Why can't the MSM admit RW terrorism exists?

[KingOrfeo]

The fact is I just blew your ass out of the saddle. Admit it.

No, the fact is that you raised a completely irrelevant diversionary non sequitur (since you were responding to the observation that there has been no deadly LW violence in America since 09/11/01), and even that point turned out to be not quite what you thought it was.

However, it is also true that in the last period of significant political violence in America, the '60s and early '70s, there was actually rather more violence on-the-ground committed by RWs than LWs (counting black race-rioters as neither; they were simply mad and fed up). You can read all about it in Nixonland, by Rick Perlstein.

Nowadays, of course, the Weathermen and the Symbionese Liberation Army are ghosts from another time, and LW violence in America consists mainly of spiking trees and smashing windows.

For now.

 

[IrezumiKiss]

The fact is I just blew your ass

Ewwww.

Dude, I'm eating lunch here, c'mon.

 

[RobDownSouth]

Grampa Kiddiefucker is redefining words to fit his preconceived political bias...
The cowardly Vetteman is lost in the scary 1960s once again...

Just another day on the General Board.
:nods:

 

[cjh]

Ewwww.

Dude, I'm eating lunch here, c'mon.

He's the self-proclaimed Lib Tosser. Remember?

 

[Boxlicker101]

And that's bullshit. In 1865, Democrat != lefty (the Pubs were much the leftier party back then; Lincoln appointed Marxists to high offices and generalships); in all times and places, proslavery != lefty.

Even if you just start with Oswald, the results are the same.

 

[julybaby04]

Most shooting sprees are not acts of terrorism. I believe the Las Vegas killings were not, nor were most of the school shootings. They were probably just people seeking notoriety.

I have wondered, in this day of instant fame, how many people choose this direction, even if the fame is for doing bad things, just to make a statement or something with their lives.

 

[eyer]

And then there's the reporting that the woman opened-up on the cops first, killed the person at Walmart, and then shot her husband dead before shooting herself.

And, to think...

...there are some that badmouth the infamous War on Women.

 

[gotsnowgotslush]

"Then, in November 1972, Nixon, harvesting the bitterness and resentment born of America's turmoil, was reelected in a landslide even bigger than Johnson's 1964 victory, not only setting the stage for his dramatic 1974 resignation but defining the terms of the ideological divide that characterizes America today."

gsgs comment- What I saw, was younglings fighting against injustice. What I saw with my own eyes, was younglings suffering at the hands of police.

(The fabric of lies was being knitted together by liars, while younglings wanted to see the truth. What is there to fear, from the truth ?)

 

[Busybody]

ATTN KNEE GROWZ

AXE not what CNN doesn't call a CRIMINAL a terrorist

AXE why, NIGGER HO! doesn't call ISLAMIC TERRORISTS......Terrorists

 

[Lorilei]

"Then, in November 1972, Nixon, harvesting the bitterness and resentment born of America's turmoil, was reelected in a landslide even bigger than Johnson's 1964 victory, not only setting the stage for his dramatic 1974 resignation but defining the terms of the ideological divide that characterizes America today."

gsgs comment- What I saw, was younglings fighting against injustice. What I saw with my own eyes, was younglings suffering at the hands of police.

(The fabric of lies was being knitted together by liars, while younglings wanted to see the truth. What is there to fear, from the truth ?)

Plenty, if you're the ones behind the lies.

 

[richard_daily]

The fact is I just blew your ass out of the saddle. Admit it.

So you want to blow him... not that this is shocking.

 

[IrezumiKiss]

And then there's the reporting that the woman opened-up on the cops first, killed the person at Walmart, and then shot her husband dead before shooting herself.

And, to think...

...there are some that badmouth the infamous War on Women.

Which has fvck-all to do with the actual and not rhetorical War On Women...

...but you already knew that.



Didja see how I spelled "fuck" especially for you, Eyer? Didja? Didja?

 

[Boxlicker101]

"Then, in November 1972, Nixon, harvesting the bitterness and resentment born of America's turmoil, was reelected in a landslide even bigger than Johnson's 1964 victory, not only setting the stage for his dramatic 1974 resignation but defining the terms of the ideological divide that characterizes America today."

gsgs comment- What I saw, was younglings fighting against injustice. What I saw with my own eyes, was younglings suffering at the hands of police.

(The fabric of lies was being knitted together by liars, while younglings wanted to see the truth. What is there to fear, from the truth ?)

