Assistant Quote of the Day

"Sharia Law has nothing to do with this at all, it’s crazy! The guy is an American citizen! (This) Sharia Law business is just crap… and I’m tired of dealing with the crazies."

-- New Jersey Governor Chris Christie defending his appointment of a Muslim-American judge to the state bench

It's sad to think that stating the incredibly obvious -- and perfectly sane -- can constitute an act of courage, but credit where credit is due here. While I haven't always been a fan of Christie's policies, given the current default position within much of the GOP when it comes to stoking xenophobic rage through completely unfounded, nonsense controversies, Christie's verbal smackdown is damn refreshing.

Watch and learn, Herman Cain and Peter King.

Quote of the Day

"This is a sobering reminder for those who think it’s too expensive to wage a war against jihadists. I spoke to Gary Schmitt of the American Enterprise Institute, who has been critical of proposed cuts in defense and of President Obama’s Afghanistan withdrawal plan. 'There has been a lot of talk over the past few months on how we’ve got al-Qaeda on the run and, compared with what it once was, it’s become a rump organization. But as the attack in Oslo reminds us, there are plenty of al-Qaeda allies still operating. No doubt cutting the head off a snake is important; the problem is, we’re dealing with global nest of snakes.' It would be a good opportunity, in light of this attack and talk about huge cuts in defense."

-- Jennifer Rubin in a Washington Post column published yesterday afternoon

Oh yeah? Would it be a good opportunity, Jennifer? Especially now that the guy who bombed Oslo and shot up a camp full of kids, killing 91 people, is supposedly the person pictured above: all blonde hair, blue eyes and otherwise looking like he could be Alexander Skarsgard's live-in boyfriend? Now that we know that that suspect, Anders Behring Breivik, is apparently a right-wing extremist who aligns himself fiercely with Christian fundamentalism, anti-Muslim and anti-immigration activism and who, police say, appeared to be lashing out at Norway's famously free and open society and progressive politics? Still wanna call for a war against those kinds of people: crazy, violent, white Christians?

See what a reactionary tool you look like jumping to conclusions in the pages of one of the most powerful and respected newspapers in the country?

On behalf of Muslims, Arabs, and anybody else brown -- apology accepted, you hack.

"Al Qaeda in TGIFriday's has Claimed Responsibility"

Well, if you're looking to strike a serious blow at the heart of Israel in America -- attack an early bird salad bar.

CNNi: Al Qaeda Group Contemplated Poisoning Food at U.S. Restaurants/12.22.10

Bonus Quote of the Day

"The Obama Administration has been a two year long Shark Week for Fox."

-- Cracked.com

FTMFW

Fear and Loathing

I'd call this a really ugly smoking gun, but the unfortunate reality is that if you didn't already think something like this existed, you need to have your head checked.

Still, I'd really hate to be Michael Steele right now.

Politico: Exclusive: RNC Document Mocks Donors, Plays on "Fear"/3.3.10

Flying the Cowardly Skies

Cesca has a great little post over at his blog today that floats an idea for a new airline called "Airtight Security Airlines," and lists the various draconian restrictions that would make this airline ostensibly terrorist-threat-free. They include:

"--Profiling any and all people with swarthy complexions, regardless of political affiliation. People with skin that's any darker than 'egg shell' will be detained for questioning and body cavity searches. Look out Michelle Malkin and Charles Krauthammer! Get ready for a long day at the airport.

--Non-swarthy travelers are questioned about relationships or friendships with swarthies. All of this takes place at the terminal, by the way.

--No shoes, belts, liquids, metal, or underpants.

--Official AIRTIGHT SECURITY AIRLINES martial arts experts will weed out any passengers with kung fu, ninja or samurai skills.

--All passengers will be strapped down in cages like Buscemi in 'Con Air.'

--If anyone so much as utters the word 'Allah' -- all flights canceled.

--Mandatory diapers."

