or individuals should be sufficient to disarm someone.
Lest one think that being a white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant is protection and a reason not to worry, Methodists were shot in this tragedy as well.
Remember "The guns are unloaded - this time?" Well that was that time, this is this time.
So is there any connection between Sarah Palin's website that put a target on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and someone shooting her point blank in the head? Watch for Palin to clean up the site and do her little witch dance to get out of responsibility for it. Didn't anyone think that people carrying guns to political rallies wouldn't eventually do this?
Frankly I've had one decade too many of Republican howler monkeys like Limbaugh and Coulter and Palin using metaphors and sly inference -- and outright calls to violence and killing judges and congressmen. What does it take to make these tea-sucking, rabble rousing, hate mongering bastards into responsible American Citizens? Probably nothing short of orange jump suits and handcuffs and meantime, watch them looking like the cat Sylvester with yellow feathers all over his lips.
And in the meantime, it's pump out the bullshit, pump out the bullshit and hate hate hate, so don't count on the voters coming to their flaccid senses any time soon.
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Update from Octopus. Here is the SarahPAC page mentioned by Captain Fogg (above):
And here is what Spencer Giffords, the Congresswoman's father, said when asked by a reporter whether his daughter had any enemies:
A friend of mine used to have the job, back during the Vietnam war, of flying a helicopter over dangerous areas so as to draw fire from hidden gun emplacements, flushing out the enemy so that we knew where they were. Barak Obama has been a bit like that and sad to say, I've now identified far too many enemies, some that I thought were friends.
I got another e-mail this morning, from someone I would hardly call a redneck: a northeasterner, ex military intelligence with a long career at the Pentagon. "I despair for the country" was the title and it had a link to a YouTube video wherein the President confesses to being a Muslim. It's an obvious cut and paste job that wouldn't fool anyone who didn't want to be fooled -- and there's the rub. Too many want to be fooled and bask like pigs in the warm and stinky deception. The hate and fear of our President long preceded his election and for some it preceded his birth. The closeted racists of America desperately need such insultingly stupid stories as a defense against the obviously true accusations of racism.
I grew up in the 1950's and I'm no stranger to segregation or blood in the streets for that matter, but still I'm amazed at the breadth and depth of the long concealed and highly fermented racial and ethnic hatred that's been lurking in the jungle and is emerging like tracer bullets whose dotted line shows the way, right to their source.
I can't count the outraged e-mails and comments I've seen about the recent California schoolyard rape, which of course has allowed the haters to vent their paranoid fear and loathing of Hispanics. It was of course a Hispanic girl who reported it, not a "regular" American as Archie Bunker would have said, but no matter. Hate has its own sort of statistics and only needs an example to declare it "typical." Indeed, it doesn't even have to be true if you have even a mediocre shareware video editing program.
In its own way, this sick and disgusting incident seems not to be out of context of what is happening in many disparate groups, even of white, Anglo-Saxon protestants, marching in the streets for lower taxes as though Obama had actually raised them; showing pictures of Nazi death camps as though any sane person connects piles of murdered bodies to a government administered health plan -- the people who call the Democratic health care bill "Obamacare" but never think to call Social Security Roosevelt Retirement or identified the GI bill with Communism or call the public library the Socialist Book Store -- or identify the recession with Republican economic policies. These things and more are part of the Us against Them view where the government is "them," the 15% fringe element and the corporate lobbyists are "We the people," the government is the enemy and only illegitimately exercised authority is legitimate.
The twenty or so witnesses to this crime, if they had any compassion at all, were prevented by the entertainment value and hatred of police and the Maverick mentality from doing anything or reporting anything. The criminals are The People, the cops are not and the law is the enemy because it interferes with our freedom to commit crimes ad libidum. Is that really different from not caring how many innocents are killed abroad in a war started and continued under false pretenses and appeals to fear and patriotism? Is that different from not giving a flying damn how many millions die, how many sick children clog the emergency rooms and drive up the cost of insurance and spread disease, or how many lives are ruined by insurance companies? Its them against us and 'them' are the unfortunate, the minorities, the sick the old and unemployed. Who wants the damned law and the government to help them even if it protects us too?
Perhaps you find the connection tenuous or even far-fetched, but I don't. There is no "us" in the US any more unless it's in the context of us against them and that miserable, militant and malicious group who flatter themselves with the stolen title of 'Conservative' are as much to blame as anyone for the rape that is our for-profit, cartel run health "system." Anyone who brings the government in is a "snitch."
Oh no, it's those liberals who insist any criticism of the President is racist and we're not racist at all - it's just that he's a foreign born, Marxistnaziterroristracist who "hates white culture" (whatever the hell that is) and murdered his grandmother and wants to murder yours. It's because he's trying to reconstitute the Auschwitz death camp by giving us health insurance, not because he's a Ni - I mean black.