It wasn't a matter of Nixon being favored as much as it was a matter of McGovern being seen as an extremist. Goldwater lost in a landslide to LBJ for the same reason. I have always believed that most elections are a matter of people voting against the major candidate they see as the worse. There are exceptions but the presidential elections in 1964 and 1972 are not among them. Personally, I saw Nixon-McGovern as the choice between a crook and a lunatic.

 

[Mr Noone]

YAWN!


Left Wing Assassins
Reprinted with permission from: ModernConservative.com


Guns don't kill presidents, Democrats do.


Politically motivated presidential assassinations come from only one side of the political spectrum.

By Christopher Cook


Sara Jane Moore, who attempted to assassinate President Ford, has been released from prison.


The caption under her photo reads...

"Sara Jane Moore, shown here in a photo from 1975, said she was blinded by her radical political views at the time, convinced that the government had declared war on the left."

We have been pointing out for a long time that political violence is part of the left's stock and trade, and that political violence perpetrated by Republicans is almost non-existent.**

With that in mind, the news of Sara Jane Moore's release—and a recognition of her motive and political identity—got me to thinking. Of our list of presidential assassins and would-be assassins, what were their political persuasions and motivations?


In the interests of time, I have chosen to use Wikipedia as my first source. Wikipedia has a few problems with both bias and reliability, but if you know how to navigate and use their list of citiations, you can usually get relatively decent information.

So let's just proceed down the list together. I am doing this as I write, so I do not know what the final results will be. Let's get started.


Assassinations:

President: Abraham Lincoln (R)
Assassin: John Wilkes Booth
Political identity and motive:
Booth was a Democrat, angry that Lincoln had freed the slaves and preserved the Union.



President: James A. Garfield (R)
Assassin: Charles J. Guiteau
Political identity and motive:
Guiteau was frustrated that he did not receive a political appointment in the Garfield administration, and he believed "that God had commanded him to kill the ungrateful President." Since we can assume that God did not, in fact, command him in this way, we must deem Guiteau mentally unstable.


President: William McKinley (R)
Assassin: Leon Czolgosz
Political identity and motive:
Czolgosz was an anarchist who believed that "there was a great injustice in American society, an inequality which allowed the wealthy to enrich themselves by exploiting the poor," and that he had to do something about it. Mimicking the assassination of King Umberto I of Italy, done for similar reasons, he shot and killed McKinley. Oddly, Czolgosz had earlier voted Republican, but the assassination motive was clearly as described above.


President: John F. Kennedy (D)
Assassin: Lee Harvey Oswald
Political identity and motive:
Defector to the USSR. Earlier attempted to kill General Edwin Walker, who was "an outspoken anti-communist, segregationist and member of the John Birch Society." Controversy about the assassination continues to persist, and Oswald was killed before any real digging could be done, so we are primarily left with his identity (as a defector to the USSR) as the prime indicator.



Attempts:

President: Andrew Jackson (D)
Would-be assassin: Richard Lawrence
Political identity and motive:
Lawrence was mentally ill, suffering from polymorphous delusions.


President: Theodore Roosevelt (R and Bull Moose)
Would-be assassin: John F. Schrank
Political identity and motive:
Schrank was mentally ill; he claimed "that it was the ghost of William McKinley that told him to perform the act."


President: Franklin D. Roosevelt (D)
Would-be assassin: Giuseppe Zangara
Political identity and motive:
"In the Dade County Courthouse jail, Zangara confessed and stated: 'I have the gun in my hand. I kill kings and presidents first and next all capitalists.'" From Zangara's own words, much can be taken. However, he may also have been mentally ill. (Perhaps anyone who wants to kill a president is a touch deranged.)



President: Harry S Truman (D)
Would-be assassin: Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola
Political identity and motive:
Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola were members of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party. Puerto Rican Nationalists, represented by Marxist terrorist groups such as FALN, who were responsible for scores of bombings in the U.S.; they were arguably the most active terrorist group in U.S. history. (Interesting side notes: President Carter freed Collazo in 1979, and President Clinton pardoned several FALN terrorists. Il n'y a aucun ennemi du cote gauche?)


President: John F. Kennedy (D)
Would-be assassin: Richard Paul Pavlick
Political identity and motive:
Pavlick was anti-Catholic, and he was also upset by "the close 1960 U.S. Presidential election, in which Kennedy had defeated Republican Richard Nixon by 118,000 votes." However, "Judge Emmet C. Choate ruled that Pavlick was unable to distinguish between right and wrong in his actions." He was kept in a mental hospital for three years. Will this be the closest we get....?


