Amid all the accusations and the elaborate flummery about “avalanches of violence and threats”, and as the left works itself into a self-righteous lather about the base benightedness of its opposition, it’s worth keeping things in some historical perspective.
We’ve heard ample warnings about extremist paranoia in the months since Barack Obama became president, and we’re sure to hear many more throughout his term. But we’ve heard almost nothing about the paranoia of the political center. When mainstream commentators treat a small group of unconnected crimes as a grand, malevolent movement, they unwittingly echo the very conspiracy theories they denounce. Both brands of connect-the-dots fantasy reflect the tellers’ anxieties much more than any order actually emerging in the world.
When such a story is directed at those who oppose the politicians in power, it has an additional effect. The list of dangerous forces that need to be marginalized inevitably expands to include peaceful, legitimate critics.
The “avalanche of violence” – Steny Hoyer’s “estimated” ten Democrat house representatives who’ve gotten off-color/picqued messages from constituents – has come home to roost. Rep. Betty McCollum (DFL-MN4) reports getting a shredded flag and a condom in the mail, as well as…
…well, I’m sure there was some violence amid that avalanche.
But I thought – what’s the larger context, here? Having worked in talk radio, including a stretch as a call screener, I know that threats and ugliness are just part of being in the public eye; some people, regardless of their politics or target, just don’t handle diversity well.
So I asked Rep. Michele Bachmann’s office “what kind of things to you get from people during an ordinary stretch of sessions?” It may have been an unfair question; Rep. Bachmann is like a red cape in front of insane bulls.
But the office duly obliged.
From email:
Date: Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 3:20 AM
Subject: I want to share my opinion with you.
You are, in my opinion. one ugly fucking human being. I’m so glad I don’t live in Minnesota. In Fargo, the Coen brothers did a great job of depicting your state as populated by dimwits, and now it’s even easier to believe that that is reality. I’m glad we’re finally closing the door on the amazing stupidity of the Bush assministration, and I will be nearly as happy when you are no longer holding any significant political office, you asshole.
Wow. If it’d been aimed at a Democrat, I’m sure brows would be getting plenty furrowed!
you are an evil person, you are the devil, you are a person without a moral conscience
I really hope you die, you took part in destroying this once great country
you are one of the most corrupt politicians out there
Would these have made the news – and caused furrowed brows – if they were aimed at Democrats?
Now, again, kids, don’t be violent. We’re going to get rid of this administration – or at least neuter it – at the polls. There’s no need for all sorts of foamy-mouthed Kossing, here.
I say that because, naturally, if I don’t someone will accuse me of grabbing Grampa’s Garand and heading into the north woods, ready to shoot at revenooers.
At any rate, yay for federal law enforcement and all, and goodnesss knows that’s going to come out at trial, but if the news reports are any indication, Big Sis has just “protected” us from the Keystone Militia:
In an indictment unsealed Monday, prosecutors said the group began military-style training in the Michigan woods in 2008, learning how to shoot guns and make and set off bombs.
Shooting guns? You mean, like 50% of the American people do?
David Brian Stone, 44, of Clayton, Mich., and one of his sons were identified as the ringleaders of the group. Stone, who was known as “Captain Hutaree,” organized the group in paramilitary fashion and members were assigned secret names, prosecutors said. Ranks ranged from “radoks” to “gunners,” according to the group’s Web site.
I’m going to guess they had a secret handshake, to help them tell who was the mole, too.
Prosecutors said Stone had identified certain law enforcement officers near his home as potential targets. He and other members discussed setting off bombs at a police funeral, using a fake 911 call to lure an officer to his death, killing an officer after a traffic stop, or attacking the family of an officer, according to the indictment.
Now, when I first read that bit – that the “militia” planned to draw law enforcement into a huge ambush – I thought “this could have been a serious bunch of people”. That’s a classic asymmetric tactic.
Why, in the hands of a ruthless, competent insurgency…
After such attacks, the group allegedly planned to retreat to “rally points” protected by trip-wired explosives for a violent standoff with the law.
…oh. Never mind.
No confirmation on whether they planned to paint huge targets on their foreheads, or go into action with central lines already inserted for the lethal injections.
Hutaree says on its Web site its name means “Christian warrior” and describes the word as part of a secret language that few are privileged to know.
Secret languages.
Oddball internal rituals and ranks.
Inscrutably bobbleheaded strategy.
Janet Napolitano just rounded up the Scientologists.
Of course, this is no laughing matter; threatening to “levy war” is a big deal.
And it’s even less a laughing matter that our government feels the need to make a huge splash over Captain Hutaree and his Christian Avengers at a time when Congress’ Democratic Caucus is actively slandering dissenters with an overwrought, and curiously coordinated, campaign of finding “violence” and “threats” and “racism” under every rock (for which, somehow, no indictments exist; also evidence, other than the kind of thing every dogcatcher and sports reporter in America gets as part of the job).
Fearless prediction: Look for a brow-furrowing “investigation” of “militias” by Ann Curry.
Stat.
UPDATE: Let me be clear, here. The Hutarees seem to have been amateurs – but amateurism is no defense when it comes to charges of conspiracy to murder anyone, much less cops. The Fort Dix Six were amateurs, and they’re in jail – justifiably so. Major Hassan (and every other mass-murderer, for that matter) was an amateur, but that doesn’t make his victims any less dead.
