What the Right Gains From Poisoning Our Political Discourse and Inspiring Violence

[BrklynLiberal]

http://www.alternet.org/story/149469/what_the_right_gains_from_poisoning_our_political_discourse_and_inspiring_violence

Gifford's shooting, and the death and wounding of so many who came to meet with her, are just the latest example of ideologically-motivated bloodshed.

The Russian playwright Anton Chekhov had a rule: if you show a gun in the first act, by the time the curtain falls, it has to go off. For weeks and months, that gun, the weapon of angry rhetoric and intemperate rabblerousing, has been cocked and loaded in plain view on the American stage; Saturday morning outside a shopping mall in Tucson, Arizona, it went off again and again and again.

The target, Gabrielle Giffords, a member of the United States Congress, lays critically wounded, one of thirteen shot and still alive. Six others are dead, including a respected Federal judge who happened to be there but who previously had received death threats from anti-immigration extremists, a member of Congresswoman Giffords’ staff and a nine-year old girl, Christina-Taylor Green. Just elected to her school’s student council, she had been brought by a neighbor to Congresswoman Gifford’s constituent event so she could see how grown-ups put democracy into action.

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We now see the deadly effect. The root causes are many and less distinct: fear of the future and what it may or may not hold, hostility inflamed by the economic injustice and uncertainty that force too many to live from paycheck to paycheck without anything saved or the slightest guarantee of security -- a gnashing of teeth and sharpening of claws because others may have what you have not. Or this: the simple fact that there are just too many damned guns in this country. One in four Americans owns at least one. The NRA would order gun racks in the cradles of newborn infants if they could. Too many weapons are used not for hunting or target shooting or legitimate protection, but for combating feelings of inadequacy and weakness with fantasies of firepower -- fantasies that crazed gunmen too often try to make reality. That someone like Jared Lee Loughner can walk into a store and buy a weapon that fires 30 rounds a clip is probably not what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they talked about "a well-regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State."

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[William769]

1. nothing to gain

I firmly believe it is a psychosis that they are all affected with.

[BrklynLiberal]

2. I also tend to agree there is some sort of genetic predisposition to become a repuke...and it is not

a life-enhancing evolutionary change....

Having an "authoritarian centered" mentality certainly makes one unlikely to lean left...
whether wants to give the orders to take the orders....

[backscatter712]

3. Stochastic Terrorism.

The right-wing plays the violent-rhetoric game deliberately, and knowing full well that they're gonna stir up unstable people and cause them to act out violently. That is by design. Call it what it is, a form of terrorism.

In fact, if you analyze what's going on from a statistical/probability point of view, one can only come to the conclusion that the right wing is engaged in a campaign of murder by proxy - they keep their own hands clean by deliberately provoking the small percentage of madmen unstable enough to be provoked to violence.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2011/1/10/934890/-Stochastic-Terrorism:-Triggering-the-shooters.

[BrklynLiberal]

4. As was said by many, many folks recently, if the shooter had been of the Islam faith, EVERY Rwingnut

would have been screaming "TERRORISM" from the rooftops and from every repuke ass-kissing media they have.

[glinda]

5. Glaringly true.