President: Richard M. Nixon (R)
Would-be assassin: Arthur Bremer
Political identity and motive:
Bremer is an interesting case, one that would require more research than we're doing in this admittedly surface analysis. He hated Nixon, but apparently, he also hated segregation and bigotry, and he did shoot Democratic candidate George Wallace. He also clearly had mental instability. Why did he hate Nixon, and also Wallace? He stated "It is my personal plan to assassinate by pistol either Richard Nixon or George Wallace," and that his purpose was "to do SOMETHING BOLD AND DRAMATIC, FORCEFUL & DYNAMIC, A STATEMENT of my manhood for the world to see." These are deep waters, and we'll have to give this one a pass for now.


President: Richard M. Nixon (R)
Would-be assassin: Samuel Byck
Political identity and motive:
Byck "began to harbor the belief that the government was conspiring to oppress the poor." He attempted to join the Black Panthers. However, he was also "diagnosed with manic depression, a mental disorder characterized by both depressive 'lows' and (less frequently) manic or euphoric 'highs.'" He had left-wing motives, but he was also mentally unstable.



President: Gerald R. Ford (R)
Would-be assassin: Lynette Fromme
Political identity and motive:
Insane member of the insane Manson Family.



President: Gerald R. Ford (R)
Would-be assassin: Sara Jane Moore
Political identity and motive:
Revolutionary leftist political activist.


President: James E. Carter (D)
Would-be assassin: Raymond Lee Harvey
Political identity and motive:
Harvey was possibly mentally ill, but also, charges were dismissed for lack of evidence. This one doesn't count.


President: Ronald Reagan (R)
Would-be assassin: John Hinckley, Jr.
Political identity and motive:
Mentally ill, no apparent political motive (despite some absurd references to his connections to the Bush family).


President: George H.W. Bush (R)
Would-be assassin: Operation of sixteen men working for Saddam Hussein's Iraq
Political identity and motive:
Geopolitical attack/act of war.


President: Bill Clinton (D)
Would-be assassin: Francisco Martin Duran
Political identity and motive:
From Wikipedia:
"Duran pleaded not guilty and mounted an insanity defense, claiming that he was trying to save the world by destroying an alien 'mist,' connected by an umbilical cord to an alien in the Colorado mountains. He also claimed to be incited by conservative talk show host Chuck Baker, who spoke on air about 'armed revolution' and 'cleansing' of the government.

In both cases, these are claims made by Duran. We would need more external information to make a judgment.


President: George W. Bush (R)
Would-be assassin: Vladimir Arutyunian
Political identity and motive:
Georgian national who threw a grenade towards President Bush. Not quite sure yet what his motivation was. Pass for now.

Totals:

Clearly mentally ill (5)


Guiteau
Lawrence
Schrank
Fromme
Hinckley, Jr.


Anti-catholic (and possible Republican) motivation, coupled with mental illness (1):

Pavlick


Left-wing motivations, coupled with mental illness (1):

Byck


Unclear/more info required/weak evidence--pass (4):

Bremer
Harvey
Duran
Arutyunian


Left-leaning political motivation (7):

Booth
Czolgosz
Oswald
Zangara
Collazo
Torresola
Moore


Remove the people who are clearly mentally ill, to leave the people who had a political motivation. That gives us an eight (left) to one (right) ratio of political motivations behind presidential assassinations and attempts.

To be fair to the two among that number who also suffered from some mental illness, one from the left and one from the right, we can remove both of them from the figures.


That leaves us with the following:


Of the successful and attempted assassinations of U.S. presidents where there was a political motivation and no blatant mental illness, the political motivation behind the act was left-leaning 100% of the time.

We will grant that this is a somewhat surface analysis, and that detailed research and nuanced analysis may produce slightly different results. But still, don't you find the conclusion of even this surface analysis somewhat striking? It's 100%, after all.


Are you surprised by this result? I'm not. I did not know exactly what the results would be when I began, but knowing the left as I do, I knew it would lean in this direction. That it turned out to be (essentially) 100% is also not a surprise, though it does serve further to reinforce this grim understanding.


You will know them by their fruits.