My beef isn’t with the FBI or the Feds for investigating or arresting them.
It’s with the media and the Dems (pardon the redundancy), which seem to be using this episode as part of an ongoing smear of all right-wing dissent. Last night the local news ran a report about “the militia and Hate Groups in the Twin Cities”; it focused on a doughy guy in a house in Apple Valley who ran a white-supremacist online bookstore.
And it’s with the Southern Guilt By Association Poverty Law Center being taken seriously as a source on the subject again. It’s Janet Napolitano’s watchlist, and hordes of semi-literate leftybloggers chanting “Avalance of Violence! Avalanche of Violence!” like a bunch of demented macaws.
It’s that there are so many smears, happening in so brief a time, so closely tied to an epochal, divisive political event.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 52% of U.S. voters believe the average member of the Tea Party movement has a better understanding of the issues facing America today than the average member of Congress. Only 30% believe that those in Congress have a better understanding of the key issues facing the nation.
When it comes to those issues, 47% think that their own political views are closer to those of the average Tea Party member than to the views of the average member of Congress. On this point, 26% feel closer to Congress.
Only one of these numbers troubles me:
Finally, 46% of voters say that the average Tea Party member is more ethical than the average member of Congress. Twenty-seven percent (27%) say that the average member of Congress is more ethical.
Again, and as always, I reject violence and threats and intimidation in any area of life, to say nothing of politics.
Of course, with last week’s non-events – the unexplained severing of a propane line, a “brick thrown” through a 30th floor window, the non-intentional lofting of spittle and the non-chanting of a racial slur at Congressmen, and the non-news that some people reacted to Obamacare by sending threatening or (more usually) threatening-sounding or socially inappropriate phone messages to Congresscritters (as if a listen through a week of Michele Bachmann’s messages wouldn’t curl their nose hair!) – the majority Democrats in Washington are trying to seize the mantle of victimhood.
Don’t forget it was Obama’s friend Bill Ayers who used terrorism as a tool for political change. SDS is still radical, with arrests in 2007 and the storming of the CATO Institute in July 2008.
It was a liberal who was sentenced to two years for bringing bombs and riot shields to the Republican National Convention in 2008.
Let’s not forget the Minnesota union thugs who attacked the Young Republicans at the 2004 MN State Fair, or burst into the St. Paul Bush Campaign headquarters with clear intent to intimidate.
Let’s be clear, here; Conservatives and Republicans aren’t “victims”. Just, occasionally, targets.
And – unlike Steny Hoyer and Frank Rich and Ed Schultz – I’m not going to use this long, and by no means complete, list of outrages to try to tar all Democrats. Unlike many of the left’s most “respected” talking heads, I’m not going to slime all of my opponents by association. That’s the mark of the intellectual bankrupt and the moral coward.
Still – when you count actual incidents, as opposed to the innuendo-via-press-release that Steny Hoyer got splashed in front of the media last week, the balance of idiocy is pretty clear.
…what can be better attributed to watching the bottom line.
“The Rage Is Not About Healthcare”, Frank Rich of the NYTimes assures us, and in so doing shows why his first gig was as drama critic:
If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.
Attention, Frank Rich. If the President, the Speaker and the Senate Majority Leader were all gun-toting Presbyterian Wal-mart-shoppers who could trace their anscestry back to the Mayflower, and they were proposing to nationalize much of the economy, sap the nation’s economic vitality, gut our healthcare system and put our great-grandchildren into debt, I’d be out there protesting, too.
And I’m pretty sure I speak for more Tea Partiers than you have, say, readers, when I say that.
The rest of Rich’s column is full of the kind of historical illiteracy and disingenuous dependence on Democrat talking points, it’s worth a separate fisking all on its own.
What happens when John Hinderaker meets Paul Krugman?
Lots of pieces of Krugman flying about the place.
Er, wait. Krugman will probably call that an incitement to violence, too.
Hinderaker eviscerates Paul Krugman’s “Violent Republicans” column. You need to read it, if you’re a Republican who’s shaking his/her head at the constant slander, and especially if you’re a Democrat who still believes Krugman is anything but a Lori Sturdevant-style shill for the Democrats.
Once upon a time, as I eviscerated Krugman’s idiotic “Red States Are Welfare Queens” column (wherein he noted, devoid of context, that “red” states take in more “federal money” than “blue” states), I said that I’d love to debate Krugman on the subject. Leftyblogger Charlie Quimby sniffed – partaking, I suspect, in the liberal delusion that credentials equal merit – that he’d “pay money” to watch a debate between Krugman and I.
On that topic? I’d do it. And mop the floor with him.
In 1987, when I was a 24 year old rookie talk show host working the graveyard shift at around 3AM one Sunday night/Monday morning, I took a call. We’d spent the first hour talknig with – and beating on – a noted Holocaust denier.
It’s pretty much axiomatic in talk radio that the callers turn out in droves for gun control and abortion; babies and crime/self-defense are topics pretty much everyone can relate to. Holocaust Denial is another one – or so I found out that night. It’d been a very busy hour; while I never had to beg for callers on my old graveyard-shift show – there were always lots of drunks, third-shifters, aspiring novelists, crazies and (oddly) handicappers tuned in and dying to sound off – that night was particularly heavy – it was a red-letter night. The phone lines crackled with revulsion; a guy claiming to be a Jewish Defense League member said that if the guest had been in the Twin Cities rather than on the phone, he’d have come out to the studio and shot him.