The point Cesca's making is in response to the pants-peeing reaction from the usual suspects on the right to the supposed new threat from al-Qaeda following the arrest of the comically incompetent "Underwear Bomber." Unless you're lucky enough to have been born deaf and blind, you're no doubt aware of what I'm talking about: the sky-is-literally-falling routine coming from the chicken hawks who think that no potential terrorist danger is too small to engage in a full-on martial law lockdown of the nation's airports and the immediate suspension of everyone's civil liberties -- you know, just to be safe.

But here's the thing: Am I the only one who thinks that the entire idea of completely losing your mind in an attempt to be "100% safe" while riding in a giant metal contraption that somehow travels 35,000 feet off the ground is kind of amusing? It reminds me of a great quote from Patton Oswalt's most recent album, My Weakness is Strong. In the bit, he suggests that flight attendants just be honest with airline passengers during the safety demonstration:

"Hi, welcome to JetBlue flight 354 from Burbank to JFK, cruising at an altitude of 40,000 feet for five hours and fifteen minutes. If anything goes wrong, you're dead. You understand? You are fucking dead. This many people in a metal tube in the sky -- this should not be happening. This is against science and God. So, strap in and let's pee in God's face for five hours and dare him to kill us -- for five hours -- and we do this a hundred times a day. I'm gonna give everybody 45 seconds to leave the plane. I'd leave too if I heard what I just said. Nobody? Wow, we got a bunch of Vikings here today. Bolt that door. Today's a good day to die. Valhalla. Who wants some blue potato chips?"

The point is that whether you're talking about potential terrorism or just the kind of unfortunate accidents that sometimes tragically happen (and there's nothing more irritating after an air disaster than the media doing their obligatory hand-wringing by asking "could this have been prevented?" Of course it could have, but it wasn't because accidents fucking happen and not every glitch will be caught or mistake avoided), the entire notion of trying to create a foolproof safety system is itself a fool's errand.

Put another way: According to statistician extraordinaire Nate Silver, there were 99,320,309 flights that either originated or landed in the U.S over the last decade. That means we had one terrorist incident per 16,553,385 flights (since there were six total in the last ten years). You have a better chance of being struck by lightning.

As Cesca also put it so beautifully, think about that the next time you're standing there at the airport with half your clothes and your dignity stuffed into a gray plastic bin.

HUAC-a-Mole

And so it begins.

The Huffington Post: Republican Congressman from Alabama Making a List of "Socialists in Congress"/4.9.09

Revolutionary Goad: Fear Factor

"Is there any doubt that Fox News is playing an increasingly erratic and dangerous game by embracing the type of paranoid insurrection rhetoric that people like Poplawski are now acting on? By stoking dark fears about the ominous ruins that await an Obama America, by ratcheting up irresponsible back-to-the-wall scenarios, Fox News has waded into a territory that no other news organization has ever dared to exploit."

-- Eric Boehlert

Media Matters: "The Rise of the Fox News Media Militia" by Eric Boehlert/4.7.09

Revolutionary Goad: The Reckoning

"I think you're confusing tyranny with losing."

-- Jon Stewart

Revolutionary Goad

Exactly how far is too far?

Several times over the past month or so, I've dismissed Glenn Beck, the new clown prince of Fox News, as being not much more than a guy doing Kaufman-esque stand-up -- an opportunistic little turd who's playing his audience of paranoid conspiracists like a badly tuned piano in the name of making himself rich. At one point, I even admitted that Beck was basically good, clean fun -- or at least would be until some tinfoil-hatted psychopath who took his nonsense way too seriously decided to fire off a few rounds at President Obama.

But given what we're now seeing, the question has to be asked: Is it just a matter of time before something like that does in fact happen?

Over the weekend, a man in Pittsburgh gunned down three police officers who showed up to the home he shared with his mother on a domestic disturbance call. He strapped on a Kevlar vest and armed himself with an AK-47, waited for them to come through the door, then picked them off one by one. The details that have come out about the shooter since the attack are as infuriating as they are not-the-least-bit-surprising: 22-year-old Richard Poplawski is identified as a Marine Corps wash-out, a recently unemployed white supremacist who believes that the Jews control the media and that, most tellingly, the Obama Administration is planning to ban his beloved guns. In other words, he's exactly the kind of guy who, if you went on TV and told him that his worst paranoid hallucinations were coming true and that the new left-wing government was indeed poised to kick down his door and take his freedoms away, would believe every fucking word of it and act accordingly.