**This may appear at first glance to be an unequal comparison—the "left" vs. "Republicans." It is not, for you must understand that Democrats are well represented among the left's perpetrators of violence, both historically and in the present day. It's not just a fringe phenomenon. Mainstream people are among the perps. Congressmen. Union members. It's a very old tradition for the Democrats, going all the way back to the terrorist wing of their party, the KKK. But it's also occurring today, in modern times, as you can read here, here, and here. And, if you would like a far more detailed exploration, read the impassioned article I wrote when I first began to really discover this phenomenon: Democrats are more violent. In fact, there's no comparison.

Democrats have hated and been violent towards Republicans since Pennsylvania went for Lincoln, and there's no sign of it abating any time soon.

http://www.tobytoons.com/td/left-wing-assassins.html


Oh, and let's not forget the FALN leftists who invaded and shot up the House of Representatives in 50s. You know, the ones pardoned by Clinton.

You're really claiming John Wilkes Boothe as a leftist?

I hope you're not allowed to drive.

 

[Busybody]

You KNEE GROWZ argue about BS like why CNN doesn't call some WHITE criminals TERRORISTS

and AL Q is taking over OIL RICH Iraq and Libya (thx to Serengeti Soetoro) and parts of Syria

THAT IS A HUGE DEAL

I know

BIG BIRD and BINDERS!

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

From AlterNet:

AlterNet / By CJ Werleman

Why Is Network Television So Afraid of Admitting That Many of America's Terror Attacks Are 'Right Wing?'

CNN has been afraid calling a major social threat by its real name.

June 9, 2014 | In the aftermath of the deadly Las Vegas shooting rampage, which left two police officers, a shopper, and the shooters dead, one can expect all the usual talking points that follow an all too regular and familiar massacre – mental health, access to guns, the killer’s motives, and so forth. But here’s another one: the intellectual cowardice of cable news giant CNN, when it comes to reporting right wing terrorism.

The facts and back story to Sunday’s carnage are pretty well known and have been widely reported by a multitude of online and offline news outlets.

A married couple, Jared and Amanda Miller, walked into CiCi’s Pizza, shouted, “This is a revolution,” and then shot police officers Alyn Beck and Igor Soldo as the two ate lunch. They then ran across an adjacent parking lot to a Walmart store, where they shot a woman before retreating to the back of the store, where the woman fatally shot her husband before killing herself.

What is also known is that the suspects stripped the dead officers of their weapons and ammunition, before covering their bodies with the Revolutionary War-era Gadsden flag, which depicts a coiled snake and the words “Don’t Tread on Me” – a flag that is informally adopted by the Republican Tea Party.

When the Millers left their home to embark on their cowardly ambush, they delivered an ominous message to their neighbor Kelly Fielder. “"We gotta do what we gotta do," Jerad Miller told her, adding that he and his wife, Amanda, were departing for an "underground world."

Fielder told NBC News that she had heard the husband make anti-government statements in the past — including a desire to overthrow the government and President Obama and kill police officers — but was not alarmed by them.

It takes no degree of sophisticated insightfulness to conclude the obvious: that the Millers are right wing extremists, identifying with Tea Party anti-government views, coupled with a severe case of Obama Derangement Syndrome. It’s also reported that the Millers were among those in attendance at the Cliven Bundy ranch, when right wing extremists, egged on by Fox News, pointed assault rifles at U.S. federal agents.

But don’t expect CNN to include the prefix “right wing” to the use of the word extremism or terrorism, for their, and the mainstream media’s, fear of the right wing hysteria machine is ever present and always palpable. In fact, CNN refused to identify the Tea Party flag. Dan Simon of CNN went so far as to avoid the far right’s wrath that he said the killers “left behind some type of flag with some kind of insignia.” The cable network’s 24/7 ticker feed reads, “Killers had extremist views.”

No, CNN, the killers had RIGHT WING extremist views. That is established and clearly evident. Wolf Blitzer asked a guest, “What kind of anti-government groups are associated with this type of extremism?” Again, that much is obvious. The right-wing of today’s Republican Party is in itself an anti-government group, and has been ever since Goldwater Republicans became the loudest voice in the GOP’s shrinking tent, culminating with Reagan’s, “Government is not part of the solution. Government is the problem.”

In the first 36 hours since the shooting, CNN has used the following words and terms to discuss the shooting: “extremism,” “extremist domestic groups,” “radical groups,” anti-government groups and individuals,” but not once has the term “right wing” or any mention of the Tea Party been uttered.

Regardless, CNN’s cowardice hasn’t stopped the right wing moving into a defensive or preemptive crouch, with conservative columnist Horace Cooper claiming on the same day of the shooting that far-right violence is a “complete and total bogeyman,” and is “an attempt to marginalize opponents of the Obama administration.”