Now, that’s brisk, baby.
And it carried on into the second hour. Full banks of callers, mostly angry; some wondering why I’d given the guy any play at all, most tearing his positions apart, many with stories of relatives who’d served in the war and fought their way into camps, and the stories they’d told.
And then, late in the final half-hour, someone called; in my mind’s eye at 23 years’ remove, he sounded a little like Dennis Hopper. And he said “We’re coming for you, Jew -boy. You can run but you can’t hide”.
I mentioned that I was about as Jewish as a bacon cheeseburger, and that he needed to take his meds as I hung up.
The lesson for the evening?
It’s obvious: Jews and Democrats are violence-prone!
———-
Well, no. It means that when people get angry (and maybe just a tad demented) and find a way to lash out at the targets of their anger from behind the cover of anonymity, they say things they’d never dare say in person. It happens on the phone (ask any talk show screener), and in blog comments, with anonymous leftybloggers – anyone, really, any time that anger isn’t tempered by accountability.
If you’re ap public figure at any level, you’ve tun into this – and you know it’s one of the little stressors that happens.
Congresspeople? Sure, they know it.
———-
It’s tiresome – and more than a little insulting – to have to iterate every time the topic of threats and violence comes up “…now, I don’t advocate threats or violence…”.
Doyy. No kidding?
Tiresome and insulting.
And that’s exactly what the Democrat leadership intended with the stories they’ve run since last weekend in re the Tea Party’s purported response to Obamacare.
It’s several stories, really. +
It’s A Loogie World: “Tea Partiers” ostensibly “spit” on Democrat congresspeople as they walked across the Mall.
Except it’s looking pretty doubtful that it actually happened (around 1:20 of the video in the link):
Jim Treacher:
I can’t get it to link to the specific time code, but fast-forward to the 1:20 mark. Looks to me like that dude was yelling at him and maybe a drop of spittle flew at him. Which still sucks. Nobody likes to be yelled at, especially by some redneck who won’t just shut up and pay his taxes. But it’s not like somebody hocked a loogie in Cleaver’s face.
I know, I know. It doesn’t matter anyway because the Tea Parties are racist. I’m just providing… what’s it called? Oh yeah: Evidence.
According to the article, Lewis was walking from the Cannon Office Building to the Capitol when protesters started shouting. According to Lewis, however, what they shouted was not a racial slur, but “Kill the bill, kill the bill.” If he heard anything more derogatory, he does not seem to have told Douglas about it.
Lewis, it should be noted, is no slouch when it comes to race-baiting. During the 2008 campaign, he compared the McCain-Palin campaign to that of “presidential candidate George Wallace,” whose comparable “atmosphere of hate” led to the fatal church bombing in Birmingham. So egregious were Lewis’s comments that McCain called on Obama to “condemn” them.
As Douglas reports, it was Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO), a Lewis colleague walking a few steps behind him, who actually claimed to have heard the slur. Note the way that Douglas runs these sentences together.
Do you hear a “Chorus” of “N”-bombs? “Kill the Bill”, sure. But there’s a difference, isn’t there?
So far, at least?
Well, all you leftybloggers out there who want to cling to the idea of Republican/Tea Party thuggishness; Andrew Breitbart is putting his money where his blog’s mouth is:
It’s time for the allegedly pristine character of Rep. John Lewis to put up or shut up. Therefore, I am offering $10,000 of my own money to provide hard evidence that the N- word was hurled at him not 15 times, as his colleague reported, but just once. Surely one of those two cameras wielded by members of his entourage will prove his point.
I’d almost bet that same amount that he never, ever gets a taker.
Anger and Pique and Threats, Oh My: Steny Hoyer got front page coverage yesterday when he claimed that…:
more than 10 House Democrats have reported incidents of threats or other forms of harassment about their support of the highly divisive health insurance overhaul vote. Hoyer emphasized that he didn’t have a specific number of threats and that was just an estimate.
Naturally, the media accepts this allegation at face value, and never once stops to question whether the Alinsky Party is, you know, exaggerating or even lying — as the spiritual mentor of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton taught it to do.
The end is what you want, the means is how you get it. Whenever we think about social change, the question of means and ends arises. The man of action views the issue of means and ends in pragmatic and strategic terms. He has no other problem; he thinks only of his actual resources and the possibilities of various choices of action. He asks of ends only whether they are achievable and worth the cost; of means, only whether they will work.
The horse-race-obsessed Mainstream Media might want to look up the term, agents provocateurs…
While I suspect there’s more than a little chance that some of the “estimated” “threats” were phoned in or are complete fabrications, it doesn’t matter; people get angry, regardless of their politics, and some of them say dumb, hateful, even illegal things.
Here comes the controversial part that still must be said: I have heard the audio of some of the threats. I get worse stuff routinely. Rush Limbaugh gets worse stuff on a daily basis. Republican members of Congress have gotten similar and worse stuff. Thank God this wasn’t a free trade vote or a variety of left wing groups would have half the country in flames right now. I do believe the 24 hours of threats, many of which were pretty weak, has gotten more national coverage than the leftist anarchists in Texas who molotov cocktailed the Texas Governor’s Mansion — for which arrests have never been made.
