Baraka_Guru

I think they're left of liberal, and at least one or two of them had an anarchist bent.

But I don't want to go down this path because it won't be very fruitful. It's as though shouting "Al Gore!" "Black Panthers!" or "Jeremiah Wright!" will lead us to believe it was okay for Palin to have had cross-hairs on a map and a list of people to remove from office. Whether it was a metaphor or not doesn't matter. It wasn't cool that she used such a militant theme for her political purposes.

She and her people removed the map promptly after the shooting, and for good reason. It's not like Gore promptly pulled An Inconvenient Truth from the shelves because of an out of hand call to arms embedded in the film. It was clearly the case that the shooter took it out of context for his own purpose. That along with the work of novelist Daniel Quinn. The Discovery Channel shooter was an anarcho-environmentalist who railed against the Discovery Channel because of overpopulation. There is only a tenuous connection of this to Gore's work.

Palin's map is more direct. Giffords' name was on a list. There was a cross-hair over her position on a map.

These two aren't the same thing.

Regardless, there is nothing you can say about liberal or leftist figures inciting, influencing, or inspiring crackpot shooters—whether directly or not—that will convince me it is okay for Palin et al to have contextualized their political goals as they did.

Violence should not be a part of politics, whether as a theme or an actual call to arms. When it comes to violence, it is an indication that you either a) do not take the peaceful process of politics seriously or b) the peaceful process of politics has failed.

If the political environment comes to either "a" or "b," then it's time to re-evaluate things.

Palin, and the members and organizations of the Tea Party movement that make use of militaristic imagery or suggestion, need to re-evaluate things.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

roachboy

it's hilarious watching conservatives refuse to accept any responsibility at all for the language that they are told to think through.

i hope you folks and your authorized talking heads keep right on squirming, and do it in a high profile way, because you erode your own position by doing it. false equivalences, arbitrary red-baiting, idiotic pseudo-historical assertions....you do your own cause a lot of damage, kinda in the way those backwater assholes from the westboro baptist church will do if they go through with this particularly ill-advised publicity stunt:

Westboro Baptist Church To Picket Funerals Of Arizona Shooting Victims

so have at it.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

ottopilot

You know... there's a whole chain of department stores with "targets" on them. Sounds mighty suspicious

meanwhile... August 10, 2010 - Al Gore speaking during a conference call with global warming activists:

I don't know... with such an inflammatory statement, how many ways can "call you to action" be interpreted by someone as far in the deep end as James Lee? Perhaps as "crosshairs"?

And yes, THANK YOU!!!... prompted by more of this contrived mob-logic you're promoting, we should also be charging Daniel Quinn (with murder), the author of "My Ishmael" which was featured in Lee's demands on the Discovery Channel. But wait!.... so are you now in agreement with the absurdity of associating acts of lone insane people to entire socio-political movements?

Where does this end? ... the rush to paint the actions of a lone nut-job as something political?

We know why it starts. It looks contrived because it is.

... I'm on my cell phone, could someone please post a Holy Grail Burn the Witch! clip from YouTube?

BTW-Lee (absolutely) was a radical liberal environmentalist... who also happened to be a PSYCHOPATH! It doesn't that mean all radical liberal environmentalists are psychopaths and would act out in the same way as James Lee. But it doesn't seem to play well with the strategy of inventing and assigning non-existant violent tendendies to political foes.

__________________
"It rubs the lotion on Buffy, Jodi and Mr. French's skin" - Uncle Bill from Buffalo

Hotmnkyluv

You guys can go back and forth with this til the cows come home and neither side is going to budge.

The truth of the matter is that it doesn't matter if Al and Sarah called this guy up personally and asked him to shoot these people, then drove him to the Safeway.
He pointed the gun.
He pulled the trigger.
He alone bears the responsibility for his actions.

dippin

Oh, look, more fake equivalency.

But talking about fake equivalency, I do wonder if people would be so quick to just label him a "lone nut job" if his name was Mohamed. Or if the people calling for "second amendment solutions" and that "if ballots don't work, bullets will" were Imams instead of some of the biggest names in the republican party.

debaser

Nice to see that this tragedy has started us on the road to a more civilized discourse.





You should all be ashamed of yourselves.