From the recent shooting of an airport police officer at LAX to last month’s shooting at the Jewish Community Center in Kansas City, and to the murders at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, right wing terrorism is now the new normal, and it’s a safe assumption that tragic, indiscriminate acts of violence, of this ilk, will become increasingly prevalent as white minority politics becomes increasingly shill at the same time demographics run counter to the politics of the far right. In other words, these “well armed militiamen,” so lovingly embraced by everyone from Sarah Palin to Rand Paul, will feel their cause has become inversely desperate.

Here’s an interesting and sobering fact: that when it comes to domestic terrorism, you are far more likely to be murdered by a far Right-wing American than a Muslim American, but the term “terrorist” remains reserved exclusively for acts of political violence carried out by Muslims.

Violence carried out by far Right groups or individuals, which have racism as a central component of their ideology, is of similar magnitude to that of Jihadist violence. In the years 1990 to 2010, there were 145 acts of political violence committed by the American far Right, resulting in 348 deaths. By comparison, 20 Americans were killed over the same period in acts of political violence carried out by Muslim-American civilians.

“Both categories of violence represent threats to democratic values from fellow citizens. Whereas the former uses violence to foment a change in the ethnic makeup of Western countries or to defend racial supremacy, the latter uses violence to try to intimidate Western governments into changing foreign policies. Ultimately, to be more concerned about one domestic threat of violence rather than the other implies governments and mainstream journalists consider foreign policies more sacrosanct than the security of minority citizens,” writes Arun Kundani, adjunct professor at New York University and author of The Muslims Are Coming: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the War on Terror.

It has now been 13 years since al Qaeda and its associated forces have carried out a successful attack inside the United States. National security analyst and global terror expert Peter Bergen asks, “Given this, it becomes harder to explain, in terms of American national security, why violence by homegrown right-wing extremists receives substantially less attention than does violence by homegrown jihadist militants?”

The Southern Poverty Law Center calculates there are 939 far right-wing hate groups across the country today, including neo-Nazis, Klansmen, white nationalists, neo-Confederates, racist skinheads, border vigilantes and others.

“Since 2000, the number of hate groups has increased by 56 percent. This surge has been fueled by anger and fear over the nation’s ailing economy, an influx of non-white immigrants, and the diminishing white majority, as symbolized by the election of the nation’s first African-American president…. The number of Patriot groups, including armed militias, skyrocketed following the election of President Obama in 2008 – rising 813 percent, from 149 groups in 2008 to an all-time high of 1,360 in 2012. The number fell to 1,096 in 2013,” the SPLC calculates.

Terrorism is a display of weakness. Terrorism is a tactic used by a much weaker combatant. It represents an inequitable power dynamic. With that in mind, it’s a terrifying prospect to run this violent trend to its natural conclusion, given the closed circuit loop of the right wing media, and the desperation that will follow future likely electoral defeats at the presidential level.

America, meet the Millers.

They ignore ELF too...

 

[about_average]

Individual criminals can't really impose an agenda; that's the job of armies. By that standard, the 9/11 hijackers weren't terrorists either, since they didn't impose anything at all.

Terrorists aren't trying to "impose" and agenda. They are trying to get, typically, a government to change what they are doing by making people afraid (creating terror) who will then force change.
The 9-11 terrorists were part of a larger movement working towards that.

I ask again, what was the larger program that these two shooters were working on? Who were they trying to terrorize? Why are these 3 shootings any more terrifying than any other random anonymous killing. Is there a large number of people who're afraid to go to restaurants or walmart now?

 

[RobDownSouth]

They ignore ELF too...

Rumor has it that the first complete sentence ever uttered by the Chief was "The other side does it tooooooooooooo, Mom!"

 

[richard_daily]

You're really claiming John Wilkes Boothe as a leftist?

I hope you're not allowed to drive.

His sons don't care enough about him to take his keys away.

 

[dan_c00000]

Vette is fucking pathetic and so is that Christopher Cook person who "wrote" (copy and pasted from Wikipedia) that article. I mean look at the first fucking comment!

to bad you left out that the Democrats and the Republicans where reversed in their political views in the 1960's...So the facts are the conservatives...I.E. Republican view point, are the 8 to the Liberal..I.E. Democrat point of view, which is 1. Except the one was when republicans and the democrats had change views....SO that makes it REPUBLICANS 9 Democrats 0!!