Certainly more than the houseful of bomb-making goodies, vandalism supplies and buckets of urine that police found when they raided a Saint Paul house being used as a staging ground for “anarchists” at the Saint Paul RNC in 2008.
The Dems’ “concerns” are long on feelings, short on actual actions. To date, there are only two actual physical actions that have been reported to law enforcement (if you leave out the real shooting at Eric Cantor’s office, which much of the media has done).
Gas Attack: A gas line to an outdoor grill was allegedly cut at the house of Virginia Rep. Tom Perriello’s brother, after a “Tea Partier” ostensibly posted the address online.
I really want to know the details about this one. Who did it and why? Let me see the photographs. I want to know all about it. I don’t like the home addresses being posted on line, and I don’t like even peaceful protests at any individual’s house. I can see why you’d be upset that your address is known. But anyone could commit an act of vandalism (including dirty tricksters on the Democrat’s side). Is the press following up about what, exactly, happened? Or are they complacently passing this story on to be used to propagate the violence meme?
After the Sparkman, Bedell and the Texas IRS-plane-crasher, I’ll take “B”.
Like A Brick: There was an alleged brick attack at a Democrat office in Cincinnati. Again – we have no idea who did it, or why; no note was attached, no threats received, no nothing.
So while it could be an angry tea partier, it could just as easily be a punk kid, a drunk or, for that matter, a Democrat activist. There is no evidence at all, either way.
———-
But this isn’t about individuals breaking laws; this is about the Democrat party using those acts, real, imagined, fabricated or instigated, to try to not only defame dissenters, but to give their own, increasingly embattled supporters the sort of “us against them” siege mentality that they’ll need to survive and keep the fire going during what promises to be an ugly electoral season.
I am forced to largely conclude that the Democrats are running to the nearest microphone in an effort to play the victim and generate sympathy as they try to steer poll numbers back in their direction.
I never bet m0ney; I don’t much believe in gambling. But I’ll bet bragging rights that nothing ever comes of any of these complaints.
Because they’re not intended to be “real”. They’re intended to set the majority party (for now) up as “victims” of a huge, benighted, ugly conspiracy that just happens to hate black people, doncha know.
And I’d have to hope this is wearing thin with the American people.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer is warning that some of his Democratic colleagues are being threatened with violence when they go back to their districts — and he wants Republicans to stand up and condemn the threats.
Hey, everyone; don’t threaten Congresspeople.
The Maryland Democrat said more than 10 House Democrats have reported incidents of threats or other forms of harassment about their support of the highly divisive health insurance overhaul vote.
Wow. If true, this sounds like a real huge wave of lunacy…
…oh, wait:
Hoyer emphasized that he didn’t have a specific number of threats and that was just an estimate.
Yeah, I’ll bet it is.
I’ll bet three more things:
That this announcement was planned at least a week ago.
That the number of “threats of violence” varies no more than 10-15% from normal.
That Mr. Hoyer will never release any details of any of these threats for public examination. Indeed, he can’t – because he doesn’t have any specifics. He’s passing off gossip to defame dissenters. Five’ll get you ten that there are no more serious, significant threats than normal during any contentious debate.
Expect much, much more of this between now an November.
And every time you see this, ask to see the specifics. When you’re at a Tea Party and see someone with a threatening or racist sign, snap a picture and post it on a blog.
New immigrants who once flocked to the large “gateway” cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Chicago are now heading for smaller metropolitan areas like Detroit and Minneapolis, Colorado Springs, Colo., Sarasota, Fla., and El Paso, Tex., according to the the study, released by the Lusk Center for Real Estate at the University of Southen California. The census data used for the study didn’t take into account respondents’ legal status.
“Every city in the US is getting a sizable immigration population,” said Gary Painter, director of research at the Lusk Center and co-author of the study, in a phone interview. “We are no longer a country where immigration is largely confined to just a few places.”
The study, in and of itself, is a bit of a political football – or at least, interpreting it seems to be:
The typical immigrant seen in these new places is likely to have been in the US fewer than 10 years, he says, whereas the typical immigrant in a larger city has likely been here much longer. The implication of this is that new immigrants probably have less English language skills, are less likely to be integrated, and are less likely to own a home.
“We found that the immigrant communities in these smaller metro areas are much less developed,” Mr. Painter said. “The questions we need to ask ourselves are ‘what sorts of policies do we want to pursue because of this?’ ”
Which, one might suspect, might be a result of them being newer immigrants.
And yes, the politicians are getting out their knives to carve out their respective bits of grievance:
“Given the negative attitudes towards immigrants, the incessant persecution by immigration agents, and the lack of jobs,” says Jorge-Mario Cabrera of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, “immigrants may believe that smaller cities offer all the right options: a place to live unnoticed, a somewhat welcoming environment, and less competition for lower-paying jobs.”
Still others question whether it’s too soon to draw too many conclusions because of the heated political climate, the recent downturn in the economy, and the coming 2010 census.
“This study is only looking at home ownership and may be overtaken by the next census,” says Karthick Ramakrishnan, who studies immigration patterns and demographics at the University of California, Riverside. “There are many variables that need to be examined because of the push and pull over immigrants – some declaring that they drag the economy down and others saying it props them up.”
