But you can't deny the last couple years have been profoundly uncivil (and that is a nice way to put it). I mean, you have a major-party candidate for the U.S. Senate openly calling for the use of "Second Amendment remedies" while in the same breath expressing a need to "take Harry Reid out." I couldn’t believe that one.
Or you have political operatives openly – and quite successfully – instructing people on how to disrupt town hall meetings, and then having right wing activists actually bringing guns to these gatherings.
Or, you have that guy who was arrested yesterday for threatening Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA) by saying:
“And you let that fucking scum bag know, that if he ever fucks around with my money, ever the fuck again, I’ll fucking kill him, okay. I’ll round them up, I’ll kill them, I’ll kill his friends, I’ll kill his family, I will kill everybody he fucking knows.”Sure, this guy is clearly a nut-job -- as was the shooter in Arizona – but don't try to tell me that he was not influenced by all the inflammatory rhetoric from Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Michelle Bachmann, and the rest of the Radical Right.
I think Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) – who got a brick through her office window last year and a bullet through her head last Saturday – said it best a few months ago when she responded to Sarah Palin’s targeting of her district with gun site crosshairs: “When people do that, you got to realize there are consequences to that action.”
If Sarah Palin really thinks she is the actual victim in all this – as she suggested yesterday in her now-infamous “Blood Libel” speech – then why the hell did she take down from her website the gun site crosshairs display after Rep. Giffords was shot in the head?
Well, I guess I'm a fool for expecting some sort of consistency from Palin, who now -- thanks to her idiotic and profoundly ill-timed speech yesterday -- has as much of a chance of being the 2012 GOP presidential nominee as I do of being the first man to walk on the surface of the Sun.
5 comments:
Don't sell yourself short, you can walk on the surface of the sun.
I blame the internets, and not the media per se, but the amount of media. The problem is that anyone can say anything and; (1) They do not have to take any responsibility for it or ownership of it and (2) For every stupid, irresponsible,deceitful or hateful thing someone says, there are ten million people who will immediately jump to their defense.
There is no right or wrong anymore, there is only right or wrong as you and your constiuency define it and as a result, you can never be wrong.
Palin was wrong in every way possible, period. But even Huckabee, who I have no ill will towards, immediately came to her defense. Sometimes a self-aborbed, narcissitic, stupid, fame whore is just a self-absorbed, narcissistic, stupid, fame whore.
True, but she's getting a lot of shit from fellow right wingers for her "blood libel" remark. What a amazing thing to say, given that Giffords is Jewish.
Plus, with regard to blaming the internets, I think that's a big part of it. But we had the internets for quite awhile, so that does not explain the marked increase in vitriol we've been hearing the last couple of years. I think the increase has more to do with the fact that a Black man was elected president than with anything else. The whole birther movement is nothing more than thinly-veiled racism.
What's amazing is that everyone also has the ability to be right these days if by "right" you mean the ability to get other people to confirm your belief. I can say anything no matter how factually incorrect and find someone that believes me thus making me right, at least to them. I suppose it's always been this way, but with the internet, you can get a much much larger audience than you traditionally could. Whereas before I might have the village idiot, the town drunk, and the local sodomite agreeing with me, now I have ten million idiots, drunks and sodomites agreeing with me and as a result I can say that "millions of people agree."
Post a Comment