__________________

Baraka_Guru

ottopilot, you clearly don't understand the difference and I don't feel the need to point it out to you.

However, I do feel the need to ask you to stop twisting my words. If you need a clarification on something, just ask.

Or maybe you're just being ironic. I'm not sure what's worse. More lately I've become weary of irony. I think it's a hangover from postmodernism.

Can you do us both a favour and just say what you mean?

Radical liberals don't tend to use guns; they use placards, blogs, word processors, and publishing companies.

You seem to forget that one of the tenets of liberalism is a non-revolutionary, non-violent approach to change. Once you've suspended your support for human rights and tolerance, you've suspended your support for liberalism.

Maybe Lee was a liberal at one time, but he appears to have walked away from that.

---------- Post added at 01:18 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:12 PM ----------

I will not be ashamed of my disdain for violence, whether overt or implied. I will not be ashamed for voicing my opinions regarding this matter.

What would you rather me do? This thread isn't a vigil for Giffords. If you want one, make one.

If you believe any posts are out of line, you're welcome to report them.

If you have nothing better to say than your sweeping, summarized, moralistic accusation, then you're welcome to press the back button.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

ottopilot

Wow! Speaking of hilariously irresponsible pseudo-historical language! There's no false-equivilancy to this load. A+ work there!

__________________
"It rubs the lotion on Buffy, Jodi and Mr. French's skin" - Uncle Bill from Buffalo

roachboy

well gee, otto, maybe the fbi should just talk to you rather than bothering to investigate this guy's immersion in neo-fascist politics. you're the expert after all, the one who knows everything about it, presumably from the position of a nativist informant of some kind.


Jared Lee Loughner note reveals aim to assassinate Gabrielle Giffords | World news | guardian.co.uk


think of the money the government could save if they just called.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Willravel

Asserting a similarity between Bush and Hitler a la Godwin is not even in the same hemisphere as a death threat. It's not. It may be hyperbole, in fact it is, but it's not a call for violence or death. Claiming as such demonstrates in no uncertain terms the willingness to commit massive false equivalence in order to escape responsibility.

Barack Obama did indeed say that Democrats should be politically bringing a gun to a knife fight, but he's not speaking to a party obsessed with revolution and guns, he's speaking to a political party hungry for more assertive political strategy, and is speaking directly to that. Were his words unwise? Perhaps, but compare them to this:
Combine this statement with the map of targets, which she herself called target on her own twitter, and the language is entirely clear.

I couldn't agree more.

kriswest

Wether language is overt or covert it is all designed to incite passions in the people.
There is a saying " There is always one idiot in the crowd". 99 people may just get passionate, there is always that 1 person will pull the trigger. Liberal or conservative all are guilty of incitement. All bear the responsibility as do all people that vote for the politicians.

Willravel

No, liberals and conservatives are not all guilty of incitement. I know it sounds measured and mature to stand back and blame both sides, as if that's the first step to move past all of this, but it's not. This isn't something balanced across the entire spectrum.

The mainstream, corporate media plays the game of false balance similarly by claiming there are extremists and calls to violence on both sides, but the last time the American left (or center-left, as it were) engaged in anti-government violence was 40 years ago. There hasn't been left wing or center left violence in years, even from our most extremist organizations. This is not to say there's no anger on the center or left, there are, but... let me put it this way: who are the biggest 5-10 people on the right and left in the United States? Now, which of chose 10-20 people have used revolutionary, violent, or language otherwise relevant to the topic at hand? Notice how they're all on one side? Notice how it's BillO, Beck, Palin, Hannity, Boehner, Rush, Savage, McConnell and such, not Pelosi, Reed, Obama, Maddow, Olbermann, and their ilk? This is reality. There's no equal responsibility for the climate of fear and violence.

samcol

There's no evidence this guy was right wing or associated with the tea party or any right leaning organization like you are implying. Everything that's come out from things he's wrote and people who have been associated with him point to him borrowing parts of his political views from the right, the left, libertarianism, and a whole lot of crazy.

At this point to say he was following the rhetoric from these talking heads is just not based in reality.

__________________
It's time for the president to hand over his nobel peace prize.

Cynthetiq

Really? So all those calls for violent demonstrations at G20 type events are all conservatives?