Poor vette I bet he thought he was so clever.

 

[KingOrfeo]

It wasn't a matter of Nixon being favored as much as it was a matter of McGovern being seen as an extremist.

Which he was not, of course, though he had some campaigning for him.

 

[Boxlicker101]

Which he was not, of course, though he had some campaigning for him.

If you consider neither McGovern nor Obama to be extremists, then who is?

 

[KingOrfeo]

From Salon:

Friday, Jun 13, 2014 11:09 AM EDT

Right-wing anger turned deadly: What Jerad Miller mess was really about

Conservatives now trying to claim that the Vegas shooters were somehow lefty radicals. Here's why that's laughable

Heather Digby Parton

If there’s one thing you’d think we could all agree on, it’d be that a crazed gun nut who moved to Nevada to join the stand-off at Bundy ranch and wrote screeds on the internet blaming the government for every problem in his life could be identified as a man of the right. But according to Cliff Kincaid of the right-wing dinosaur media watchdog, the ironically named Accuracy in Media, the Las Vegas shooters, Jerad Miller and his wife Amanda were somehow left-wing radicals who shot police officers as some sort of a protest against marijuana prohibition.

Kincaid’s piece is in response to an article by Jon Avlon in the Daily Beast in which Avlon lays out all the ways in which the Millers were influenced by far right militia and white supremacy rhetoric. The list is substantial. But Kincaid notices something amiss. You see, Avlon fails to note that Miller was a pot smoker who was also angry at the government for jailing him on drug charges. And that’s true, at least in part. Miller’s hatred for government was informed by his brush with the law on drug charges. But Kincaid the fails to note that what seemed to really bother him about that was the fact that his felony conviction made it impossible for him to legally own guns.

But let’s examine the rhetoric he used to convey his “philosophy” (if you could call it that):

I will be supporting Clive Bundy and his family from Federal Government slaughter. This is the next Waco! His ranch is under siege right now! The federal gov is stealing his cattle! Arresting his family and beating on them! We must do something, I will be doing something.

If Bundy and his pals in the militia were out there in the Nevada desert fighting off the BLM over marijuana, it’s quite a scoop. Those are all the usual right wing talking points about the stand-off. In the LA Times, Amanda Miller’s father characterized Miller by saying “he was was into all this Patriot Nation and conspiracy theory stuff” which is not normally how one would describe marijuana legalization activism.

Kincaid homes in on Miller’s affinity for Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist, who also, as it happens, rails against the drug war. In Kincaid’s mind that closes the case, however he seems not to know that Alex Jones calls himself a libertarian and a conservative whose anti-government beliefs are so extreme that he believes both 9/11 and Oklahoma City are government conspiracies as was the Newtown massacre. His most famous public appearance was on CNN in defense of gun rights:

“I’m here to tell you, 1776 will commence again if you try to take our firearms! Doesn’t matter how many lemmings you get out there on the street, begging for ‘em to have their guns taken. We will not relinquish them. Do you understand?! That’s why you’re going to fail, and the establishment knows, no matter how much propaganda, the republic will rise again!”

So yes, it’s possible that the combination of far right rhetoric along with a libertarian desire to end the drug war attracted Miller to Jones, but it’s pretty clear that it was the guns that bound them to each other most strongly.

Kincaid proves, if nothing else has, that he is seriously out of touch with his own movement:

The paper said that Garry Frick, the owner of a bookstore, got caught in a short but dramatic debate with Jerad Miller, in which the pothead “covered everything from Bundy to the Declaration of Independence to the morality of pornography, guns and drugs in a span of less than 15 minutes. He kept misquoting things and incorrectly using words, Frick said, all the while sounding very sure of himself.”

It sounds like marijuana took its psychological toll on him.

If “misquoting things and incorrectly using words all the while sounding very sure of himself” is a sign of marijuana induced psychological problems, the entire right wing of this country is a very dedicated bunch of potheads.

The fact is that marijuana is actually known to have a sedative effect and calm violent tendencies rather than exacerbate them. A recent study by the University of Texas showed that marijuana use in itself not only doesn’t contribute to violent crime, it may reduce it:

It actually may be related to reductions in certain types of crime, said Dr. Robert Morris, associate professor of criminology and lead author of the study published in the journal PLOS ONE.

“We’re cautious about saying, ‘Medical marijuana laws definitely reduce homicide.’ That’s not what we’re saying,” Morris said. “The main finding is that we found no increase in crime rates resulting from medical marijuana legalization. In fact, we found some evidence of decreasing rates of some types of violent crime, namely homicide and assault.”

