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.\u00a0 We’d spent the first hour talknig with – and beating on – a noted Holocaust denier.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It’s\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 Holocaust Denial is another one – or so I found out that night.\u00a0 It’d been a very busy hour; while I never had to beg for callers on my old graveyard-shift show\u00a0– 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Now, that’s <\/em>brisk, baby.<\/p>\n And it carried on into the second hour.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 And he said “We’re coming for you, Jew -boy.\u00a0 You can run but you can’t hide”.<\/p>\n I mentioned that I was about as Jewish as a bacon cheeseburger, and that he needed to take his meds as I hung up.<\/p>\n The lesson for the evening?<\/p>\n It’s obvious:\u00a0 Jews and Democrats are violence-prone!<\/p>\n ———-<\/p>\n Well, no.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Congresspeople?\u00a0 Sure, they know it.<\/p>\n ———-<\/p>\n It’s tiresome – and\u00a0more 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…”.<\/p>\n Doyy. No kidding?\u00a0<\/p>\n Tiresome and insulting.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n It’s\u00a0several stories, really.\u00a0+<\/p>\n It’s A Loogie World: <\/strong>\u00a0“Tea Partiers” ostensibly “spit” on Democrat congresspeople as they walked across the Mall.\u00a0<\/p>\n Except it’s looking pretty doubtfu<\/a>l that it actually happened (around 1:20 of the video in the link):<\/p>\n Jim Treacher:<\/p>\n I can\u2019t 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\u2019t just shut up and pay his taxes. But it\u2019s not like somebody hocked a loogie in Cleaver\u2019s face.<\/p>\n I know, I know. It doesn\u2019t matter anyway because the Tea Parties are racist. I\u2019m just providing\u2026 what\u2019s it called? Oh yeah: Evidence.<\/p>\n Cleaver declined to press charges over this, which is a good thing because no arrests were made that day<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n No arrests?\u00a0 Why, spitting is both assault and, most\u00a0 likely, a hate crime.\u00a0 If it happened.<\/p>\n The “T” Word: <\/strong>“Tea Partiers” – plural – purportedly screamed the “N”-word at civil rights movement veteran, Rep. John Lewis.\u00a0 Except, again, there’s no evidence that it actually happened<\/a>:<\/p>\n 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.
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\nLewis, 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.<\/p>\n