__________________
I don't care if you are black, white, purple, green, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, hippie, cop, bum, admin, user, English, Irish, French, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, indian, cowboy, tall, short, fat, skinny, emo, punk, mod, rocker, straight, gay, lesbian, jock, nerd, geek, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Independent, driver, pedestrian, or bicyclist, either you're an asshole or you're not.

Willravel

There's evidence in that he's anti-government. There are, in the United States right now, only a handful of (tiny) liberal anti-government groups and not a single one of them is pro gun rights. Not one. There hasn't been anti-government violence from the left in over 40 years. Not one instance.

The entire Republican party, on the other hand, has been anti-government for decades and is tightly associated with armament and armed resistance. I can't count on all my fingers and toes the instances of anti-government violence which can fairly connected with the right in the past 10 years let alone in the past 20+. You're not allowed to simply ignore this because it hurts your case. You have to factor it in or face being branded dishonest.



As an added note, journalist Tim Heffernan has spoken to surveyors in the past 24 hours and has managed to find crosshairs in surveying. The symbol commonly represents an aven, or vertical shaft. I've only done amateur landscaping drafting, myself, but based on what information I can find this does seem to be the case. I'd like a conservative apologist around here to explain in a plausible way why these marks on Palin's map represent avians and not crosshairs. I'll be waiting with bated breath.

---------- Post added at 02:24 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:21 PM ----------

Confusing anti-globalization with anti-government goes beyond the pale of plausible ignorance, Cynth. You're a bright fellow, you know better.

Regarding the question of left violence... where were the guns? Where were the preparations for active and offensive (as opposed to defensive) violence? There are literally hundreds of independent videos of the police instigating... where are the videos of the protesters, some of which liberal, centrist and libertarian, instigating? Your attempted comparison falls very much flat.

samcol

I found it interesting note that one of the people that apprehended him was a gun owner who was armed at the time. He decided not to draw his firearm though because the suspect was out of ammo, although said he would of if he had reloaded. Apparently the suspect had at least 2 more high capacity mags for his glock and a pocket knife.

__________________
It's time for the president to hand over his nobel peace prize.

roachboy

actually, there is evidence that he was into a version of far right loon mythology--you know, ayn rand, ron paul....combined with a more eclectic reading list.

i've not been making anything like a causal connection between this guy's individual decisions/actions and neo-fascist language as if the latter was working in his brain like a parasite and made him do stuff as a way of expressing its own characteristics. what i'm saying is that this happened within a poisonous political context and the responsibility for that poison comes clearly from the populist right----in the shorter run from the fabrication of the tea party as a movement that in the end has been co-opted by american crossroads and other deep pockets organizations in order to pressure the republican party to head further to the right. this at a moment of total political collapse for conservative politics in any sane sense of the term.

the populist right generated a context in which this is not surprising in general. something like this happening is not surprising.
that's not to make a cause-effect argument---but it is to say that there's a problem with the context that the right has created for it's own self-interest, its own purposes.

there are other questions that arise from this which are more central for the specific action:

why is it so easy to buy a fucking glock?
what possible reason is there to have glocks be available so easily in arizona?
what possible reason is there to have abandoned background checks in arizona?

the other that i've been reading about has to do with the cutting away of mental health services by conservatives because they seem so vaporous and unmanly i suppose.
maybe like most conservative policies, cutting funding for mental health treatment turns out to be a really bad idea.

but it's still funny to watch and read all the conservatives who are whining about what victims they are because of this. and acting all indignant about the Tragedy of It All. and trying to find a way to blame their usual imaginary enemies for it again.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Willravel

I'm not suggesting a direct causal link, either. I don't know that there are any of those in the thread.

dc_dux

According to the FBI, threats of violence against members of Congress are up 300% over the last two years.

The same time as the unprecedented rise in the vitriolic rhetoric....the call to "refresh the tree of liberty" with violence....the socialist takeover led by those anti-Americans, Obama/Pelosi, that must be stopped....the govt health care bill will kill your grandma and your babies if they get their way....they have plans to take away your guns.....

Coincidence?