The thing is, this isn’t really news. We reported on the demographic trend almost three years ago, here at SITD. Leaving aside the immigrants who come to America to escape crime, pettifoggery, warlordism and the rule of mens’ whims (wouldn’t moving to Chicago be redundant if you were from Sarajevo or Mogadishu?), immigrants aren’t stupid. Lower crime, more jobs and better taxes draw them as they do all the rest of us.
I first heard this during the Carter Administration. I first heard it seriously during the Clinton years. Jews, tired of the Democratic party’s one-sided approach to Israel, will eventually bolt from the Tics. Someday. Maybe. Honest.
I’m starting to think American Jews are to Israel the way American Catholics are to pro-life politics; the theoretical tie frays when you get down to specifics; “progressive” politics beats out the purported big issue.
But I suspect something is brewing. [The Tics’] kind of excessive and weirdly paternalistic attitude to the state of Israel, directed so clearly from the top, seems to come out of a kind of unexamined personal animus. The long record that Obama has of friendship with virulent enemies of Israel has not gone unnoticed.
Whatever the etiology, group love affairs with political parties cannot help but be self-destructive. They may begin in a burst of mutual admiration but they will almost always devolve into a self-desturctive “taking for granted” that could only work to the benefit of one party (if that). The love affair between African-Americans and the Democratic Party has been similarly useless for blacks. In the forty years I have lived in Los Angeles, I haven’t noticed life getting significantly better in South Central, a region of the city in which Republicans are about as scarce as killer whales.
Right. See also Detroit, DC, Philadelphia and Minneapolis.
This doesn’t mean I think Jews or blacks or anybody else should become Republicans. They should think for themselves and even change sides when it’s advantageous. For Jews, Obama’s behavior is indeed a “teaching moment.” The bizarre over-reaction to a minor incident in Israel should serve as a wake up call.
I say the odds are it’s all wishful thinking. But who knows?
I take occasional issue with my fellow AM1280 host Bradlee Dean on some questions political and theological, even as I support his program, “Sons of Liberty”. “Sons…” does for politics what his late, long-running show on AM980 The Believer did for religion; take it back to its original fundamentals; going back to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison on The Patriot more or less like referring to Luke and Saint Paul on The Believer.
Neither program is/was for the faint of heart or the mushy of belief. Like I said – I disagree with Dean on some things as strenuously as I agree with him on others.
But knowing Bradlee as I do – he’s a great guy, and I’ve had a lot of fun watching his kids grow up over the years during our mutual Saturday time slots – I got a kick out of Andy Birkey’s odd little swat at Dean in the Mindy yesterday (emphasis added):
You Can Run But You Cannot Hide, the front group for the punk rock ministry of Bradlee Dean…
Just between you (pl) and me, whatever Bradlee Dean is, he’s not especially reticent about who he is or what he or “You Can Run…” represents.
Back to Birkey:
… took his brand of fundamentalist Christianity to a DFL gubernatorial meet-and-greet several weeks ago…
Several weeks ago?
Then why cover it on a “news” site?
Did Birkey just hear about it? Or was it a slow news day at the Mindy?
Or did John Marty need to place a story showing how he was duking it out with all those teabagging fundies to make his gubernatorial campaign seem like less a relic from the nineties?
There was some other stuff, but I lost interest. Sorry.
Calling anyone to the right of Larry Pogemiller an “extremist” was a standard practice in Minnesota politics long before any non-poli-sci wonk ever heard of Saul Alinski. For generations, anyone in Minnesota who stood outside the great DFL-and-“moderate”-GOP, “marching-boldly-toward-the-future-hand-in-hand toward the collective vision of our betters” ideal was called an extremist (provided they were on the right. And of course, bits and pieces of it have leaked out in the national culture; the idea that Rush Limbaugh listeners were a “vast right-wing conspiracy” responsible for the bombing of the Murragh building was the moment it all got really serious – the first time the (wife of a) sitting president had ever tied a perfectly legitimate free speech activity to mass-murder and terrorism.
Since then, trying to link anything – Second Amendment ctivistm, critizing free trade agreements, being a hardliner on immigration, being a pro-lifer or an uppity Libertarian or a tax protester, whatever – gets one called an “extremist” first, with questions not asked later. Several non-profits – including the inexplicably-well-regarded Southern Poverty Law Center – make a cottage industry out of McCarthyizing all non-“progressive” thought by linking all of it to some form of fringe extremism or another.
It’s rubbish, of course.
But I figured – maybe it’s worth a look.
Maybe I am an extremist!
This is the first part of a seven-part series, coming out on alternate blogging days ’til it’s done.
At what point does society recognize that an elected leader’s public speech has crossed the line into the territory of sedition?
About two seconds before it crosses into “witchcraft”.
Oh, give me a break. It’s as serious as anything else in Bodell’s point.
Wikpedia’s definition:
{{facepalm}}
(Note: When someone leads off an “argument” with a dictionary definition of a word, they are insulting you. When they lead off the “argument” with a definition from Wikipedia, they are insulting themselves. And you).
I digress…
Sedition is a term of law which refers to overt conduct, such as speech and organization, that is deemed by the legal authority as tending toward insurrection against the established order. Sedition often includes subversion of a constitution and incitement of discontent (or resistance) to lawful authority. Sedition may include any commotion, though not aimed at direct and open violence against the laws. Seditious words in writing are seditious libel. A seditionist is one who engages in or promotes the interests of sedition.
