January 2011

Wingnut pundits like to refer to the ‘failed stimulus’. Crazyeyes Michelle Bachmann did so last night in the hilariously inept and mendacious Tea Party response to President Obama’s State of the Union address.

There is, of course, one glaring problem with the claim that the stimulus ‘failed’: it’s a lie.

…[M]ore private sector jobs have been created [in 2010] than during the entire Bush administration. Read that again: 2010 has had more private job creation than during the entire 8 year tenure of George W. Bush.

When the facts don’t support the conservative narrative, conservatives always resort to lies. Every. Single. Time.

Over at Balloon Juice, mistermix has perhaps the best summation of Bachmann’s blatheration:

Two years ago, when the black guy with the funny sounding name became president, we wondered if he would wipe our asses, change our diapers, feed us a bottle, and put us down for a nap. Unfortunately, he expected us to act like adults and help clean up after our pants-shitting performance while were in charge of the country. We think it’s more fun to accuse him of sneaking in and crapping in our pants when we weren’t looking.

It’s an established fact that Jim Hoft, proprietor of the odious cesspool known as ‘Gateway Pundit’, is both a prolific (some would say pathological) liar and a racist. Here’s an illustrative example of Hoft’s asinine priorities:

• He’s posted twice on a ginned-up phony controversy about a song played at a recent White House state dinner.
• He’s posted not at all regarding the murder of nine-year-old Brisenia Flores. The dead girl was Hispanic, and her accused killers were far-right anti-immigrant domestic terrorists — so of course, Jim Hoft can’t be bothered to get off his fat ass and write a post about their deaths.

Susie Madrak:

…[W]hat [Glenn] Beck does is deliver his information is a very consistent frame: Certain people are doing unthinkable, illegal, immoral things that are undermining the Constitution and destroying our country. He insinuates this in such a way that any listener who thinks of themselves as a patriotic American simply has no choice but to hate and hopefully destroy the people Beck tells them to hate—because what moral person wouldn’t?

It is an article of faith among the wingnuts of the far right that only brown people can be terrorists. Whites who commit mass murder are simply ‘disturbed’. The T word never gets mentioned in connection with crimes committed by Caucasians. Stephan Salisbury of Le Monde Diplomatique illustrates this with a comparison of the media treatment of Jared Loughner and Nidal Hasan:

That leads to a common thread among these murderous incidents. None has been labeled the work of terrorists by authorities or the media. All involved white men, most of whom — like Jared Loughner in Tucson — have been deemed troubled or disturbed by authorities and various media outlets. Even Jim David Adkisson, the unemployed truck driver who attacked the Knoxville church because he believed it was “a cult” and a haven for Democrats and secular liberals, has not been characterized as a political terrorist. Adkisson was a fan of the writings and shows of right-wing media personalities Bill O’Reilly, Michael Savage, and Sean Hannity, according to authorities who searched his residence after the 2008 shootings. However, his primary motivation, according to those same authorities, was the imminent loss of food stamps and inability to find a job.

Joseph Stack, who flew his plane into the Austin IRS building in an eerie echo of the 9/11 attacks, is also not a terrorist — just a plain old suicide. The Maine dirty-bomb maker, who amassed quantities of hydrogen peroxide, uranium, thorium, lithium metal, thermite, aluminum powder, beryllium, boron, black iron oxide, and magnesium ribbon, a terrorist? No, just a “disturbed individual.”

…

…[C]onservative columnist David Brooks, in an astonishingly superficial argument, wrote in the New York Times that those who drag politics into public debate over the killing of political figures and government officials are leveling “vicious charges” and lack empathy for the mentally ill. Brooks gravely wagged his finger at those — he singled out MSNBC commentator Keith Olberman, former Senator Gary Hart, and Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas — who have argued that violent rhetoric from the Tea Party and Sarah Palin set the table for the Tucson shootings. (Of course Congresswoman Giffords herself chastised Palin for putting her district in the now-infamous gun-sight crosshairs. Does Brooks include her, too, in excoriating “vicious charges made by people who claimed to be criticizing viciousness”?)

How sugary is Brooks’ argument? Compare it to what he wrote following the shooting rampage that took place at Fort Hood in November 2009. In that murderous incident, Major Nidal Malik Hasan was ultimately charged with killing 13 and wounding over 30. Hasan, a Muslim psychiatrist, was clearly disturbed by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (he was about to be deployed to the latter) and his deteriorating mental state had been a concern to officials at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.

That was before Hasan snapped. Despite documented psychiatric worries, the issue of terrorism quickly dominated public discussion of Hasan’s act.

At the time, Brooks derided talk of Hasan’s mental state and characterized those who brought it up as casting “a shroud of political correctness” over the Hasan “narrative.”

“The conversation in the first few days after the massacre was well intentioned, but it suggested a willful flight from reality,” Brooks intoned. “It ignored the fact that the war narrative of the struggle against Islam is the central feature of American foreign policy. It ignored the fact that this narrative can be embraced by a self-radicalizing individual in the U.S. as much as by groups in Tehran, Gaza or Kandahar.”