One could also just ask the tens of millions of people who have smoked pot whether or not it made them feel like going on a murderous rampage or whether or not it made them go on a refrigerator rampage.

On the other hand we have ample evidence that this fetish for guns in our culture is killing people in large numbers. This survey from the Harvard School of public health shows:

Our review of the academic literature found that a broad array of evidence indicates that gun availability is a risk factor for homicide, both in the United States and across high-income countries. Case-control studies, ecological time-series and cross-sectional studies indicate that in homes, cities, states and regions in the US, where there are more guns, both men and women are at higher risk for homicide, particularly firearm homicide.

Let’s put it this way: even if Jerad Miller and his wife really were very, very, very angry about the prohibition against marijuana in America, and even if getting high made them aggressive in some abnormal way, if they didn’t also have a stash of weapons these two pot heads would probably be knee deep in a pile of empty Cheetos bags yelling at the TV today instead of lying dead alongside their victims.

 

[contrifan32]

From Salon:

Tuesday, Jun 10, 2014 01:04 PM EDT

Fox News foments another violent outbreak: From Cliven Bundy to Jerad Miller, words matter

Five years after I clashed with O’Reilly about his network’s dangerous rhetoric, it's still promoting extremism

Joan Walsh

Cord Jefferson has a wonderful piece about how hard it is to keep writing about the latest outbreak of virulent racism — he calls it “the racism beat” — whether it’s the Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, police official who called President Obama a “fucking n****r,” or Donald Sterling, or Cliven Bundy, or Justin Bieber, or Janelle Ambrosia, the stripper who’s apparently as comfortable with the N-word as with a G-string. Instead of taking on another assignment to explain that the latest outrage is outrageous, Jefferson longs to submit a simple line of text: “Black people are normal people deserving of the same respect afforded to anyone else, but they often aren’t given that respect due to the machinations of white supremacy.”

I sympathize with Jefferson. Today, I’m feeling similarly about the latest gun violence by right-wing maniacs, white supremacists and Cliven Bundy supporters Jerad and Amber Miller, who shot two police officers and an armed civilian and wrapped the officers in the Gadsden flag, which has become the ugly yellow emblem of the anti-Obama resistance, flown at countless Tea Party rallies.

I’m coming to believe we need another bit of boilerplate language to react to these kinds of killings: “Not all Republicans are racist or violent, but increasingly eliminationist rhetoric against President Obama and Democrats is fomenting extremism – and Fox News is making things worse.”

On Thursday it will be five years since my showdown with Bill O’Reilly, after I suggested O’Reilly might consider toning down his extreme rhetoric in the wake of the murder of Dr. George Tiller, the man he famously called “Tiller the baby killer” many times. Our sit-down came after I expressed more general concern, on Salon and MSNBC, about the extremism of right-wing rhetoric in the wake of Obama’s election.

My O’Reilly anniversary may have something to do with the combination of fear and exhaustion I feel reading about the Millers. Wrangling with O’Reilly was bad enough; worse still was the torrent of online abuse from his fans — thousands of tweets, comments on Salon and personal emails wishing all manner of misfortune on me and my family, along with two personal letters to the Salon office that we shared with our lawyers. I learned then that a “death threat” requires someone to say they have plans to kill you, not merely that they wish to see you dead.

Back then, I thought it might be worth asking whether Fox’s increasingly shrill attacks on Obama could be contributing to a spike in violent rhetoric, and actual violence. For context, my conversation with O’Reilly wasn’t just about Tiller: an African-American security guard at Washington’s Holocaust museum, Stephen Tyrone Johns, had just been murdered by a white supremacist birther. That came months after a fan of Glenn Beck (then at Fox) murdered four police officers in Pittsburgh. We were heading into a summer of hate that would soon spawn “town hells” trashing Democrats (and moderate Republicans) over healthcare reform, and gun-carrying “patriots” waving Gadsden flags at Obama rallies. I thought Fox might want to take a look at its role in fomenting an unhinged opposition that was starting to move from rhetoric to violence. Of course, I was wrong.