---------- Post added at 06:29 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:19 PM ----------

__________________
"The perfect is the enemy of the good."
~ Voltaire

samcol

roach, apparently he passed the FBI background check to purchase the firearm. i dont know if there was another state based one on top of that?

also, i understand your concern over the gun rights in america and don't really want to go there, however what are you suggesting be done about this rhetoric from the political pundits?

the thought of regulating the first amendment any further than direct threats makes me shudder. it just seems like such a slippery slope and very dependent on which party is in power at the time in regards to which speech gets 'shut down' or prosecuted. thoughts?

__________________
It's time for the president to hand over his nobel peace prize.

dogzilla

Oh yes, those on the left are also guilty. Obama made the comment about bringing a gun to a knife fight. Harry Mitchell ran a TV add with crosshairs superimposed over a photo of J.D. Hayworth. I think a photo of a person with crosshairs superimposed over that person is a much stronger suggestion to shoot someone than a picture of cross hairs over a space on a map.

What set the looney off? Was it a map with crosshairs? Was it a suggestion to bring a gun to a knife fight? Was it a picture of someone with cross hairs superimposed over them? Was it heavy metal music he listened to? Watching too many Rambo movies created by the liberals in Hollywood? Voices in his head? Bad day at work? Road rage? Who knows?

Until he explains himself, who knows why he did it.

At least give the guy the swift execution he deserves. No not guilty by reason of legal technicality nonsense liberals are so fond of. There's no doubt he did it.

Cynthetiq

I'm not confusing anything. I'm stating LIBERAL inciting violence, I don't care that you're parsing it as anti-globalization or anti-government. That's splitting hairs.

Since many liberals don't believe in guns there won't be guns, but there are other methods used to incite violence and rioting.

__________________
I don't care if you are black, white, purple, green, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, hippie, cop, bum, admin, user, English, Irish, French, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, indian, cowboy, tall, short, fat, skinny, emo, punk, mod, rocker, straight, gay, lesbian, jock, nerd, geek, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Independent, driver, pedestrian, or bicyclist, either you're an asshole or you're not.

Willravel

First, as I said, they didn't incite anything. They showed up to protest and responded to the undue force of law enforcement. There were many documented incidents of the police or paramilitary troops engaging peaceful protesters. The response to that, be it violent or not, is not incitement.

Second, what other method is comparable to a gun?! Throwing stones? Yelling profanities? Please. Unless you can point to such protests where tools of deadly force are used like bombs, Molotov cocktails, or something which can be honestly compared to a gun, you're just spouting more false equivalence. You're enabling calls to violence on the right, be they implicit or explicit, by dishonestly suggesting that both sides are doing it.

Cynthetiq

you apparently don't equate violence with violence, and again, split hairs with fatal violence with violence.

__________________
I don't care if you are black, white, purple, green, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, hippie, cop, bum, admin, user, English, Irish, French, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, indian, cowboy, tall, short, fat, skinny, emo, punk, mod, rocker, straight, gay, lesbian, jock, nerd, geek, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Independent, driver, pedestrian, or bicyclist, either you're an asshole or you're not.

Willravel

You're perfectly happy to equate people of all political backgrounds from socialist to libertarian, as they were at the G20, defending themselves from paramilitary police aggression to even the mere speculation that the current climate had some bearing on the tragic shooting in Arizona. That's the imbalance. That's the false equivalence.

There's no hair splitting going on here. There's meaningful speculation and there's outright deliberate obfuscation.

I want you to look at this screencap of Glenn Beck's site:
http://i.imgur.com/3hYtf.png

Look at it very carefully. Doesn't this stand as a perfect example of calling for violence out of one side of your mouth while pretending to abhor it with the other? This is the problem. You can't just discount the nut with a gun because it doesn't fit with your ideological views.

Cynthetiq

I'm not discounting anything. I'm just not accepting that you're statement of Liberals don't incite violence as false.

__________________
I don't care if you are black, white, purple, green, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, hippie, cop, bum, admin, user, English, Irish, French, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, indian, cowboy, tall, short, fat, skinny, emo, punk, mod, rocker, straight, gay, lesbian, jock, nerd, geek, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Independent, driver, pedestrian, or bicyclist, either you're an asshole or you're not.

Willravel

In what way is responding to police brutality incitement?

samcol

what's the point though will? beck posing with a gun while denouncing violence, i just dont get how it relates to this shooting. obviously no one on the right is condoning this shooting, and why do you keep harping on it while at the same time saying the right didn't incite this shooting?

