I Just Don't Get It

(Cartoon by Lee Judge, published 4/15/14 by the Kansas City Star and featured at McClatchy DC.  Click on image to enlarge.)

I'm serious:  I just don't get it.  I don't get how, during the holiest week in the Christian calendar and on the eve of one of the holiest days in the Jewish calendar, some dude decides to be the new Hitler.  Or something.

From the LA Times:

The elderly man was well known in this slightly faded farm town for his failed attempts at elective office, his libertarian leanings, his Southern charm.

But Frazier Glenn Cross, 73, who also went by the name of Frazier Glenn Miller Jr., was known even more for his white supremacist beliefs that led him to try to incite a race war, pepper local papers with anti-immigrant letters and get into a shouting match with a Jewish student at Missouri State University.

Police arrested Cross on Sunday on suspicion of shooting and killing a 14-year-old Boy Scout and his grandfather at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City in Overland Park, Kan., and a woman at a nearby Jewish assisted living center. ...

Sunday would have been Franklin's 64th birthday. And Monday was Passover, one of the best known Jewish holidays.

Little is known about Cross' alleged motives, but Beirich posited that the avowed racist and author of a memoir called "A White Man Speaks Out" "has got emphysema, and this is a twisted, white supremacist bucket list."   [Emphasis added]

As some of you know, I have emphysema (actually, COPD) and congestive heart failure and the hospice people who pay for some of my drugs and I both know that my time is greatly foreshortened.  For me, it's not a matter of years but (at best) a matter of months. 

I can't envision facing my maker with the blood of another on my hands.  Rather, I've been working hard to show love, not hatred, especially to those here in the Cuckoo's Nest who also are living out their last days even when I disagree with their politics and their view of humans of a different color, creed, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.

Life is too precious to waste on such garbage, so it's not on my bucket list.

May God have mercy on Mr. Cross.  I'm working hard right now to open my heart to wish that for him.  But I have to.

Lead Us Into Temptation

Listening to the constant lying from the right wing makes a lot of us libruls - that get that Colbertian bias of the facts - pretty baffled. The congress these days is an object lesson in fiction as the wingnuts fight against the public interest. Existing U.S. health care, that 85% of the public wants restructured, can't be justified by any means but lying.

While I don't listen to much of it, the insistent canting a mantra that is blatantly wrong does grate in the bits and pieces I do hear. The victims of that campaign of lies are the wingnuts who follow and revere the opponents of public interest.

Last night, Bill Moyers' Journal took on the media blitz of haters that the right wing puts forth as its spokespeople. He focused on the Tennessee shooter , Jim David Adkisson, who killed members of a 'liberal church' in his attempt to save the country. That pathological shooter was sure that it was the liberals who are responsible for what he sees as a weakened country, where he can't get a job. How many jobless and frustrated people are following that spiel on the air by winger radio and television 'hosts' and learning the same directions? we have to wonder.

MICHAEL SAVAGE, THE MICHAEL SAVAGE SHOW: Liberalism is, in essence, the HIV virus, and it weakens the defense cells of a nation. What are the defense cells of a nation? Well, the church. They've attacked particularly the Catholic Church for 30 straight years. The police, attacked for the last 50 straight years by the ACLU viruses. And the military, attacked for the last 50 years by the Barbara Boxer viruses on our planet.
(snip)
GLENN BECK:I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore and I'm wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out of him. Is this wrong?

RICK KARR: Michael Reagan, son of the former president, suggested that people who claim that "9/11 was an inside job," a U.S. government conspiracy, deserve to die.

MICHAEL REAGAN, THE MICHAEL REAGAN SHOW: Take them out and shoot them. They are traitors to this country, and shoot them. But anybody who would do that doesn't deserve to live. You shoot them. You call them traitors, that's what they are, and you shoot them dead. I'll pay for the bullet.

RICK KARR: Neal Boortz went after victims of Hurricane Katrina.

NEAL BOORTZ, THE NEAL BOORTZ SHOW: That wasn't the cries of the downtrodden. That's the cries of the useless, the worthless. New Orleans was a welfare city, a city of parasites, a city of people who could not, and had no desire to fend for themselves. You have a hurricane descending on them and they sit on their fat asses and wait for somebody else to come rescue them.
(snip)
REV. CHRIS BUICE: When you blame all your problems on some minority group, then everyone else is exonerated. We exonerate ourselves. We don't have to look at ourselves to see what sort of ways we contribute to the problems of the world. We don't have to examine ourselves, to see what we are doing that is helping to create the problems that we're so concerned about.

RICK KARR: In other words, Buice says, angry talk radio rhetoric simply sets up scapegoats for society's problems. And ever since Jim David Adkisson walked into his church and opened fire he can't help but wonder whether that might lead to more violence.