And if you don't think that that's exactly the message the Richard Poplawskis of this country are being inundated with from the far right these days, you're even more delusional than Poplawski himself.

Over the space of just the past couple of weeks, Glenn Beck has warned his loyal, terrified viewership of the coming socialist junta; lunatic congresswoman Michele Bachmann has claimed that the U.S. dollar is about to be replaced by foreign currency, American youths will soon be sent to "re-education camps," and patriotic citizens should be "armed and dangerous" and ready for revolution; disgraced CNBC loudmouth Jim Cramer has called the Democrats "Bolsheviks" and compared the U.S. House of Representatives to the Politburo; and Dick Morris, the no-lie smarmiest shitbag alive, spat this little pearl of wisdom into the Fox News echo chamber:

"Those crazies in Montana who say, ‘we’re going to kill ATF agents because the UN’s going to take over’ -- well, they’re beginning to have a case."

In case you missed that, let's rewind: Dick Morris says that militaristic nutjobs willing to kill government agents now have a fucking case.

Once again, exactly how far is too far?

While free speech has to be respected and the right to it protected, is there no line of rhetoric so incendiary, so dangerous, so shameless in its aim of instigating simply for the sake of ad revenue, that it can't provoke absolute outrage? If you know that there are an inordinate number of Richard Poplawskis listening to you and that they already buy thoroughly into half-baked persecution fantasies -- and then you purposely try to at best validate their fears or at worst scare the hell out of them even further -- don't you bear at least a small amount of responsibility for the outcome? Shouldn't there be accountability?

In a display of hypocrisy that's almost staggering, many on the right who once railed against the twin evils of violent video games and Marilyn Manson and decried their supposed relation to teen violence are now hiding behind the very argument they say bleeding-heart liberals used against them way back when: that you can't blame the messenger for the effect the message might have on one or two unstable individuals. To his credit, Bob Cesca has a good take on this specious comparison; he points out that the difference between, say, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold -- the Columbine killers -- and someone like Richard Poplawski is that Harris and Klebold, while certainly being budding gun fetishists, hadn't yet developed the intransigent political ideology that goes hand-in-hand with a maniacal worship of weapons in this country. Harris and Klebold, like Cho Seung Hui -- the Virginia Tech killer -- were basically impressionable kids using guns to lash out and make themselves feel powerful (the latter, a trait they indeed shared with Poplawski and one that should have precluded them from ever owning a goddamned gun in the first place). They loved guns, sure -- but they didn't yet have the distrust of a government they feared would one day come and take their precious weapons away. Poplawski was impressionable in another way in that he did think that his weapons made him part of a larger culture of True Believers, and any confirmation of an attack on the way of life espoused by he and those like him would be all it took to set him off. And it did. Poplawski likely always figured his guns could be used to level the socio-political and economic playing field, and in his twisted mind, that's exactly what happened.

But for those who would still claim that everyone is impressionable in his or her own way and that, at some level, both the creators of GTA4 and Glenn Beck need to acknowledge that their actions may have unintended consequences: You're right, to an extent. The bottom line is that while free speech and expression must be respected, there has to be a level of responsibility attached. It's reckless, dangerous and immoral to knowingly stoke the demons of a person's nature -- and what's worse, to pass off fantasy as fact and do it in the name of making a buck or a political point. It's intellectually dishonest to pretend that you're operating in a vacuum -- whether you're Marilyn Manson or Michele Bachmann -- and that nothing you say will have an impact on the crazies within your target audience.

So, I ask yet again: How far is too far?