The answer is simple, Joe. “Sedition” is a “crime” that gets trotted out to criminalize dissent, and bully people into compliance, acquiescence and silence.
For example, if I say “Keith Ellison is a brittle, vindictive little man who is more suited to teaching Grievance Studies at a community college than representing a great city like Minneapolis in Washington, and I urge you to vote against him”, and the “local authority” in Mr. Bodell’s Wikipedia reference (sknx) “deems” it to be rabble-rousing, and has perverted the laws to make “sedition” illegal, they could sic the goons on me.
Glad I could help.
Fortunately, our “local authority” is bound by the Constitution, whose First Amendment protects my right to have an opinion about Keith Ellison just as much as it does the right to make statues of the Virgin Mary out of dung, or Joe Bodell’s right to pass off McCarthyistic misapplications of archaic, authoritarian laws as “reasoning”.
Or Michele Bachmann’s right to get a crowd whipped up against Joe Bodell’s government:
Just this past weekend, Michele Bachmann spoke at a Tea Party rally in St. Paul, saying
“But mark my words, the American people aren’t gonna take this lying down,” Bachmann later said. “We aren’t gonna play their game, we’re not gonna pay their taxes. They want us to pay for this? Because we don’t have to. We don’t have to. We don’t have to follow a bill that isn’t law. That’s not the American way, and that’s not what we’re going to do.”
After which she told people to go into the woods with Grampa’s Garand and start shooting revenooers?
Well, no. The Representative was calling people to “resist” at the ballot box and at Tea Parties and Town Hall meetings (assuming we haven’t seen the last of them) and on the phones.
Which is still legal, by Joe Bodell’s leave.
An MPP reader happened to be in the neighborhood of that rally, and noted that there appeared to be many more Wisconsin license plates nearby than one normally sees in St. Paul.
(Huh? First – does Joe Bodell ever spend time in Saint Paul? Second – and I repeat; huh?)
Curious. In any case, I’m fairly certain that if Congress passes a bill…and the President signs it (despite those same Republicans playing footsie with the crazies who fervently believe him not to be a natural-born American citizen), the bill. becomes. law.
(And goodness knows one must not play footsie with people with bizarre fringe views, must one? Because having fringies and other lunatics show up at ones’ party sure destroys ones’ credibility, doesn’t it?)
Anyone care to disagree?
I’d raise my hand here, but I’m afraid Joe Bodell will call the State Patrol or something.
OK, Joe, it’s fairly simple. If a bill. becomes. law, I get to work to change it, in the Legislature, and/or by changing the legislature.
But if it walks like a duck and talks like a seditionist, at what point do we call the damned thing one thoroughly seditionist waterfowl?
It’s simple, Joe. You can call it “sedition”. You can even call together a group – call it the “Minnesota Anti-American Activities Project” hearings, if you’d like – and have them declare it anything you want. Call it sedition, or witchcraft for that matter. And the rest of us will do what Americans do whenever people do that kind of thing. Laugh at it, and maybe come up with a snappy term for trying to criminalize dissent. “Bodellism”, perhaps?
Nah.
It just seems like that invoking a term that was last used as an authoritarian and not-very-constitutional infringement on civil liberty in 1918 is something you do when you don’t have a very good factual argument.
After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.
…and thought “oh, great”.
Not that I don’t think some balance is in order. After having kids and stepkids in one school or another for the past twenty years, there’s no question that the public education system is biased to the left, especially in whatever pass for “humanities” in the public schools. History education in particular is a joke; I’ve spoken, exasperated, about this in the past; my kids have gone years where all they studies were slavery and civil rights. Important, sure. Episodes with big impact on many of the kids’ lives? Absolutely. The only things, practically, worth studying? Hardly.
And on the occasions where other parts of history and current events were studied? Yeah, pretty much “America last”; the few kids who are even exposed to the ideas of “liberalism” and “conservatism” seem, for some reason completely unknown to me – to come out of school with the idea that “conservatism is about the right to own slaves and the freedom to let old people freeze”. Nothing new there.
So the idea of “balance” seems, on the surface, to be an improvement.
The problem is, I don’t want either side – any side, really – writing the history books “favorably” to themselves. I’m not one of those people who ever thought teaching kids the dates and places and events was such a bad thing; tell kids what happened, and show them what other commentators – not textbook writers – have written about the events, and let them make up their own minds.
“But Mitch! Kids are stupid! They don’t have what it takes to process all that information!” So do you think they’re processing the pre-digested stuff that’s slanted one way or the other? Hell, most history teachers haven’t processed most of what history actually means.
The big question with this Texas fracas is “how good an idea is it for committees of politicians, most of them pretty ignorant themselves, to be determining what goes into textbooks and curricula?”
As a boy growing up in the Soviet Union, Sergey Brin witnessed the consequences of censorship. Now the Google Inc. co-founder is drawing on that experience in shaping the company’s showdown with the Chinese government.
The internet may be many things, for better or worse, but one would have to backtrack history to the invention of the printing press to find an innovation that has done more for the free flow of information, expression and commerce.
China will never threaten America’s dominance unless and until its people enjoy the same freedoms of speech and enterprise that Americans do.
Bill Sparkman was murdered by anti-government zealots spurred to a homicidal rage by Michele Bachmann and the Northern Alliance. Er, wait. Nope. My bad.