REV. CHRIS BUICE: I just think a lot of people are hurling insults from the safety of television studios, the safety of radio studios, the safety of cyberspace, which they would not throw if they had to stand right next to a person and look in their face and say the same thing. And so that's a void in our community, the chance to be in the same room and to have these exchanges and remember the humanity of the person on the other side

BILL MOYERS: That report aired on the Journal on September 12, 2008. Earlier this year, when Jim David Adkisson was sentenced to life behind bars, he released what he called a manifesto -- a four-page statement he wrote before his shooting spree. It was a manifesto, all right, spewing hate like fire and lava exploding from a volcano.

"This was a hate crime," he wrote. "I hate the damn left-wing Liberals [sic]. There is a vast left-wing conspiracy in this country & these liberals are working together to attack every decent & honorable institution in the nation, trying to turn this country into a communist state." Among the targets of his malice -- the Democratic National Committee, for "running such a radical leftist candidate, Osama Hussein Obama, yo mama. No experience. No brains, a joke. Dangerous to America."

"Liberals," Adkisson went on, are "evil ...like termites. Millions of them. Each little bite contributes to the downfall of this great nation." He longed to exterminate the traitors one by one. "Who I wanted to kill," he wrote, "was every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldbergs [sic] book." --Full disclosure: I'm one of the hundred. "But," Adkisson lamented, "...these people were inaccesible [sic] to me. I couldn't get to the generals & high ranking officers of the Marxist movement so I went after the foot soldiers, the chickens**t liberals that vote in these traitorous people."

And that's how Adkisson decided on his victims -- he would go after the foot soldiers, the congregation in the church he described as "a den of un-American vipers." He had a patriotic imperative for anyone who read or heard his manifesto: "do [sic] something for your country before you go. Go Kill Liberals."

While you are sitting at your computer reading in a place you've learned to expect analysis and facts, in other places with other motivations hundreds of thousands are being persuaded that they need to do violence to folks like you who are on the other side. This mind-numbing ignorance has a vast audience, and elects the wingers who are trying to mobilize them to kill our government, our interests, and us.

Eliminating by the vote would be a really good way to start. Removing the liars who want their audience to believe that the government that administers their own health plan can't possibly be trusted to serve the public - the public it is supposed to represent over their worst efforts - there's a good beginning.

I don't listen to the Savages, the Limbaughs, the Obbs rants, but those who want to protest their spewed tirades might well do so at the networks that consider them worth public attention. Here are a few places you can place your remarks.

Glenn Beck; foxnews.com/

Neal Boortz; wsbradio.com/

Michael Savage; www.wnd.com

Rush Limbaugh; choose your closest station at; http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/menu/rush.guest.all.html

(Posts also appear at http://seminal.firedoglake.com/ )

Still Crazy After All These Years

Avedon Carol pointed out that the "front page" of Media Matters is chock full of stories on the racist right's rage at being held accountable for their incendiary statements and behavior. Those infuriated by the DHS report suggesting that far right wing nutjobs might be preparing terrorist actions were even more furious when columnists such as Paul Krugman and Tim Rutten made the link between those who spewed incendiary encouragement to those unhinged souls and the actions of those unhinged souls.

The fact that such reactions have been so extreme leads me to believe that we can't let up, we can't stop reminding people that such hatefulness and such calls to action in support of such hatefulness have real world consequences, deadly consequences. The shooting at the Holocaust museum makes that clear. And that's why the beautiful essay by Leonard Pitts, Jr. in today's Sacramento Bee resonated so deeply for me.

It is jolting to recall that I once thought we were living in the last days of creatures such as this. My only excuse: It was the 1970s and I was young, raised on civil rights marches and Norman Lear comedies. Kids like me felt, with the offhand smugness of youth, that we were harbingers of a new world too enlightened to ever again hate people because of their ethnicity or religion. ...

We act as if it were all a game, as if it means nothing when people of position and visibility spew garbage, validating and galvanizing the unhinged and the disaffected who need little encouragement to believe all their problems are caused by "Them." We act as if we do not toy with fire when people of authority claim white Christians are a victimized minority or Hispanics a threatening and faceless "Other." We act as if we were not heirs and witnesses to a blood-soaked history that tells us exactly where this hate some of us so fecklessly stoke will logically, inevitably lead. ...

I've always liked the Holocaust museum because it is a stark reminder in an era where too many are in a hurry to forget. And so it is even today, even quiet and locked up tight. Behind yellow tape it sits, scene of a hate crime authored by an old man who thought he was great because his skin was pale. An American flag droops limply at half-staff as if tired of waiting, waiting for the last days of creatures such as this.

Mr. Pitts, the Holocaust museum is once again open, and people have returned to its message of "Never Forget." And we won't, as long as voices such as yours, Paul Krugman's, and Tim Rutten's remind us of what that memory loss can lead to.

Well done, gentlemen.