So much for “vicious charges” and empathy. They are apparently reserved for young white males in Tucson; Muslims need not apply.

(hat tip: Crooks and Liars)

Whilst saying nasty things about fellow right-wing pundit Ross Douthat, Mark Levin blurts out the following inanity:

He actually doesn’t have the courage to put his ideas into action and defend them—like [Sarah] Palin.

That’s not courage. That’s avarice.

The right is tying itself into knots trying to prove that all their violent rhetoric had nothing to do with the recent shooting of Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Of course, they won’t mention the fact that her opponent in the last election used actual guns in his campaign to stress how much he wanted Giffords ‘removed’:

Flashback: Giffords Opponent Had M16 Shooting Event, ‘Help Remove Gabrielle Giffords From Office’

Oops.

Wingnut gun freak ‘Texas Fred’ tries… oh, how he tries so hard to sound reasonable and prudent:

There’s no information on exactly why the shooter opened fire. There is much speculation, all over the MSM and blogosphere, but I am not going to guess and speculate.

But of course, reason and prudence are utterly alien to an extremist of Fred’s stripes. The poor dimwitted hayseed can’t help it… only a few paragraphs later, he breaks down and does exactly what he claimed he wouldn’t do:

It appears that Jared Loughner is the exact opposite of the far right anarchist. I believe that as this story develops and the truth surfaces, Jared Loughner will be outed as a far left radical that acted in the belief that Gabrielle Giffords wasn’t far enough to the left for his tastes.

Wingnuts truly are your best entertainment value.

The far right is responsible for the climate of hatred and aggression in this country. Every so often the seeds they have planted sprout into actual violence, as they did last weekend with the shooting of Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Anyone who disputes the culpability of the extremist right wing for this violence will first have to explain away the constant, relentless campaign they wage to promote violent insurrection in this country:

March 9, 2009—NRA celebrity spokesman Chuck Norris writes in an editorial published at WorldNetDaily:  “How much more will Americans take? When will enough be enough? And, when that time comes, will our leaders finally listen or will history need to record a second American Revolution?”

March 11, 2009—NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre speaks at the 2009 Conservative Political Action Conference and announces that “Our Founding Fathers understood that the guys with the guns make the rules.”

March 21-22, 2009—Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-MN) states that she wants residents of her state to be “armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back. Thomas Jefferson told us ‘having a revolution every now and then is a good thing,’ and the people—we the people—are going to have to fight back hard if we’re not going to lose our country.”

April 4, 2009—Neo-Nazi Richard Poplawski shoots and kills three police officers responding to a 911 call to his home in Pittsburgh. His friend Edward Perkovic tells reporters that Poplawski feared “the Obama gun ban that’s on its way” and “didn’t like our rights being infringed upon.” Perkovic also commented that Poplawski carried out the shooting because “if anyone tried to take his firearms, he was gonna’ stand by what his forefathers told him to do.”

April 7, 2009—The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis releases an assessment of right wing extremism in the United States. The Department notes that “the economic downturn and the election of the first African American president present unique drivers for rightwing radicalization and recruitment.” Recalling the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh, the Department speculates, “The possible passage of new restrictions on firearms and the return of military veterans facing significant challenges reintegrating into their communities could lead to the potential emergence of terrorist groups or lone wolf extremists capable of carrying out violent attacks.”

April 15, 2009—Daniel Knight Hayden, 52, is arrested by FBI agents after he openly states on Twitter that he is going to turn the upcoming Oklahoma City “Tea Party” into a bloodbath. Two months earlier, Hayden had written online, “The only thing that is keeping the New World Order from destroying this nation is the presence of over 100,000,000 guns in civilian hands. When guns are outlawed, only criminals will have guns. Since we are already criminals in the eyes of the New World Order, and they intend to enslave us all, and to kill those of us who will NOT submit to their slavery, I say to IGNORE gun “laws” and keep your guns (AND ammo) handy.”

April 19, 2009—The Oath Keepers, an anti-government group made up of current and former law enforcement and military personnel, holds its first “muster” in Lexington, Massachusetts, the site of the opening shots of the Revolutionary War. The groups’ members pledge to disobey ten different orders that they deem “unconstitutional” and “immoral,” the first of which reads, “We will NOT obey orders to disarm the American people.”

April 25, 2009—Joshua Cartwright, 28, a member of the Florida National Guard, shoots and kills two Okaloosa County sheriff’s deputies attempting to arrest him on a domestic abuse charge. Cartwright is killed in an enusing gun battle with police. Cartwright’s wife reports that he was “severely disturbed” that Barack Obama had been elected president. Okaloosa County Sheriff Edward Spooner states that Cartrwight was “interested in militia groups and weapons training.”

UPDATE 01/11/11 10:40 AM EST: A commenter at Blue Virginia highlights the absurdity of the attempts by the right wing apologists to disclaim responsibility for the rhetoric of violence they’ve been spewing for years:

[W]hen the Tucson shooting was first reported, everyone immediately assumed that the shooter was a Unitarian angry at the demise of the Public Option and influenced by irresponsible rhetoric from Jon Stewart and E.J. Dionne.