I talked to my father a few days ago. He's an ex-cop and ex-Navy SEAL who now lives part-time in a little Florida town called Sebring -- right in the center of the state's hyper-Republican I-4 Corridor. He's had a concealed weapons permit for decades and is about the most qualified and responsible person I can imagine being allowed to carry a weapon. He mentioned to me that he had recently been to the local Wal-Mart looking for ammunition for his handgun -- the kind of thing that's typically in abundance at a Central Florida big box store. But what he found surprised him, and scared him a little.

The place was almost completely out of ammo. In fact, it turns out they can barely keep the stuff on the shelves these days.

Somebody out there is listening to the "warnings."

And I'm betting that what we've seen lately is just the beginning of the nightmare.

Tuesday is Recycling Day

"An Equal and Opposite Reaction" (Originally Published, 8.15.08 and Related to the Above Column)

Maybe I've been wrong all this time.

While a lot of the usual suspects on the left seemed to embrace victimhood at the hands of the Coulters, Limbaughs and Savages of the world, I always kind of dismissed the bellicose mouthpieces of the far-right as little more than Vaudevillian boobs. I looked at them as the media's equivalent of carnival barkers -- cut-rate provocateurs spouting amplified, affectedly shocking nonsense aimed at whipping their audience into a feeding frenzy while enticing new recruits into the tent by playing on their fears of liberal-agenda infestation. Sure, they were obnoxious as hell and probably deserved most of the blame for the complete erosion of civilized political discourse in this country, but in the end they were basically harmless; they'd simply stumbled upon a template for a brand of shtick sure to make them rich and it happened to involve, ironically, exploiting the lily-livered gullibility of Red State America better than anything their sworn enemies could've come up with. The best way to deal with their crap? Ignore it -- because anything else just emboldens the bullies and makes them not only increase the antagonism but laugh in your face for either not being able to "take a joke" or for failing to recognize just how powerless you are against them. Besides, I had always assumed that although plenty of people found these pompous loudmouths entertaining and bought wholly into the sentiment behind the saber-rattling, no one took them that seriously -- did they?

Somewhere along the line, I guess I forgot just who we were talking about here -- just what kind of people would listen intently to someone like Rush Limbaugh day after day and what they might be capable of. This is admittedly a huge oversight on the part of someone who considers himself an avowed misanthrope; I'll try not to make the same mistake again.

The question, though, is this: Would some on the American far-right -- who've had it psychically drilled into them that liberals are to blame for all their ills -- be capable of murder?

What started as a mere whisper has turned into an unrelenting drone throughout the blogosphere after the shooting death of Bill Gwatney, the chairman of the Arkansas Democratic Party. Gwatney was gunned down in his office at the Arkansas Democrats' HQ in Little Rock Wednesday by a man who had just been fired from his job at Target. Police say that after shooting Gwatney, 50-year-old Tim Dale Johnson led them on a high-speed chase for 30 miles; it ended with cops shooting and killing him. Although investigators are still trying to officially connect Bill Gwatney to the man who walked into a busy office and seemed to kill him in cold blood for no apparent reason, some are suggesting that the reason, in fact, is as obvious as it is disturbing -- that Johnson, a troubled loner, blamed liberal-leaning governmental politics for the loss of his job and exacted his revenge on the biggest target among Arkansas Democrats. They point to an arsenal of weapons found in Johnson's home after the shooting -- inarguably standard issue for right-wing psychopaths -- and, more disconcertingly, the fact that Wednesday's attack comes so soon after a deadly shooting inside a Tennessee church in which a gunman claimed to be out to kill the liberals who were supposedly controlling the country and preventing him from getting a job.

Is it irresponsible to question whether the two crimes are related? No. It's sort of a no-brainer to make the connection, as the shootings do seem similar and, like the police, most intellectually curious members of the public don't like coincidences. But are the crimes related? That remains to be seen; for now, absolutely not.

Which isn't stopping a vocal segment of the left from already jumping to the conclusion that these attacks on individuals whose politics take a liberal slant represent the inevitable next phase of a conservative "eliminationist" fantasy.