Then the guy who crashed a plane into the IRS office in Texas was a tea-bagging mouth-breathing conservative. Oops.
Then the guy who shot the Pentagon cops ended up being a Glenn-Beck-listening dittohead. D’oh. This isn’t going well at all.
A woman talking on a cell phone during a movie didn’t take kindly to being “shushed” by another moviegoer. Or at least her boyfriend didn’t.
In a drama that turned more lively than the one on screen — “Shutter Island” — the boyfriend allegedly attacked and stabbed the “shusher” in the neck with a meat thermometer. Sheriff’s spokesman Steve Whitmore said the stabbing occured Saturday during a screening of the Martin Scorsese film.
Remember – if we ban kitchen accessories, only criminals will have them:
The victim was attacked by the woman’s boyfriend and another man. Deputies say he was stabbed in the neck with a meat thermometer.
Fully one-quarter of the space on this year’s form is taken up with questions of race and ethnicity, which are clearly illegitimate and none of the government’s business (despite the New York Times‘ assurances to the contrary on today’s editorial page). So until we succeed in building the needed wall of separation between race and state, I have a proposal. Question 9 on the census form asks “What is Person 1’s race?” (and so on, for other members of the household). My initial impulse was simply to misidentify my race so as to throw a monkey wrench into the statistics; I had fun doing this on the personal-information form my college required every semester, where I was a Puerto Rican Muslim one semester, and a Samoan Buddhist the next. But lying in this constitutionally mandated process is wrong. Really — don’t do it.
I think I’ve done that. I also registered for Obama’s “Organizing for America” email blasts as “Beinrich Bimmler” (20 extra points for those who get the reference).
Krikorian actually has a better idea:
Instead, we should answer Question 9 by checking the last option — “Some other race” — and writing in “American.” It’s a truthful answer but at the same time is a way for ordinary citizens to express their rejection of unconstitutional racial classification schemes. In fact, “American” was the plurality ancestry selection for respondents to the 2000 census in four states and several hundred counties.
So remember: Question 9 — “Some other race” — “American”. Pass it on.
I was listening to MPR last night, and caught an episode of “MPR Presents” that reprised a speech by the honorable Cory Booker, mayor of Newark, New Jersey. Mayor Booker has apparently had good results running Newark, a city that is one of America’s longest-running punchlines due to its blight, violence, corruption, incompetence, and history of crime both organized and random.
Booker is a Democrat, Afro-American, and in many ways from the same model as President Obama; from upper-middle-class roots (his parents were IBM executives), and a former “community organizer” (spending a few years living in one of Newark’s projects, and several months in a motor home which he’d park at drug-traffic-prone intersections around the city).
Unlike Obama, he’s actually had some substantial effect on his city. Crime has fallen under his administration, and after hiking taxes in the first year of his term, he’s held the line on budgets and spending since then. He’s far from the most profligate liberal in New Jersey public life; like Barack Obama, he was elected to his biggest office to date in 2006; one might be forgiven for wishing that if the Democrats had to pick a not-overly-experienced candidate for pure camera value, they’d picked Booker instead of Obama. This is, by the way, a statement against interest for me; he’s a liberal. But one should give credit where it’s due, while working to do better still (and noting that it was a Republican, Brett Schundler, who first showed that a corrupt Jersey cesspool could have potential, in Jersey City in the nineties).
Booker’s also a highly edumacated person, for those of you for whom paper credentials obtained before age 27 are important; Booker has bachelor and masters from Stanford (where he became pals with liberal shrieking head Rachel Maddow), a Rhodes Scholarship to Queens College at Oxford, and a JD from Yale. He was also an all-Pac 10 football player at Stanford.
And as I listened to him speak, I was reminded of the great media meme from eight years ago, when waves of America’s pseudo-intelligent tittered like snarky eighth-grade girls when George W. Bush pronounced the word “Nuclear” “NOO-kyu-lar”. This, the born-again mean girls declared, was a sure sign of stupidity.
Anyway – I listened, interested, as Booker, the highly-educated, very accomplished mayor of one of America’s most intransigently-difficult cities, spoke about a meeting with Colin Powell. Booker asked Powell what was the greatest threat facing America. Was it terrorism? Poverty? Income imbalance? Was it…
“NOO-kyu-lar proliferation?”
Wow. I guess he’s really not only an idiot, but white trash to boot.
Obama took up the issue privately with his staff Monday in a bid to advance a bill through Congress before lawmakers become too distracted by approaching midterm elections…
If anyone can deliver immigration reform to America, it’s an “assertive” president with a 45 percent approval rating who’s lost three big state elections in a row.
But this isn’t about giving green cards to illegals:
The wild card is the GOP. Obama obviously wants to use this as wedge issue, to try to cut the Dems’ losses in November by reminding Latino voters that Republicans are “nativists” or whatever.
It’s an attempt at a wedge and a distraction; Obama believes he can count on a thick film of GOP sovereignty activists to put a crack in the party’s opposition, and get the Tea Party – whose members are largely anti-illegal-immigration, but it’s not the Parties’ focus by any means – to divert its attention.
So will Obama’s fragile, panicky cohort of Blue Dogs stay the curse?