Hey, we're not responsible for not reporting a vicious and nearly fatal rape, it's because we can't trust the cops, the cops are the problem, the government is the problem and we want less government, you know.
Race, religion and gender are "Immutable characteristics" said a spokesman for John Böhner. The House Minority Leader feels that existing Federal protections ore OK for people born with such handicaps as being female or dark skinned, but not for people who against nature and for entertainment purposes choose to be gay or to be in a wheelchair.
"He does not support adding sexual orientation to the list of protected classes,"
said Böhner spokesman Kevin Smith in an email to CBS News. It's important to note that he includes religion as something worthy of special protection. Of course gender is not currently given special protection, and religion is hardly "immutable" or innate or the product of genetics, but we're quoting Republican leaders here, who can't be expected to be rational or consistent, not normal human beings.
Rep. Tom Price, who heads the GOP conservative circus caucus cites the slippery slope fallacy to predict that such legislation would lead to "thought crimes" while felonies of intent which account for a good part of our prison population would not. Sounds dishonest to me and it's apparent that the real opposition comes from the fear that some preacher might be called to task for preaching hatred against infidels or "sinners" or witches even though no violence can be traced directly to him. Don't tell me it doesn't happen, I've endured many a sermon that prompted me to leave in disgust and I don't mean Pastor Muthee. The danger of exposing the inherent anti-Semitism in certain foundational documents must seem very real to people like Price.
"We believe all hate crimes legislation is unconstitutional and places one class of people above others,"
said a spokesman for Buck. Perhaps this is all about principle, despite all appearances, yet it seems like yesterday to me when segregation was the backbone of American Conservatism and the exclusion of ethnic groups from neighborhoods and hotels was de regueur and fiercely defended by people like Barry Goldwater. Of course I think it's not about egalitarian sentiment at all. I think it's that if you took the license to preach hate away from the far right religious faction that owns the GOP, they'd be out of business.
The right wing trolls have been parading their mock outrage recently about suggestions that the last 8 years have marked a new high ( or low, if you prefer) in Republican hate mongery -- unless, of course they're allowed to blame it either equally or entirely on "far-left Liberals," which group is comprised of anyone who criticized George W. Bush's presidency before the economy hit the fan.
Were the Doctor murderer and the museum shooter secret FLL's? is the question they're pretending to ask themselves in order to avoid the appearance of complicity, says Majikthise. Of course yesterday's arrests for home invasion and murder by leaders of one of the "minuteman" groups who pose as well-regulated militias doing what "the government refuses to do" will have to be integrated into the program of denial and blame passing. It's going to get more and more difficult, I predict, to discuss any question of responsibility.
Shawna Forde, leader of Minutemen America Defense, aptly called MAD, is a graduate of San Diego terrorist Camp Vigilante. She's been arrested along with two other terrorist border patrol volunteer group members for having shot up a Hispanic family in their own home, leaving a father and his nine year old daughter dead. One of the other vigilantes is also a product of a Minuteman training camp, but of course the argument is being steered away from culpability and toward which of several groups get to use the Minuteman name, as the dance of denial and evasion begins.
Of course by suggesting that the rabid barking about Mexicans from Lou Dobbs on down to the self-appointed defenders of America's borders and undiluted bodily fluids has had any effect on the overall climate of murderous rage amongst the "conservatives," exposes me to accusations of playing the "Blame Game" and being ranked as another Far Left Liberal hate shouter in the false equivalence World Series and probably an America Blaming, crypto-terrorist, Fascist-Marxist follower of the false and foreign-born Messiah Obama as well.
Really, I should just go back to writing about Boats before my sense of guilt becomes overwhelming.
When James vonBrunn was sentenced to jail for the armed kidnap attempt of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors it was only because the Judge was a Jew and the jury was black. No doubt about it. He's been raging about Jews and Black people since most of you were children and he sees something called the Aryan race as victims of such inferior groups.
It's tempting, as a person who despises the growing culture of hate and defamation in the US, to tie this man and his hundreds of thousands of supporters to the hate shouters we're all too familiar with, but in good conscience, I cannot. Even so their endless derision of fabricated scapegoats has inured us to the danger of the terrorists out there among us. Their hate talk legitimizes and breeds more hate talk and we become habituated to it. Those standard scapegoats tend to include Jews, Blacks and the Federal Reserve Bank, all of which are also targets of people like James vonBrunn.
Von Brunn has written that the "Holocaust Religion" is destroying Western (by which he means White) culture. It's common amongst people who would like to re-invent themselves as victims of relentless persecution to resent those who have actually been victims and so it's not surprising that the elderly hatemonger chose the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC for what was surely intended to be a suicide attack.