Five years later, just as Fox promoted anti-Obama extremism in the first months of his presidency, so did it try to turn Cliven Bundy and his armed supporters into the second coming of the American Revolution, rising against the “tyrant” in the White House. Over 12 days in April, Fox spent almost five hours covering the ranch standoff, led by Sean Hannity. (To be fair to O’Reilly, he actually challenged one Bundy backer he interviewed. Some Republican lawmakers joined in: Nevada Sen. Dean Heller called the Bundy Ranch defenders “patriots,” and 2016 contenders like Rand Paul and Texas Gov. Rick Perry also jumped on the Bundy bandwagon – only to disembark when their hero made predictably racist statements about “the Negro.” They never explained – and they never were forced to explain – why they endorsed an armed militia threatening federal agents with violence, merely because those agents were threatening to enforce the law.

And now we have the Millers, who were, to be fair, too extreme for even the Bundy encampment; apparently Jerad Miller was turned away because he had a felony record. But it’s not just the Millers; they were almost upstaged in the past week by “sovereign citizen” Dennis Marx, who shot a sheriff’s deputy and planned to take over the courthouse in Forsyth County, Georgia, before he was killed by police. The sovereign citizen “movement” doesn’t acknowledge the legitimacy of the U.S. government. (Oh, and by the way, Forsyth County was the site of an early 20th century race riot that resulted in 98 percent of its black population moving away. Fun fact.) Meanwhile, the parents of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl are facing what the FBI considers credible death threats for the crime of trying to get their son out of captivity by the Taliban. The beat goes on.

I’m getting tired of writing patient explainers like this one – thanks, Paul Waldman, for taking one for the team this time. I just want to say what Digby said: She quotes Waldman, and earlier pieces by Rick Perlstein and David Neiwert, showing how the election of Democratic presidents so often leads to spikes in violent rhetoric and violence itself. John F. Kennedy’s election was followed by rising hate from the John Birch Society and armed anti-Communist “Minutemen”; Bill Clinton coped with a rising militia movement and the Oklahoma City terrorist attack (along with the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre demonizing federal agents as “jack-booted thugs”); Barack Obama begat the paranoid and often racist anti-government Tea Party, abetted by Fox News and, of course, the NRA’s LaPierre.

What’s different is that under Obama, the rhetoric from elected Republicans and mainstream conservative pundits has gotten more extreme. One-term congressman and Fox News contributor Allen West has declared, “We have a tyrant in the White House.” As Congress and the White House debated common-sense gun regulation in the wake of the Newtown massacre, Fox’s guests and hosts were warning that Obama was planning massive gun confiscation and comparing him to Hitler. At CPAC this year Sen. Ted Cruz suggested that Obama’s use of executive orders means “you have a president picking and choosing which laws to follow and which laws to ignore,” and therefore “you no longer have a president.”

Which means you have a dictator, or, again, a tyrant; someone whose blood might need to water the “tree of liberty,” to quote from the T-shirt that gun-toting liberty lover William Kostric wore to a 2009 Obama rally in New Hampshire.

Like Digby and Waldman and Perlstein and Neiwert, I’ve written about all of it time and time again. When you have the impulse to simply quote long blocks of your own earlier writings, maybe it’s time to turn your attention elsewhere. And I would, if these killings didn’t keep happening.

This combination of fear and exhaustion, I think, helps explain why I reacted so strongly to Jonathan Chait’s uncharacteristically blinkered piece on racial politics in the age of Obama. I like Chait and generally agree with him, but in his piece he used me as an example of a liberal unfairly maligning Bill O’Reilly as having untoward racial views in his Super Bowl Sunday interview with Obama, when I should have assumed O’Reilly merely has political and policy differences with the president and was criticizing him in good faith.

I don’t see how you can assume O’Reilly does anything in good faith after the last six years. If you doubt that O’Reilly and Fox are playing to the worst impulses of American politics, then I invite you to join O’Reilly and be told you have blood on your hands because you support abortion rights. Oh, and to be a woman, or a person of color, while doing same, because for the far right, our full participation in this society is always conditional on being on their side. To experience that wrath is to know the violence that lurks within the far-right anti-Obama movement – along with perfectly legitimate nonviolent conservatism — and to fear it. And to know that the reflexive “Both Sides Do It” mainstream media fetish is part of the problem.

But instead of quoting from my earlier pieces about all of this, I’ll give the last word to Paul Waldman, something for Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly and Ted Cruz and Rand Paul to think about before the next killings:

That whiny rant made me chuckle. Thank you, we should all get a laugh on a Friday afternoon. And all this time I thought the left blamed everything bad in the world of Bush.

 

[Balladeer08]

Your question includes the assumption that they have figured it out.

I've seen little evidence that they are good at locating facts, less in the interpretation of them.