Signs emerged that Bedell harbored ill feelings toward the government and the armed forces, and had questioned the circumstances behind the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
In an Internet posting, a user by the name JPatrickBedell wrote that he was “determined to see that justice is served” in the death of Marine Col. James Sabow, who was found dead in the backyard of his California home in 1991. The death was ruled a suicide but the case has long been the source of theories of a cover up…The user named JPatrickBedell wrote the Sabow case was “a step toward establishing the truth of events such as the September 11 demolitions.”
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Dusty Trice, the City Pages and the Southern Poverty Law Center, it’s that even the most tenuous intellectual synchronicity is evidence of a shadowy undercurrent of hatred.
(Ever since I learned the technique of holding people responsible for things people who seem tangentially like them also happen to say, I find that I’m relieved of the usual burden of being responsible and accountable).
UPDATE: Of course the leftyblog hamsters tried to tie Bedell to the Tea Parties.
It has become pretty clearpretty quickly that Bedell sufferred from Bush Derangement Syndrome, and was a 9/11 Truther, just like 35% of Democrats as of May 2007.
So we’ve got Bill Sparkmann, Major Hasan, John Bedell, the guy who crashed his plane into the IRS office – all of them who were seemingly driven to horrendous (and/or self-immolating) acts by the rhetoric of the left…
Why, if I were a leftyblogger and the parties were reversed, I might be tempted to call it a “climate of hatred…”
A 45-year-old woman, charged with ending a domestic dispute by killing her 26-year-old husband of five days, is a registered lobbyist for a group fighting domestic violence.
Arelisha Bridges was ordered held without bond in the Fulton County Jail. She is scheduled for a preliminary hearing later this month on charges of felony murder, murder, aggravated assault and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony.
Officials said Bridges claimed she was unemployed. But records show she is a lobbyist for an organization called the National Declaration for Domestic Violence Order; its Web site says the group is pushing legislation to create a database of those convicted of sex crimes or domestic abuse.
Usually an accused felon will appear at a preliminary hearing a day later, but Bridges’ hearing was within hours of the shooting death of Anthony Rankins. Officials said the court appearance was moved up because of the unusual circumstances around the crime.
Witnesses told police that Bridges was wearing a nightgown and a shower cap as she argued with Rankins on the sidewalk on North Avenue near West Peachtree Street around 10:45 p.m. Monday.
And moments later, witnesses said, they heard shots. They said she then “calmly walked away.”
A MARTA police officer stopped her as she was getting into her car, perhaps to return to her home nearby on Centennial Olympic Park Drive.
According to Atlanta police, Bridges told investigators that she and Rankins had been dating for a few months and were just married on Feb. 24.
Reid, speaking in the midst of a Senate debate over whether to pass a $15 billion package meant to spur job creation, appeared to argue that joblessness would lead to more domestic violence.
“I met with some people while I was home dealing with domestic abuse. It has gotten out of hand,” Reid said on the Senate floor. “Why? Men don’t have jobs.”
Men, you see, are slaves to their base urges. Harry say man no have job, man hit:
Reid said that the effects of joblessness on domestic violence were especially pronounced among men, because, Reid said, women tend to be less abusive.
“Women don’t have jobs either, but women aren’t abusive, most of the time,” he said.
Well, that’s not really true, but Reid’s gotta answer to his political masters, and it’s a little off-topic anyway.
“Men, when they’re out of work, tend to become abusive,” the majority leader added. “Our domestic crisis shelters in Nevada are jammed.”
Hear that, all you guys in Nevada? If Big Brother doesn’t keep you amused and occupied, you just can’t help taking it out on those around you. Your little male peabrain can’t handle the tough times.
Here’s hoping the voters of Nevada send Reid home to pummel his wife to sit in a support group for potentially violent out-of-work Democrats soon.
Andrew Coulson at Cato writes about his appearance on John Stossel’s special on problems with public education:
Tomorrow night at 8:00pm, Fox Business News will air a John Stossel special on the failures of state-run schooling and the merits of parental choice and competition in education. I make an appearance, as do Jeanne Allen and James Tooley.
Now, here’s the part that grabbed my attention:
News of the show is already making the rounds, and over at DemocraticUnderground.com, one poster is very upset about it, writing:
When will these TRAITORS stop trying to ruin this country?
HOW can AMERICANS be AGAINST public education?
Stossel is throwing out every right-wing argument possible in his namby pamby singsong way while he “interviews” a “panel” of people (who I suspect are plants) saying things like preschool is a waste of money and why invest in an already-failing system….
I hate Stossel and I hate all of those who think the way he does.
Now, the DU poster’s rhetoric is (what a shock) a little lot over the top. But it’s not a whole lot different from the “if you’re not with the current public education system, exactly as it is (except a lot more money) then you’re against the children!” meme from the likes of MN2020, which ends up being something like “school choice is fine, unless it questions the current teachers union, adminstrative establishment and educational academy in any way, in which case it’s the same as sending six year olds directly to a homeless shelter”.
Coulson gets this:
What this poster–and many good people on the American left–have yet to grasp is that critics of state monopoly schooling are NOT against public education. On the contrary, it is our commitment to the ideals of public education that compels us to pursue them by the most effective means possible, and to abandon the system that has proven itself, over many many generations, incapable of fulfilling them.
Or to paraphrase that great sage Linda Richman; “What if public education doesn’t educate the public? Discuss amongst yourselves”.