__________________
It's time for the president to hand over his nobel peace prize.

Willravel

My point, if there is one, is that the current climate of calls, implicit or explicit, to violence and violent resistance to political ideas that you simply don't like (or have been instructed not to like) coincides with a similar increase in politically motivated violence and that, while we don't have all the facts yet, may be connected in some way to the shooting of which this thread is about. Moreover, because calling for political violence serves no beneficial function in a free society such as ours, it's long past time there was universal—that is, left, center, and right—denouncement and repudiation of these obvious threats. Not only is it not okay to so subtly suggest "Second Amendment remedies", as only one many many examples, but these stupid and irresponsible statements should be met with a wall of condemnation from the entire country, which includes conservatives. If Keith Olbermann were calling for violence, I'd be calling his ass on it even stronger than I am this. When Alan Grayson called his opponent 'Taliban Dan', the left, overnight, abandoned him. What I'm seeing in this thread is apologists. What the hell would possess you to try and make excuses for calling for violence? Are you really that entrenched?

Charlatan

It think there are people on both sides that have been guilty of violence in their rhetoric. Currently, the majority of that is coming from the conservative end of the spectrum.

Again, I don't care to make any connection between the language and symbolism that politicians and members of the media have been using (maps with cross hairs, reload, guns v. knives, etc.) and what the shooter did.

I just want to point out, again, that using this sort of language comes with consequences.

Now is not only the time to point fingers. It is also the time to look at ourselves.

__________________
"My hands are on fire. Hands are on fire. Ain't got no more time for all you charlatans and liars."
- Old Man Luedecke

ARTelevision

Yes. Looking at ourselves is also a form of politics. We are all responsible for what happens. I can think of many reasons for this: our individual states of mind, our behavior, our collective action, how we treat the mentally ill, our lack of compassion and our lack of will to address the underlying problems rampant in our society. These are all illuminating and help provide some context...some understanding. It seems there are some ways to look at this that don't require us to argue with each other.

__________________
create evolution

roachboy

the false equivalence concerning this "call to violence" stuff is pretty obvious: even if one accepts that it's somehow coherent for conservatives to point to stokley charmichael as a counterexample in 2011 (which presupposes---shall we say---relaxed standards for coherent argument) there was no point---ever----where he or anyone else "on the left" in the arbitrary gallery of figureheads adduced for red-baiting purposes at the moment had the kind of saturation media exposure that contemporary neo-fascist discourse has. period. on that basis there is NO comparison between the danger posed by contemporary neo-facist calls to political violence and those of people who were active on the left in the united states 40 years ago. the comparison is absurd, yet another example of conservative metaphysics---all fast and loose with context, fixate like a crackhead on some purely formal resemblance, repeat the claim over and over as if repetition gets rid of the speciousness of the claim. and this should be tolerated because hey, it's just my opinion man. i'm entitled to indulge shabby superficial thinking. it's my right as an american. blah blah blah.

i dont think anything more damaging could happen to american neo-fascism than for it to be exposed for what it is. i find it amazing that the tea party et al have been able to form, gain some momentum, lurch about on the national political scene doing whatever chump work they're doing for the big money people and not be subject to serious critique. it just hasn't happened. i'm not advocating any censorship or any legal action---but i do advocate the political destruction of the far right and this because their politics are incoherent AND dangerous and if this democracy business means anything, it should be able as a process to weed out the incoherent and dangerous. if it can't then we really are in trouble because the substitution of shopping for politics is complete and the fading empire is well and truly fucked because the central political feedback loop that was supposed to make democracy so wonderful has been eliminated. shoppers don't get to criticize the retail system---that system is neutral---they merely get to choose which peanut butter they like.

that the ultra-right is viable in the united states is in itself an indictment of the american political system.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

dogzilla

So left-aligned violence from people like Stokeley Carmichael and calls to 'kill whitey' with the ensuing riots are good.

A whackjob job Democrat who saw a map on Sarah Palin's website with crosshairs over states is bad.

Got it.

roachboy

maybe reading something in print will help you with your obvious reading comprehension problems:

Dana Milbank - For Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, a McKinley moment?


i've been amused by conservative columnists like george will and others less literate who are effectively arguing that behind all this human tragedy stuff, the real victims of the past few days are conservatives....