It's an agenda which has, admittedly, been proclaimed and perpetuated -- whether in jest or not -- by people like Limbaugh, Coulter and Savage for some time. These three and others like them have honed their talk of zero-tolerance for the people across the aisle to a knife's edge. For years, they've blanketed the airwaves, bookshelves and internet with ultra-nationalist agitprop which asserts that those who don't think like them are not simply to be argued with and voted down, they must be utterly crushed underfoot by any means necessary -- even if it involves, as Coulter once said, taking a baseball bat to them -- because they are nothing less than the enemy of the United States of America. In the words, if not actually the minds, of these seemingly fascist demagogues, liberals are as dangerous and absolute a threat to our way of life as the terrorists they supposedly coddle.

And there's no doubt that whatever their actual intentions may be -- no matter how much of it is just theater -- people are listening to the rhetoric and absorbing it. But are a few of those people now acting on it, and do the ones allegedly inciting the indignation through their bluster and bombast bear any responsibility for what it may be metastasizing into?

For almost a century, the litmus test for the lengths to which so-called free speech can legally be taken has come from Oliver Wendell Holmes, who famously ruled that "falsely shouting fire in a theater" was beyond protection; it's almost always been illegal to use a public forum to incite panic, violence or imminent lawless action. By that standard, there's just no way that any pundit at any time has crossed the line and broken the law. But legal doesn't always mean ethical, particularly not when you're refusing to take into consideration the fact that a substantial portion of your audience is made up of edgy, easily malleable "oppressed" white guys -- many of whom are now unemployed and looking for someone to blame for it. Although it's never a good idea to allow the potential misbehavior of the lowest common denominator to curb the right to free speech, it's equally inadvisable, not to mention irresponsible, to act as though you're operating in a vacuum -- as if what you say can't possibly have a negative impact, despite its incendiary nature. This was what made it such a pathetically insincere cop-out years ago when some lunatic from the Army of God would gun down an abortion doctor, leading Operation Rescue's Randall Terry to immediately get in front of a camera to offer an anemic and thoroughly horseshit disclaimer that he didn't advocate violence against abortion doctors. Terry set the wheels in motion and let nature take its course; today, the same thing could very easily be happening on an infinitely larger scale.

Once again, whether they mean it to or not, the invective of clowns like Limbaugh does have an impact. Listen long enough to right-wing propaganda and your eyes eventually glaze over, your brain shuts down and you begin to subscribe completely to the alternate reality that it's constructed out of thin air: an America where your new non-white neighbors are terrorists, immigrants are stealing your job, homosexuals want to lure your children into a life of sodomy, and treasonous liberals are plotting against you and your god at every turn. Believe this paranoid fantasy completely and who knows what you'll be capable of doing to defend your way of life.

It's no secret that the natural consequence of the fracturing of media -- of everyone having a voice and being able to put his or her opinions into writing and proffer them over the airwaves and internet -- is that there is no truth anymore. We have no common ground to anchor any argument. The left and right in this country live in completely separate worlds, each with its own set of facts. When we debate, we may as well be speaking foreign languages, so entirely have we allowed a single agreed-upon reality to become muddled by dishonesty on both sides. Rush Limbaugh lies his porcine ass off regularly and no one ever calls him on it; the ones who do are just dismissed by his acolytes as delusional or secretly trying to further the leftist agenda. Fox News and the Wall Street Journal launder George Bush's every sin until he comes out on the other end of the news cycle smelling fresh and clean.

And their listeners, viewers and readers believe every word of it. Their version of the truth, right or wrong, is why a man would shoot up a church in Tennessee, intransigent in the conviction that liberals are in control of the nation (when our president and half of our lawmakers are Republican) and that they've decimated the economy and taken away his job (when it could easily be argued Bush's policies, in fact, bear most if not all of the blame for the current dismal state of things).

For so long, the fire-and-brimstone of political division has been preached from every keyboard and microphone across our land; it was always just a matter of time before anger turned to action. All that rage had to go somewhere.

Maybe it just did.