I'm probably less surprised about this than my Christian countrymen, since I've been listening to all the old calumnies and fantasies about baby-eating, blood-drinking, Christ-killing, warmongering, bank-controlling Jews all my life while many of them are just now beginning to accept that the vilification of Jews has been, if not the very backbone, at least a major buttress of Christianity. Certainly not all however and certainly they are not the only ones. Muslim vilification of the Jews in all their fantastic stereotypes is second to none and many of them consider the Jews to be in control of the United States, if not Europe, Canada and Australia as well.
There is a lesson here and it is that we have not only tolerated such people, but made heroes of some of them to a degree: men who will stand up to a government we blame for all our own excesses and deficiencies. They are not and their acts of terrorism are warnings that we should examine our own angers and stop blaming a host of straw men for having messed up our country.
I remember when "subornation of perjury" entered the common parlance; back when they told us it was a crime for Bill Clinton to say "don't tell my wife" even though he wasn't actually on trial for cheating on Hillary. It's all zipped away in my hypocrisy directory along with Ann Coulter's call for Federal Judges to be poisoned and the amazing comment about me on another blog where I was accused of calling for the bloody decapitation of Rush Limbaugh when I said that heads should roll at Fox News. Fairness, balance and objectivity, if I could find much of it, would occupy a smaller file.
None the less, it may be that incitements to violence have at long last lost some of whatever it was that protected them. Racist Radio bloviator, blogger and frequent guest of Sean Hannity, Hal Turner has been arrested in Connecticut after he advised Connecticut Catholics to get out their guns and go after two legislators and an Ethics Committee official. Is there a difference between that and asking listeners to poison Judges? Perhaps someone in Connecticut thought the threat a little too credible; a little too specific, seeing that Turner promised on his blog to publish the addresses of his targets. Perhaps a little too much not to take seriously following the latest murder of Dr. Tiller.
"Mr. Turner's comments are above and beyond the threshold of free speech,"
said Police Chief Michael J. Fallon according to Raw Story today.
"He is inciting others through his website to commit acts of violence and has created fear and alarm. He should be held accountable for his conduct."
Yes he should.
Does this signal the beginning of an era when people are called to take responsibility for their words? Don't be silly, but if prompts the media to begin to reassess those they dub "conservatives" I think all of us should welcome it no matter what we call ourselves.
Michelle Malkin is talking about Christmas cheer. Yes, it's like Kim Jong Il talking about threats to civil liberties, only worse, because we don't have Fox News bleating his demented ravings or calling them "conservative comment."
Yes, it's the atheists, as though they were a group: it's the atheists, the non-believers who are getting in the way of her cheerful enjoyment of Christmas and the atheists who should be treated like "Internet trolls." That, I presume, means to ignore them. Of course, in Fox speak, that means to continue their mythical battle between retail Christianity and the nefarious forces of religious freedom.
Gretchen Carlson, who apparently has a good shot at surpassing Malkin for sheer vituperative viciousness disagrees, saying that religious freedom will be the death of Christianity.
"If you don't stand up and fight for it, it might just disappear! I'm talking about Christianity!"
No, you're not, you're talking about forced unanimity and mandatory expressions of official faith. Christianity thrived actual persecution for enough time to make me doubt that it's future is injeopardy , at least from other religions, and it has thrived through persecutions of it's own, but it's having a tougher time in some places that leave everyone alone to celebrate if and when and how they like and restrain them from forcing their practices and rituals on others.
Back before Christianity was coopted by those who play to the stupid and ignorant and hateful; back before Fox News and the Aryan Nation, it was an inclusive holiday. As a non-Christian and an atheist and someone who knows all too much about Christian history, about early Christian, Greco-Persian, Roman and Norse practices that form the basis of Christmas: as someone who knows how the holiday (and yes, it's a goddamn holiday) owes more to Coca-Cola, Hallmark and Charles Dickens than to some Jewish baby born to a teenage mother in April of an indeterminate year about 2000 years ago, I've always celebrated it anyway. After all Christmas as we know it is an American holiday and one that used to bring about a spirit of tolerance, brotherhood and generosity to a unique degree. It was a holiday that brought out the liberal in most of us.
Now that it's become a bloody piece of meat in the claws of harpies like Malkin and Carlson, now that we've become as stupid and superstitious and as ready to rend our neighbors as any of our subhuman cousins at the behest of Fox and its stable of demons, I'm no longer interested. Its just another hot poker in the dungeons of the Fox inquisition.
Of course if their were any real Christians in this country they might propose at least to ignore this attempt to make it a holiday of hate, but perhaps that, like liberty and the pursuit of happiness just another lost hope of the secular humanists who first dreamed of it.
As both are really, really long -- I don't know what it is that compels me, sometimes -- I'll just leave the links, rather than hogging the whole front page.
Who knows how far they would have got, but who knows what other evil lurks in the hearts of such people, stoked up on campaign libel and "Joe sixpack bigotry."
No comment has been obtained from Palin headquarters yet, as to whether these are some of the "real Americans she's been talking about.