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Baraka_Guru

Modern (American) conservatism seems to require a status of victimhood.

After all, the Tea Party movement isn't simply a political platform; it's a reaction to a perceived affront to a particular political stance. If Tea Partiers didn't see themselves as victims, I don't think there'd be a Tea Party movement. They didn't organize to support their views; they organized to oppose what they perceive as a threat to them.

And so it goes. A congresswoman and several others are shot at a public event. Would it not be expected to take a look at the political environment when a politician is shot? Is it not obvious that there has been a lot of violent imagery, metaphor, and innuendo coming from the right? It seems to have become the theme. I don't deny that liberals have also used some of that, but comparatively it's more than just a bit lopsided.

So what is to be done? Business as usual? I hope not.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

dogzilla

When the loonie admits why he shot all these people, and that it was because of Sarah Palin's website, then maybe your position will have some validity.Until then, none. It's just conservative bashing. Again.

I've read a number of comments that the guy was angry at the Congresswoman for other reasons.

So while It's a tragedy that all these people were shot, you're not going to convince me that Sarah Palin had anything to do with it.

filtherton

So when someone torches an under-construction upscale housing development, I just assume, without evidence, that that someone was from ELF. When someone releases a bunch of lab animals into the surrounding environment (which usually means most of them are dead within a few days), I usually assume, without evidence, that someone from an ALF-ey type group was involved. These are plausible assumptions given what I know about these two groups based on prior activity and rhetoric. These are leftist groups. Despite the fact that I typically fall on the left side of things, I have no problem denouncing their tactics and rhetoric.

When someone mows down a group of people in an attempt to kill a congressperson who had previously been targeted with death threats due to her "tyranny", I just assume that it was some right wing lunatic, because there is a fair amount of talk amongst some very prominent folks on the right that politicians engaged in tyranny need to be shot. Sorry if that hurts the feelings of some of the more reasonable conservatives folks around here. Part of having a named political philosophy is that you get identified with the loudest folks who share that philosophy. Get over it. Perhaps if you spent more time denouncing the gadflies on your own side and less time getting all whimpery whenever someone hurts your feelings by associating you with those gadflies, this type of thing would be less of a problem.

This is wholly separate from the actual motives of the actual shooter. However, when the political rhetoric your side employs starts to resemble the behavior of violent lunatics (regardless of their actual, lunatic motivations), perhaps its time to take a step back and think about how fucking ridiculous and out of place your rhetoric is.

ottopilot

So now, as we've seen so many times before (i.e. census worker), there is no evidence to support a political motive behind the attack. The sherrif essentially made up his statement to the press (without a shred of evidence) to support his claim that the attack was most likely prompted by the volitile media voices of the right. As a law enforcement professional expected to work within the evidence and the law, his statements are highly irresponsible if not intentional in the misrepresentation of the facts. To what purpose? We can only guess as to his motivations. It's fairly easy to guess why the media hacks would want spin this into something it's not. But to eagerly and willfully assign unsubstanciated blame to persons or groups for unrelated violent acts of a sick individual is highly disturbing in itself.

Immediately after the Ft. Hood masacre, our leaders and media rightfully echoed the need for restraint in jumping to conclusions about what motivated the attack. Where was the restraint in this case? Why do any of you feel justified in continuing to perpetuate this hoax?

__________________
"It rubs the lotion on Buffy, Jodi and Mr. French's skin" - Uncle Bill from Buffalo

dc_dux

Agreed....putting the motives of the shooter aside.

It appears that those on the right dont see, or are unwilling to acknowledge, any connection whatsoever between the ratcheted up rhetoric over the past two years and the 300% increase in threats of violence against members of Congress.

__________________
"The perfect is the enemy of the good."
~ Voltaire

Tully Mars

The whole thing depresses me. I watched Jon Stewart this morning and I think I agree with him... "I don't know."

I do find it odd, if not sad, that in a state where open carry is not only legal it's almost mandatory someone didn't drop this moron before his second shot.

---------- Post added at 12:13 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:09 PM ----------

Just to clarify- the shooter was a reg. indep. who did not vote last election.

__________________
I used to drink to drown my sorrows, but the damned things have learned how to swim- Frida Kahlo

Vice President Starkizzer Fan Club